Poor Dean's Homework 2013 Turnout

[PayneTrain]

Unlike Dean's Homework in the past, this "assignment" was something that most teams never have really done, and the bandwidth and overhead required by a team to do a project, that like Jon said, had no direct benefit, is hard to justify even for the relatively small number of teams who "meet year round". Teams have to raise money, train students, do community events, do some optional but beneficial work like putting together training sessions for team members or planning FLL tournaments or drafting legislation or helping kids apply to college...

This year, FIRST wanted teams to submit a 2 minute video about whatever for no clear reason. A lot of teams already put a ridiculous (in a good way) amount of effort and time into creating their 3-minute Chairman's Award video. To pull something liek this off, you'd have to probably be a large team of 70 or more students where a dedicated video subteam can justifiably form and not fold into an operations/outreach/media subteam, you'd have to meet all year, you'd have to have the available equipment, prior b-roll footage, people available to interview, and time on top of everything everyone does inside and outside of robotics the rest of the year,

[wilsonmw04]

Wow, I see a whole lot of excuses here. It's a two minute video. Most everyone has a video camera in their pocket right now. There are various free video editing software suites for educational use. Even if you don't meet during the summer, there were 3 months from Sept to now to get something together.


If it wasn't a priority, that's fine, but don't blame FIRST or Dean if you didn't get your homework done. Blame yourself.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

If it wasn't a priority, that's fine, but don't blame FIRST or Dean if you didn't get your homework done. Blame yourself.

Nobody was blaming FIRST.

[wilsonmw04]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

Nobody was blaming FIRST.

I don't know. It seems that way: there was no reward for doing it, it wasn't mandatory, it wasn't advertised. The time frame was all wrong, etc.

Maybe, this whole thread just rubs me the wrong way. I teach and hear excuses about not getting homework done. Some of the posts here reminded me of my students.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

I don't know. It seems that way: there was no reward for doing it, it wasn't mandatory, it wasn't advertised. The time frame was all wrong, etc.

Maybe, this whole thread just rubs me the wrong way. I teach and hear excuses about not getting homework done. Some of the posts here reminded me of my students.

I think somebody already mentioned that many teams don't meet regularly through the summer or even the fall. I think it's rather self-evident why it is impractical or unrealistic to expect those teams to make a video, so I'll focus on why my team (a team going into our eighth competitive season, having won a couple of Engineering Inspiration Awards and a RCA along the way) didn't do the homework.

We didn't do the homework.

That's the summary of "why we didn't"-- heck, we even have a student that loves to do videos that, had he heard about this, would have leapt at the opportunity. Sometimes there is no excuse-- and sometimes there isn't any real consequence either.

That being said, I would hazard a guess that many of the teams that fall into our "boat" of having the resources but not making a video certainly have made good usage of their time during the fall-- we've been busy mentoring the seven new FTC teams that we started this year, thank-you-very-much, in addition to doing our own recruitment and fundraising.

[Jscout11]

Like other teams, the Dean's List Homework was just something that kind of fell to the side and was (wrongly) forgotten among a list of offseason projects, which was admittedly long this year for us (5 offseason events, complete renovation of our build space, major fundraising and planning for increased travel expenses, summer and fall weekly teaching sessions, 3 new FLL teams, planning for NJ State FLL and our district event, etc.)

That being said, we have a lot of footage from over the past year that was used for our weekly Build blogs and chairman's effort (both of which have already begun for the next year) and we have started to put together the video, regardless of the due date, as many others are starting to do.

But I don't agree with those who say "It's just a two minute video, teams could have easily pulled something together quickly." It's not the most challenging project, but I still think that if a team wasn't really going to/wasn't able based on time and available students to put in enough effort to make a well thought out, meaningful video, there would be no point to it, at least in my opinion.

[ebarker]

I'm not making excuses but since the OP asked a question.....

The reason we didn't is simply because we are out of bandwidth. We meet about 4 days a week from CMP through Kickoff and our current projects are burying us. We have another 3 minute video project that is going to take 3 months to do, minimum, and we are 6 weeks behind. This project has a higher project status than the homework so that's how that happened.

For the general question about all teams, there are already lot of comments, but I'll add the Parato principal, or the 80/20 rule. It is unfortunate but probably 80 % of the teams in the world don't meet that often right now if at all and are probably not motivated enough or capable enough to do the video. Maybe they excel in some area. Maybe they are in the top 10 % of robot building, or top 10 % of something else.

This whole Parato thing frustrates everyone everywhere in what are know as socially unconstrainted situations, like any volunteer organization.. Trying to get the 80% of the crowd to do as well as the upper 20 % is tough. It's just like 20 % of the team members build 80 % of the robot, etc.

I can rant forever but I'll stop here....

[MrBasse]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

I don't know. It seems that way: there was no reward for doing it, it wasn't mandatory, it wasn't advertised. The time frame was all wrong, etc.

