Sippin' on the haterade

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

Why not teach more kids CAD? Why have your students machine all the parts in-house?

You bring up an interesting question. Are these the most valuable skills that students can generate through the FIRST program? Answer as you will, but I'd answer with a resounding "no."

I would much rather have my students designing parts, than building parts based on someone else's drawings. I'd rather have my parts manufactured at an outside facility, precision machined from a student's drawing, so that the students can see EXACTLY what they designed come to life. I'd rather have my students learn to prototype, design, think, and iterate. I'd rather have my students learn how to think like a software engineer, than how to punch Java code into a computer. It doesn't matter who builds the robot. It doesn't matter who drafts the robot. It matters that the students learn what it means to engineer a robot.

And one could argue that even that doesn't matter. The bottom line is, FIRST is about inspiration. It is about being inspired to go into STEM fields, not about showing off what you can do with your current skill set. It is about working with mentors, and being shown what's possible...what you didn't think could be done...what CAN be done. Good FIRST teams teach their students that they can do, what they didn't think they could, through mentors. Good FIRST teams even show members of other teams the amazing things that can be done with good engineering.

Without teams as strong as 1771, we wouldn't have a constant, dependable source of inspiring robots and teams. We wouldn't have anyone to look up to. Sure, there would still be an imbalance in the teams...some students would of course come into the program more prepared than others, and sometimes a bunch of particularly skilled students pair up and make something amazing. The team would probably fall back to mediocrety in a few years, since the students would have no incentive to stick around in a "student only" program, and we'd loose our source of inspiration. And, most of the haters would still find a reason to hate. If they find a reason to hate teams better than them now, they'd find a reason to hate later.

And the majority of us? We'd look like this. Trust me. I've been there. You don't want to.

Finally, a reminder. It is NEVER in anyone's best interest to hate on teams, because they may run themselves differently than yours, or value different things. Doing so only drags the program down.