My wish? make the BuildBlitzs/RobotIn3Days projects go away...

[Tungrus]

My biggest challenge this year will be to minimize external distraction. At least few team members will watch YouTube and will comeback with half baked ideas, not understanding the engineering behind the design process and insisting on doing like "they" did. To add to some parents will come prepared with video loaded on iPad and try to challenge those who are practicing engineering best practices. Anyways this is my challenge and I have to learn to deal with it.

[mrnoble]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

The "^^^" in his post are referring to the post right above his.

Thanks. All these years and I'm still finding my way.

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by Tungrus

My biggest challenge this year will be to minimize external distraction. At least few team members will watch YouTube and will comeback with half baked ideas, not understanding the engineering behind the design process and insisting on doing like "they" did. To add to some parents will come prepared with video loaded on iPad and try to challenge those who are practicing engineering best practices. Anyways this is my challenge and I have to learn to deal with it.

Roy Plunkett invented Teflon by trying to make a better refrigerator. His experiment completely failed but he took samples of the material he made a found he made a material that achieved a different necessity.

Harry Coover tried to use cyanacrylates as a moldable polymer. It completely failed because its so sticky. However, he realized it was sticky enough to hold two materials together thus inventing superglue.

One can argue in hindsight that their original ideas were bad however these inventors were operating in the unknown. Their flawed ideas yielded a great invention.

Last year, I had a picture I took in 2011 of 1114's drivetrain that my students saw. We like the drivetrain but that is not what inspired my students. They liked how 1114 mounted their wheels and my students used that method to hold our shooter wheel. We never had an argument about if we should use our west coast drive versus 1114's drive. Frankly I don't think we could argue if one was superior. Time was precious, thus we picked west coast drive based on our collaboration with 766.

A lot of these examples require an idea to be prototype, to be experimented with. That consumes resources so not every idea can move forward. I disagree that a team should limit "distractions." The challenge is to condense a reservoir of ideas into working prototypes and functioning mechanisms. The process can get gruesome as ideas are dropped. Last year, we had two climber concepts but barely enough time to do one, so the other was cut. We tried two shooters; linear and curved, but our linear shooter lagged behind the curve shooter. We had to drop it to focus on a design that was working.

About 3/4 of our teams mentors are parents. A lot of parents want to help and have ideas, a key transition is to get parents to join as full-fledged mentors. Some will suggest ideas that don't appear to help but its a clue that they want to help. Also, I really try to cut the egos from ideas, some people get very attached to their ideas and that makes it difficult to have productive discussions. I wish I had resources to say "go build it, show us how great your idea is." That is just not practical. We do say, if your idea is to be pursued in prototyping, you are expected you to be part of the prototyping process. We want people to take ownership of their work.

The best thing I can suggest is to research and develop a formal design process. This will help manage the flow of ideas. My team uses one based on Ideo's method. I got it from a documentary I saw about them. We have a timeline that we try to adhere to, this year will be the strictest schedule yet, we can't afford to endlessly talk ideas. We also have a design spec, and ideas must address the design objectives. Some ideas will cause us to redefine our design spec but this should help you make people say more than, "they did it so it must be good." They will have to articulate their ideas.

[wilsonmw04]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I would be wary of this line of thinking.

This is not my thinking. This is what FIRST says it's stated goals are: to inspire the next generation. How a team does this mission is entirely up to the individual team. If a team chooses to inspire by having professionals design and build the robot, that's entirely their choice. This is very similar to RI3D's. If a team uses it to inspire their students, more power to them. If a team chooses another path, that's just as valid. The only thing you should take away from this conversation about my "line of thinking" is that the all teams should have access to as many tools as they would like. What they do with them is entirely their choice.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

This is not my thinking. This is what FIRST says it's stated goals are: to inspire the next generation. How a team does this mission is entirely up to the individual team. If a team chooses to inspire by having professionals design and build the robot, that's entirely their choice. This is very similar to RI3D's. If a team uses it to inspire their students, more power to them. If a team chooses another path, that's just as valid. The only thing you should take away from this conversation about my "line of thinking" is that the all teams should have access to as many tools as they would like. What they do with them is entirely their choice.

