Sippin' on the haterade

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

It is an excellent challenge, I agree. Our rookie year robot was under $100 (plus kit money) and ended up top seed. That is, however, not the point. What a team with a $5000 budget can do with a $100 limit is *very* different from what a team with a $100 budget can do with that limit. The $5000 team can build 48 prototypes, 1 practice bot, and 1 actual robot. The $100 team has one chance and no practice bot. In short, my point is: Money makes a huge difference.

Part of the challenge of FIRST is designing your team's effort to acquire more money, not simply building the robot. If you've got $100 this year, maybe do some sales/demonstrations/begging letters and try to get $300 next year. The team with $5k budgets in your example probably didn't have that money fall out of the sky with no strings attached. They probably had to go around and ask for it. Even if they got lucky with a single extremely generous donor, they still had to find a way to make the extremely generous donors in their community aware of them. Maybe there's one in your community that you just haven't found yet. Every time our team does a big fundraising push we seem to come back with substantial donations from unexpected places (last year we got some money from a beauty salon).

If a team has lots of money such that they can outsource their entire robot, that's a measure of success. If your goal is to be successful in the competition and the competition permits use of outsourcing, lots of money, and professional help and you're not using them, then it is unlikely you'll be consistently successful at the competition. FIRST has permitted all these things for its entire existence, and is unlikely to change.

Background: I'm on a consistently well-performing team whose most expensive tool is a 30-year-old drill press and whose biggest tool upgrade recently has been a vice that's bolted to a table. It takes us 4 hours to make bumper brackets because someone has to hacksaw through them and we can't afford to have it taken to a machine shop.

[Phyrxes]

One of the things I've tried to instill in the students on my team is by all means go over and talk to that "dominant" team and ask them questions about how they do things. Very rarely have I run into a student or mentor that wasn't excited to tell me about their program.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

I'm sure there are teams out there that get (falsely) blamed of a big budget and a mentor-ran team.

Your choice of the word "blamed" is interesting. Should teams be ashamed if they have big budgets and a structure where mentors play a large role in the running of the team? I think that is something for which to be grateful and/or proud.

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

If the best way to inspire someone is to have robots be built by people much more skilled than him/her, then wouldn't it make sense to have the most skilled people build the robots? And by that extension, wouldn't it make most sense to have demonstrations of robots built by top NASA engineers instead of competitions?

Top NASA engineers are indeed involved in the building of the robots of several FIRST teams. It's a shame there aren't enough top NASA engineers to go around. The point is not to put a bunch of students in a workshop with no direction, and it's not to completely obfuscate the engineering process from the students. It's to build a bridge from what the student currently knows to what engineering is all about. To work alongside engineers to see what their life entails and realize "hey, I can do/enjoy this!" Alongside sometimes means that you are doing while they watch, but also that sometimes they do while you watch. A professional engineer with a lifetime of training can do some amazing and inspiring things that (the vast majority of) high school students cannot.

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

A competition implies that there is some form of fairness involved. If every team is mentor-built and mentor-ran, FRC might as well be renamed First Robotics Demonstration.

There are all sorts of measures involved with FRC to ensure that fairness is involved. Weight, budget, control system, fabrication window, allowable motors, the game rules. Limiting the participation of mentors places an artificial ceiling on inspiration for no other reason than to lower the bar of competition. Many in FRC have been inspired by incredible robots built by elite teams. Did engineers work on them? Absolutely. Does that make them less inspiring? Of course not.

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

FIRST might not be all about student built/ran teams, but I thought there was something in there about inspiration. And the maximum way to achieve that is have students do as much as they can. (The more they do, the more they learn, the more they will want to do it. Hence, the definition of inspire.)

Having the students take ownership and pride in their robot is an important part of FRC (in my opinion). But ownership and pride don't mean that the students have to do the entire thing themselves. Making CAD drawings that get turned into perfect parts by a CNC or water jet is taking ownership (and this is far closer to what a real world mechanical engineer does than making everything himself). Prototyping several iterations of a mechanism until it is perfect is taking ownership, even if the final version on the robot was fabricated by a sponsor (your prototypes essentially designed the final mechanism). Perfecting a game strategy that your robot executes is taking ownership.

[ebarker]

An Ed rant !!

TEAMWORK
If we ran a football team the way some people run robotics teams we would get laughed off the field. If you told your football coach they could save a lot of time and effort if they would wait to the beginning of football season to assemble and build their team……really !