Maybe, this whole thread just rubs me the wrong way. I teach and hear excuses about not getting homework done. Some of the posts here reminded me of my students.

I emphasized that part because I want to ask, when you teach you don't assign the homework clearly to less than 1/4 of the class at a major event and obscurely to the remainder who happen to be absent do you? We've never had the opportunity to go to St. Louis, but if we had we would have heard about this directly from the source. I looked back at email blasts and the homework assignment was mentioned three times (5/23, 10/4 as a side bar, and 10/17) and I can honestly tell you that at the times I got those emails, I never noticed them because it was the last thing on my mind. The only other place to find out about it was the FIRST website and there have been multiple threads about how easy it is to find things there...

I don't think anyone is making excuses, they are just giving their honest reasons for not getting it done. And never knowing about an assignment is a pretty great reason, not an excuse, for not doing it. We would like to give this a shot and see what we can come up with, but I'm not about to let my students do something with less than 100% effort just so they can get it done. So as was said earlier, we might still put something together, but it will be on our schedule and worked on until it is right.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

I don't know. It seems that way: there was no reward for doing it, it wasn't mandatory, it wasn't advertised. The time frame was all wrong, etc.

Maybe, this whole thread just rubs me the wrong way. I teach and hear excuses about not getting homework done. Some of the posts here reminded me of my students.

The difference between these posts and "the dog ate my homework" is that the latter is trying to avoid consequences. For ourselves at least, and I think most others, we're more than willing to own our decision. I can wish our priorities were different (like we didn't have to move for the 13th time), but I think the decision that led to us not finishing was correct for us in this case. We're trying to increase our bandwidth overall, which will hopefully change the outcome next time, but I don't regret it this time.

I'm happy to "blame" myself for it if you wish--I don't feel there's any fault in the rational decision to enrich and inspire in other ways more befitting of our circumstances. I saw this thread as the community endeavoring change the circumstances that led up to many teams' similar decisions.

[ChrisH]

Maybe most of us would rather build robots than make videos. While making videos is a lot easier than it used to be, it still requires a specific skill set to do well, and you can only be good at a limited number of things.

So if your team has a group of students that passionately wants to TELL the FIRST story, go for it. But don't get disappointed with teams that are busy BEING the FIRST story for not being storytellers too.

[wilsonmw04]

Originally Posted by ChrisH

Maybe most of us would rather build robots than make videos. While making videos is a lot easier than it used to be, it still requires a specific skill set to do well, and you can only be good at a limited number of things.

So if your team has a group of students that passionately wants to TELL the FIRST story, go for it. But don't get disappointed with teams that are busy BEING the FIRST story for not being storytellers too.

Then I think you are missing a large part of what it means to be on a FIRST team. IMHO.

[MechEng83]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

Then I think you are missing a large part of what it means to be on a FIRST team. IMHO.

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.

We all have different ways of inspiring and recognizing science and technology. A video is one tool, but by no means the only tool. Nothing is one-size fits all.

A business must make priority calls due to limited resources, time, money, knowledge base, etc. I think that teams who display this active decision are demonstrating a clear understanding of a tenet of business practice.

Do not presume that your definition of what it means to be on a FIRST team is universal, and do not presume that you have the right answers for every team.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

Then I think you are missing a large part of what it means to be on a FIRST team. IMHO.

Haha right... the Beach Bots are missing what it means to be on a FIRST team.

But seriously, a lot of teams use the off-season to scrape together funding so they can simply exist next year, and you're upset that they didn't make a documentary video in their off-season instead?

Our team is busy designing a practice drive and teaching students how to CAD, improving our relationships with sponsors, using our previous season's robot to demonstrate & inspire at football games every week, and more. It's my job to ensure our students are ready for build season and I'm sorry to say that making a documentary video doesn't help us out in that aspect.

Every team has their priorities and I don't think you have the right to make a judgement call on a team's character because they didn't do a video for FIRST.

[wilsonmw04]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

Then I think you are missing a large part of what it means to be on a FIRST team. IMHO.

Let me rephrase:

Why can't we BE the FIRST story and TELL it at the same time?


And with that I will take off me teacher hat and step down from my soapbox.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

Let me rephrase:

Why can't we BE the FIRST story and TELL it at the same time?

Because we don't have ENOUGH FIRST stories available to do the telling!

Let me explain this one: Each student (and in some cases, the mentors) is a FIRST story, and has one. The problem is that many of them are distinctly unavailable during the summer, or during meetings of another activity, or at some other time that is convenient for telling the story, for a variety of reasons not necessarily relating to lack of interest. A larger team has more members that might be available, but large/huge teams tend to be the exception rather than the rule, particularly if all their students are fully active!

In other words, there is a severe lack of available manpower to do the telling and do what is needed to build a robot* at the same time. Time to get some more inspiration going!

*This "what is needed" includes fundraising, outreach demonstrations, keeping up with schoolwork, robot building/maintenance, moving shops if needed, planning logistics, and all the other stuff that goes into showing up at competition with a robot.