I was simply opining that I do not think it is nearly as inspiring or educational to watch a mentor build a robot as it is to do it yourself. I can state with absolute certainty that had I not had access to the hands-on problem-solving experience that my FRC team provided, I'd be much worse off. I understand that this may not have been the point of your post, but your claim that "FIRST is not about kids solving problems" is something I felt compelled to comment on, because I think that students solving problems is a very important part of what FIRST is about. It certainly was the most valuable thing I got out of the program.

As an illustrative anecdote: About a year and a half ago I began an internship at the university of Maryland, working in robotics. The professor informed me that I would not be added to the payroll until I was contributing deliverables to the research; that they do not pay students to learn. A week later I was on the payroll, almost entirely because of the hands-on engineering work experience and problem-solving skills I had gained through FIRST.

You mention that Ri3D's choice is to have engineers build the robots, in the context of teams choosing how best to inspire their students - in light of this, I think it is also worth noting that Ri3D is not a FIRST team. They are a group of independent engineers who feel that this is a good use of their time (for which I am very grateful, as I've already mentioned).

[wilsonmw04]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

You mention that Ri3D's choice is to have engineers build the robots, in the context of teams choosing how best to inspire their students - in light of this, I think it is also worth noting that Ri3D is not a FIRST team. They are a group of independent engineers who feel that this is a good use of their time (for which I am very grateful, as I've already mentioned).

You misread my post. I was simply saying that Ri3D is a tool that a team can choose to use or not use.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

You misread my post. I was simply saying that Ri3D is a tool that a team can choose to use or not use.

I read that part, and agreed with it totally; I even qualified my last response with a mention that I realize what I'm responding to was not the main thrust of what you were posting. It was an aside, albeit a lengthy one, on a subject you touched on that I feel very strongly about.

[aldaeron]

When I heard there would be many more “televised robots” (i.e. Ri3D, Team Blitz) built this year I had the same initial concern as the OP – that FRC is for the kids and if we follow a trend of having “Professional FRC builders” that FRC may become a competition where everything is copied from the Pros. After a bit of thought I changed my mind. Most of the good points have been added already, but I wanted to share what changed my mind.

Finally, some competition!

One argument I have not yet seen is for the C in FRC - Competition. I would like to see 50 functional bots at the regional and have the ranking determined by teams could drive and score well and who had a good strategy. It would not be fun to watch the Denver Broncos play a local high school football team. Similarly it is not fun to watch a match where 3-4 robots can’t offer much activity. It is a lot of fun to see a close match where 2 points made at the buzzer determines the result.

Design Iteration

In the “real world” of engineering, design iteration is a must. Design, analyze, build, test, repeat. With a “go to” design shown online, less experienced teams could spend some time on driving and testing (which from my experience on such teams does not happen at all). While there is not time for major design iterations in 6 weeks it is a great practice to show a full design cycle including testing and proposing changes (even if they cannot be implemented before the regional).

Is Ri3D really different than years past?

I would argue that the concepts shown by RI3D last year would have come to light anyway and been utilized by most teams. I recall seeing numerous YouTube videos of collegiate Frisbee competitions with shooter designs and whitepapers, including the popular linear and curved shooter designs on CD. Ri3D was just a well documented summary of ideas mixed with years of “what works well in an FRC specific environment”. Think of it this way: without Ri3D do you really believe there would have been a big difference in the design concepts teams chose?

I share the concern that student learning and growth can be hampered by improper balance of “outside help”, be it from mentors, Ri3D, CD, etc. I would not want to see a team that bought and assembled a group of parts that were designed by a contracted professional engineering firm with no student or mentor involvement. I believe this is “doomsday scenario” the OP envisioned happening down the road. So long as the “outside help” limit themselves to 72 hours I don’t see that trend developing because there is a lot of fine tuning of the game specific mechanism that takes place and can’t be done in 72 hours. The nice thing I have noticed in FRC games is that there is always something more to learn to dig into (the hard part is restraining yourself IMO)

My biggest critique of Ri3D is that they should have gone back and explained in depth why they made certain choices (after they sleep) whether it be “this tweak has worked well for FRC because”, “you might want to experiment with disc compression vs. distance” or “a six wheeled drivetrain is better for FRC because …”. This allows everyone to learn their process and important FRC specific design concepts (more on this later).