Teambuilding is not valued enough with too many teams. Part of team building is doing things together, and that can be done for free. You can’t build a robot if you can’t build a team. No team, no robot, no nothing. All you have is a robot club of people hanging out building robot chaos. Clubs and Teams are different.

FOCUS
Know what you are trying to accomplish is important. Are you trying to change the culture or are you trying to build a robot ? It turns out you can do both. If you work at doing both you can build a better robot because you will have more resources !!!

COMMUNITY
It took us years to discover it but there is a ton of people out there that would help the team with material or machining or cutting or donuts or pizza or whatever.

When you engage these people you have made them a sort of team member. They see the benefits to society and their future, you get the pizza and parts, a better robot, and culture change to boot. And that is money you didn't have to spend.

Think about it. What use is there in developing an iPad if you don't bother to go find a customer ? What use is there in developing technology leaders of the future if the community doesn't know or care about it ?

Earlier in the thread there was the "grouchy old Ed walking around the shop" comment : If someone "upward delegates" a problem to me like "where is the whatchmacallit ? " and they are supposed to know where it is, I answer "I don't know or care - if putting it back where it belongs isn't important to you, it isn't important to me."

Let's for a moment pretend I run the ACME company here in town. My thought as president of ACME company could be something like:

If a team "upward delegates" a problem to me like "where is the money ? " I could answer "I don't know or care - if explaining to me the societal relevance of your team isn't important to you, your money problem isn't important to me."

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm already there. I'm trying to explain to some of these youngin's how the world works.

RESOURCES
“If only we had a ton of money” life would be great. There is a very valuable resource that students have in abundance. Intelligence, creativity, time, sweat. A HUGE part of what we do is spending time in the community rallying support for our team and area teams.

Don't allow people to waste valuable resources: intelligence, creativity, time, sweat, complaining about what doesn’t exist and and lead them toward focusing on creating solutions.

(There are teams on this thread right now that are unaware that some of their funding is a direct result of community outreach we did and grants we wrote, but I digress)

EMPLOYABILITY – YOUR FUTURE

Your future employer is not going to hire you so you can sit and play in a lab while they shove endless piles of money under the door. Hello – wake up, real world.

FIRST is real world. FIRST is a model of your future. Here you can learn how to use those free resources - resources, intelligence, creativity, time, and sweat – solving problem for your future employer.

Think about it. If they didn’t have a problem to solve they would not have hired you in the first place.

That is the definition of an engineer, or at least 'a' definition: someone that solves problems, usually but not always with some significant degree of STEM.


THE ENGINEERING PROCESS
A near constant discussion on CD is related to designing, cadding, building, machining, etc. Rarely is there a good explanation of the spectrum of STEM oriented jobs on CD.

The general public and unfortunately I think too many on CD do not discriminate or explain the difference between:

Research & development engineer, management and operations engineering, 4 year engineering technologist degrees, 2 year engineering technologist degrees, machinist, CAM operators, engineering technicians, technical skills operators, mechanics, electricians, and so forth.

This lack of career literacy clouds the discussion of “What is Best” for a team. The answer is “All of the Above”.

This year, our team most closely approximates what you would see in a typical R&D shop. (student) Engineers do lab work to test ideas, then go to CAD, then outsource the maching/waterjetting. The parts return and the robot is assembled. This is a very close real world model of an R&D lab.

Having an understanding of what ‘space’ your students need to operate in is important to how the team’s engineering design and construction process is done.


THE LONG VIEW
Ask your team some questions.

Does your team know what it wants to do the next 12 months. I’m talking designing and building some robot parts, team building exercises especially the kind that doesn’t involve robot but maybe water balloons and Frisbee. Community service, community outreach, meeting with potential sponsors partners.

Most of what we do is sweat equity. A ton of community donated stuff, a ton of student donated time and effort. And we manage to generate enough cash to build the robot.

The video


</END_RANT>

[pfreivald]

Good rant, Ed!

[Patrick Chiang]

Originally Posted by Bongle

Part of the challenge of FIRST is designing your team's effort to acquire more money, not simply building the robot. If you've got $100 this year, maybe do some sales/demonstrations/begging letters and try to get $300 next year. The team with $5k budgets in your example probably didn't have that money fall out of the sky with no strings attached. They probably had to go around and ask for it. Even if they got lucky with a single extremely generous donor, they still had to find a way to make the extremely generous donors in their community aware of them. Maybe there's one in your community that you just haven't found yet. Every time our team does a big fundraising push we seem to come back with substantial donations from unexpected places (last year we got some money from a beauty salon).

