Lack of Prior Knowledge

[bardd]

Originally Posted by Taylor

How do you prevent the "let's put a buzzsaw and squirt gun on the robot" comments during brainstorming?

We don't, they're fun

To answer your question though, we hold workshops where we teach the new guys the basics of robotics and FRC, and major rules that don't change (like no ruining other teams' robots). We also show them many robots (pictures and videos, we don't keep our bots) from different years and different teams. While that's not enough to make them understand which kinds of mechanisms are useful and which aren't, but they get the general idea.