“Doing FIRST right”

It has been noted numerous times that every participant and team in FRC is different and there is no single solution to “doing FIRST right”. From differences in resources, knowledge, experience and “how much help should mentors give”, teams have a variety of successful approaches toward achieving the FIRST mission. I have participated in or mentored a few collegiate engineering clubs and have mentored a few new engineering grads at work. On the issue of “how much do we show by example” I think it is important to note that: (remember this is my opinion on the subject)

• “Copying” or re-use of established design concepts is and old concept (For example: The concept of a differential dates back hundreds of years ). We don’t start with oval wheels every year to see if they might work better for a reason. We accept the fact that circular wheels are the way to go.
• I haven’t seen any major design concept in an FRC robot that did not come from somewhere else. It is very unlikely that you will see an identical copy of an FRC mechanism on a commercial product, since most are tailored to FRC. However, you will see the concepts (gearing, linear motion, etc) and implementations (2 stage gear reductions using spur gears, power transmission using belts, etc).
• All the mass produced COTS parts we buy come from established industries and are used for FRC the same as they are in industry (there are probably a few exceptions, let’s not be nitpicky).
• In industry we do not expect recent college grads to design spaceships from scratch on day one. We assign senior engineers to teach new hires and they show them “how to do X and why we do it that way”. Why should FRC be different? My real life example to any college seniors – How do you mount a fiber optic gyroscope such that it can withstand extreme thermal and pyrotechnic shock events without moving over a 20 year lifespan? I have never found that answer in a book. The answer is proprietary and cost thousands in the design/analysis/test/iterate cycle
• Learning by example works (it is the motto of my alma mater – Cal Poly SLO). That is why we have so many labs in science and engineering classes – to see what we read in textbooks in action. A well explained “super design” that is simply replicated by students can teach them a ton. I believe the students learn even more if they legitimately try to come up with their own solution and are then presented with a very elegant solution and the elegant pieces are explained to them in detail. Then they can really appreciate the creativity that went into the design.
• Students of all ages have a tolerance for failure. There is a point where everyone says “I am sick of failing at this and going to do something else”.

New to FRC

When I started FRC my professional background was in ultra high precision navigation systems like this . That season of FRC was a disaster because I had no idea what to expect or what worked well in FRC. I joined only a few weeks before the season and though resources like CD were plentiful I did not find them until near the end of the build season. We rebuilt the robot at the competition, barely passed inspection and were able to drive in a straight line and occasionally turn – that’s it. It was quite a disappointment and a number of kids did not return. Having a demonstrated working bot doing the current year’s game would have helped enormously to set expectations for the overall design.

Great topic and great feedback from all!

-matto-

[Kevin Ray]

Originally Posted by billylo

Nothing is perfect. The key question I ask myself is: does R3iD/Buildbitzs help inspire students to like STEM from a big picture perspective?

My thought process is as follows:

1. For new teams, the benefit is clear. They can enjoy the fun of being in the competition sooner and contribute to their alliance partners more and learn more in the process.

2. For teams with a few years of experience, their job will be harder than last year because competition level will be raised and they will need to think more to "stand out from the crowd" and come up with a more capable/effective design. But I have no doubts that these teams will adapt and find a new way to do just that. Case in point: the games are getting harder every year, but teams manage to overcome new challenges.

3. For veterans teams, I see this is as a good thing. Competitions will be more fun with stronger participation level overall. Their job will be harder too as they will no longer be able to dominate a match easily. More strategic thinking, need to be more versatile and better scouting, driving and in game adjustments. All fun things for veteran teams to enjoy.

billylo, Well stated!!!
I had intended to start this exact thread the day after kickoff and was adamantly opposed to Ri3D. However, after having read this entire thread I'm only mildly opposed to it. Some reasons:
You cannot "unsee" something--especially a design that piques your interest and especially one that you know that you can replicate. Yes, not all of the designs can be replicated by all teams, but one of the purposes of the Ri3D teams is to show you what you can do with their products and they tell you pretty much how to do it. This does stifle the creative process and anyone who says it doesn't, I think is kidding themselves. There is a plethora of threads on CD attesting to gains made by students going from the design process through final construction. A major part of that is prototyping, and the consequent iterations which evolve the final product. Short-cutting that by showing a great solution (or five) deprives teams of that learning opportunity. Yes, "they don't have to look if they don't want to see it". There will invariably be at least one or two team members who might look even with the admonition not to. Once they see it, do they remain silent as ideas are being proffered during strategy sessions? Remember, we're not talking about "borrowing" an idea from 1114, 359, 16, 2056 et.al. on drive systems or shooters or lifting mechanisms from previous years--we're talking about complete robot solutions to THIS year's problem. And finally, to those who say that you can't prototype your potential designs in 6 weeks--hogwash! Hundreds of Youtubes prove otherwise.