If a team has lots of money such that they can outsource their entire robot, that's a measure of success. If your goal is to be successful in the competition and the competition permits use of outsourcing, lots of money, and professional help and you're not using them, then it is unlikely you'll be consistently successful at the competition. FIRST has permitted all these things for its entire existence, and is unlikely to change.

Background: I'm on a consistently well-performing team whose most expensive tool is a 30-year-old drill press and whose biggest tool upgrade recently has been a vice that's bolted to a table. It takes us 4 hours to make bumper brackets because someone has to hacksaw through them and we can't afford to have it taken to a machine shop.

Kudos to your team for finding resources in unexpected places.

However, keep in mind some teams simply reside in geographic locations where their school district has room in their budget for robotics. It's actually fantastic that they're driving money in their area towards robotics and are helping inspire people. It just seems rather unfair to me (and un-inspiring for students not lucky enough to live those areas) that they have an instant advantage at the start.

And you're right. FIRST is unlikely to change their rules. Unfortunately, it's equally unlikely that the "hate" towards successful teams will disappear overnight. (After all, it's just an irrational overreaction to an actual issue.) All we can hope to do is change people's attitudes.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

My first year participating in high school on 195 (this was about 10 years ago, mind you), our robot was 100% mentor built. No joke, we met with the engineers on the first day of the build and they delivered a robot 6 weeks later.

Regardless of that, we went to the competitions and had tons of fun, it was great. We had some great team leaders and mentors who encouraged us to just soak in everything about the competition. We won an event that year and that got a bunch of us really pumped to try and help the next year.

Many students from that team have gone on to complete degrees in engineering and now work at places like Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, Amazon, and bay area startups. I think the "Inspiration" (you know, the whole point of this program) was successful.

[sdcantrell56]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

It just seems rather unfair to me (and un-inspiring for students not lucky enough to live those areas) that they have an instant advantage at the start.

Why would you assume that everything is supposed to be "fair" in this competition or life or the real world of engineering. If FIRST is supposed to introduce students to real life engineering then surely it should introduce students to the concept that things are not always totally level. If you want more money or resources go find it.

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by sdcantrell56

Why would you assume that everything is supposed to be "fair" in this competition or life or the real world of engineering. If FIRST is supposed to introduce students to real life engineering then surely it should introduce students to the concept that things are not always totally level. If you want more money or resources go find it.

"Fair is a four-letter 'F'-word. It doesn't belong in school."

But seriously, 'fair' is a fiction -- there's no such thing. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, nor is it a good thing. It's just a thing.

[Bongle]

It just seems rather unfair to me (and un-inspiring for students not lucky enough to live those areas) that they have an instant advantage at the start.

Real-world engineering example:
It's 'unfair' to many companies in the consumer electronics sector that when Apple announces mundane spec-bump revisions of their products (iPhone 3GS, 4S, iPad 2, textbook program for iPad) that it is front-page news, but when the non-Apple companies announce interesting revisions of their own products, nobody cares. However, that's how the real world works. Some people or organizations have built-in advantages that you'll have to overcome.

The teams with supportive school boards (I'm not actually aware of any powerhouse teams funded entirely from their school boards) have an advantage, and you've got to overcome it. That's bad luck, but you have to deal with it.

[Patrick Chiang]

Originally Posted by sdcantrell56

Why would you assume that everything is supposed to be "fair" in this competition or life or the real world of engineering. If FIRST is supposed to introduce students to real life engineering then surely it should introduce students to the concept that things are not always totally level. If you want more money or resources go find it.

By your logic: If FIRST is supposed to introduce students to real life engineering, it would require teams to hold tryouts and interviews for team positions.

It doesn't, because its purpose is to maximize the number of people it inspires, and the best way to do that is to have a fair competition with a level playing field. It's like spectating sports: if two teams are somewhat equal in strength, both sides give their best, and the crowd is excited because the winner is a tossup.

