Sippin' on the haterade

[Patrick Chiang]

Originally Posted by JABot67

I guess it's very probable that there are some teams out there that operate like that. I'm just tired of the accusation being thrown around, especially at teams whose robots look or perform awesomely and deserve to be commended. When you judge a team like this, it may turn out they're a team like 1771 who absolutely does not deserve it.

I'm sure there are teams out there that get (falsely) blamed of a big budget and a mentor-ran team. But there is a grain of truth in at least some of the accusations, and some of the students can get discouraged because *that team* always wins because they have a huge autoshop, bigger budget, more mentors than kids...etc.

Of course, I sympathize with teams that legitimately worked their way to the top and get accused of above said things. Which is why the whole issue is so complex: easy to make accusations, hard to defend yourself from it, and yet some accusations are true so you can't just ignore all accusations.

Originally Posted by JABot67

Oh man, if everyone on my team needs to know how the entire robot functions, there is a WHOLE LOT of work to be done...
Rather, there are some students who know how almost all of the robot works. Same with the mentors... I am the only mentor who knows how the programming works, but I don't know everything about the mechanical aspects of the robot. For everyone on the team to know how the entire robot functions is an impossible task, at least for my team.

Of course... What I meant was not the details, but the general gist of things. Usually, what I like to hear when I ask a student how their robot works in general is something along the lines of "so we have this mechanism that sucks balls in, the conveyor belt takes that to our magazine, and when our driver presses the button, it drops into the hotwheel mechanism which squeezes the ball out and scores". Or at least something along the lines of "well, I don't know about the electronics board, but the conveyor system is powered by this and this motor, and it squeezes balls against the backside of our robot so it moves upwards"...etc. Seems like a reasonable thing to expect from students who build the robot.