Sippin' on the haterade

[martin417]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

Reading your story is certainly interesting. Since I'm not familiar with your team, I'll respond regarding teams I am more familiar with, which may or may not have dynamics similar to your own.

Personally, what can make me begin to dislike a team isn't budget, or even mentor experience, but how much the kids actually work on the robot.

I know you don't "buy" your robot, and I wasn't trying to imply that. What often bugs me is where mentors do much of the design work, and sponsors do much of the machining work. It really seems that if it shouldn't be impossible to built the robot you want to build with students. Why not teach more kids CAD? Why have your students machine all the parts in-house? To me, the design and machining experiences are one of the things that makes the FIRST experience truly valuable.

To me (and there certainly are a lot of differing opinions on Chief Delphi on this), the students are the ones that should be learning, and the best way to foster this learning is hands on. Ask yourself if they learn much from others making the design and others giving them parts. Is this a "lesser of two evils" that allows students more learning somewhere else? In my opinion, no. There is very rarely anything that needs to be done in the build process that a student cannot do.

This is my opinion, and I know it may be unpopular. You may even see it as part of the "haterade," and if so, I'm sorry. I only want to present my thoughts and provoke discussion, not anger.

While I agree that "students should be learning" (that is what a student does), I think you are misinformed as to the purpose of FIRST. We are not trying to teach kids to be an engineer or to design a robot, or even to machine parts. The purpose of FIRST is to INSPIRE kids, to make them take a look at engineering and technology as a career choice. If they learn something about CAD, or designing, or machining, that's just a bonus.

Using our model, how successful has our team been at that goal? Let's look at a few examples. The founder of the team graduated from MIT and is a grad student there now. Not the best example because he was destined to be an engineer from the day he was born. In 2009, 100% of the seniors on the team went on to college in engineering. I know of three that had never thought of engineering as a career before being involved with the team. By the way, all three of those happened to be girls. I consider that special because there are so few women that choose engineering as a career. In 2010, only one of the seniors did not choose engineering. She wanted to be a veterinarian. she has since thought about it and may change her major to biomedical engineering. Last year, we again had 100% of the seniors go into engineering. This year's crop are all planning to go into engineering. Every year, a high percentage of the team is female.

So is our model successful in inspiring kids to go into engineering and technology fields? I doubt you will find anyone who can honestly say that it is not.