Preventing "Garbage In, Garbage Out" in FRC

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

I totally agree with you, but like you said that's not really what I'm after. Tom hit it right on the head of how to shift people from the "Let me CAD up another copy of a WCD without any understanding of what I'm doing" vs. a "Let me design a widget that I can actually explain."

Judging from Jon and Tom's comments, it sounds like it just comes down to challenging people. "Why did you do that? (and I copied it off someone else's CAD doesn't count)"

I agree with the idea of challenging people, but remember part of innovating is copying. For example, it is fine to copy the way other teams have done a WCD. However it is then important to challenge the students to understand why teams do a WCD like that.