Having said all that, I do think we should have Ri3D! Here's why, it does enable rookies who would/could not field a working robot (more than a chassis) to be competitive and have a great first year experience. I remember being on a bus coming from Dean Kamen's home during the pre-kickoff party in 2000. A woman from the Midwest was sitting with me and said that she was the only mentor on their rookie team and she was a home economics teacher. I wished then that there was something available for rookie teams like them which would help level the playing field--now there is.
I agree with billylo in that competition will increase almost exponentially now. Most teams should be able to field at least a semi-competitive robot and separating the elite from the good and the good from the rookies will just be harder--as it should be. You will now HAVE to build a better mouse trap if you want to be a winner.

I think the compromise would be to hold off on unveiling the Ri3D for one week. That gives teams a legitimate amount of time to discuss strategies/designs without being influenced by obviously elite level teams. It still affords rookies (and anyone else) plenty of time to proceed with whatever level of assistance they wish to gain from viewing the builds.

[dbonar]

I'm adding my opinion to the discussion even though I haven't read all of the thread yet. Apologies if I am repeating someone else's comment but this is the only free time I have.

I'm conflicted about the Ri3D videos. However its really just part of the overall conflict in FIRST especially as a smaller team. As a science teacher with an engineering background I want my students to do their background research and start with some idea of the state of the art. Unique and innovative designs are great but with scarce resources in both money and time we don't want to reinvent the wheel or go down too many dead ends. This research should include seeing how others have solved similar problems up to and including other solutions to the current problem.

There is a risk of just copying but its the same risk as just letting a mentor design the robot.

[dbonar]

One thing that I feel is important is expanding the Ri3D idea. One robot in 3 days leads some students to see a solution and copy it. 4, 5, or 8 robots shows that there are different possible solutions and leads to discussions about pros and cons of each design.

[cseabury]

I fully agree. Watching a team of seasoned professionals with unlimited resources sets completely unrealistic expectations for the average 15 year old student at an unfunded public high school club. Let them compete at their own level and enjoy the experience.

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by cseabury

I fully agree. Watching a team of seasoned professionals with unlimited resources sets completely unrealistic expectations for the average 15 year old student at an unfunded public high school club. Let them compete at their own level and enjoy the experience.

Most of the 3 day robots are made with cots parts and limited resources. A lot of these robots appear to well under the costs limits of a robot. A couple used the kit chassis. All of them used a chassis that would be analogues to the kit chassis. A few appear to be a couple hundred bucks more expensive but could easily scaled back to be cheaper.

if 15 year old me had finished a semester of wood shop, i think me and my high school friends could have built most of these robots, maybe cut a few corners but it would not be unrealistic. Probably would botch the boom done programming but if you raised the age to 18; Yeah I bet we could have done it. They would not look as nice, all the socket cap screw heads would have been stripped in the process, and probably we would have taken out a ceiling light in the room. Totally realistic.

[GBK]

I can see the good and the bad in these projects. The real issue is not that they are there, but how each team uses the information in them. If they are used a short cut that is bad. If they are used to help rookie teams and actually gives even one rookie team (or veteran team for that matter) and idea or helps them through an issue that is great. However if the intent is to help rookie teams and teams with limited resources, they would be more helpful to those teams if they were build with a KIT Chassis.
Bottom line if they help inspire they are a success. But if even one team shows up to a competition with a copy of one of these, then they are a failure.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by GBK

Bottom line if they help inspire they are a success. But if even one team shows up to a competition with a copy of one of these, then they are a failure.

So it'd be better if teams showed up with just a drivetrain and barely functioning end effectors than build a functioning robot(which, again, they physically built themselves) that they programmed themselves?

The point of these 72 hour builds is to raise the floor of competition, which is exactly what they are doing.