By the way, the "life isn't fair" excuse is most often used by elites who are comfortable with their position in society (I'm not implying you guys are ). Pretty much every case of socio-economic injustice and discrimination in the US during the last 30 years or so are linked to the "life isn't fair, deal with it" position.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

However, keep in mind some teams simply reside in geographic locations where their school district has room in their budget for robotics. It's actually fantastic that they're driving money in their area towards robotics and are helping inspire people. It just seems rather unfair to me (and un-inspiring for students not lucky enough to live those areas) that they have an instant advantage at the start.

Patrick- as a mentor for a decently successful rookie team in the heart of West Philadelphia with zero, and I mean ZERO, support from a school or the Philadelphia school district, I find your statement here highly irrelevant. Teams who relied on the district in the past have all died out. We are fully independent in raising money, finding a place to work, finding mentors, finding in-kind donations, and finding machining sponsors. Our main machining sponsor is located 2 hours away from our team, so please don't give the excuse that location factors into this.

A team that blames their environment for their lack of resources is, in my honest opinion, not trying hard enough. (To a certain extent)

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

By the way, the "life isn't fair" excuse is most often used by elites who are comfortable with their position in society (I'm not implying you guys are ). Pretty much every case of socio-economic injustice and discrimination in the US during the last 30 years or so are linked to the "life isn't fair, deal with it" position.

Patrick let me ask you something - how long have you been in this program? How long have you been mentoring? Were you also ever a student on one of these teams?

Most of us saying that life isn't fair have all gone through this program as students. Some of us have been lucky enough to be on teams who have been successful from the start, and some of us from average or mediocre student run teams. We are taking what we learned from past experiences to make our current teams better. What we wish we had as high schools students- we are working our hearts out to provide for our own students.

In the end I think it boils down to the question "do you really have a problem with all these successful/resourceful teams and feel you're being cheated out of something, or do you actually have a problem with your own team and feel that you want to improve?"

[sdcantrell56]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

By your logic: If FIRST is supposed to introduce students to real life engineering, it would require teams to hold tryouts and interviews for team positions.

That's interesting....we hold tryouts for important field positions. Many many many successful teams do this. While we have not personally had to limit students involved in other aspects of the prgoram due to our size (only 30 kids) I am aware of plenty of programs that limit the number of students on the build team. We also limit who travels to only those who we deem necessary for success and those who have put in the effort to warrant travelling with us. Again this is not an uncommon practice.

This isn't un"fair" or wrong it just encourages students to actually put in a meaningful effort if they want all the benefits. Mediocrity shouldn't be rewarded just like teams who take the time and put in the effort to seek out sponsors shouldnt be limited so that everything is "fair".

[E. Wood]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

They win largely because their school is basically an extension of whatever large corporation that sponsors them, which is why they can afford to have their beautiful custom-built bot, along with their community outreach plans funded by the school that gets them their chairman's award every other year.

Having been on two teams, both of which have won Chairman's Awards (see signature below), both of which were not "an extension of whatever large corporation that sponsors them", and both of which have competitive robots year after year, I am deeply sadden and somewhat disturbed by your comments. Many of these "Elite" teams have worked many years to get to where they are today. Don't assume they "bought" their way to the top because they have large corporate names in their sponsors list because it's simply not true.

I currently co-organize many of the outreach efforts for team 836 and I can tell you that we have two requirements before we schedule or host an outreach activity. First, there must be people to inspire at the event. Second, we must have students available to attend to work the event. Most of the costs to support these events have come directly from my pocket and those of my fellow mentors. At the actual event, we mentors back-off as much as possible and let the students do the work where they can.

As for the robot, we work as team, students and mentors side by side to build the best robot possible. When we win it is always as a team, not just as a team of students or a team of mentors, but as one team of both. I believe it is this partnership between students and mentors that FIRST is looking for as it is in their mission statement.

"Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership."

If mentors and students do not work together to solve the problems FIRST presents to us I believe you are missing the point and I bet FIRST would agree with me.

[ebarker]

At the beginning of the school year the roster had 32.

From then till 1st of March we work them to death. Then they have to take an competition eligibility examination, multiple choice and essay question. Nothing technical.

Between working like crazy, the exam, and other things, they will "self select" themselves into or out of the program.

Starting with 32, self-selecting 8 out, and adding 3 rookies, we netted 27 solid members.

That was the tryout / interview / team bonding experience. If they don't own it they don't go.

It is only fair that the team members that earned the right to go to the competition are not accompanied by people that didn't earn the right. The students that didn't go had a year to learn about what is going on and become introduced to engineering. For whatever reason they didn't make the cut and yes that is a fairness issue.
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