Who built your robot?

[jburstein]

Engineers? What engineers. On our team the only things done by an adult is the welding of our frame because it has to be very precise and with the amount of aluminum tube involved a screw-up would be very expensive. All the other fabrication is done by students. The design is done by students, although individual students will go and seek ideas or other help from adults (not necessarily engineers). There usually isn't an adult present during our build sessions- senior team members have access to our build area, so we don't even need anyone to let us in.

I believe that engineers should essentially be resources whome students can ask for help. The whole process of building a robot should be a student led/run project. I don't think engineers should do more than correct errors unless their help is requested.

The difference between the students on my team and someone on a team where the engineers do the building is huge. At the competition my team are all in the pit fooling around with our robot, while the students from certain Ford Teams are hard at work on the demanding task of handing out buttons.

What i'm trying to say is that the difference between the two is the difference between having something taught to you, and learning it yourself. Someone who watched an engineer build a robot would probably not be able to apply a whole lot of that learning to the next year's robot.

What really makes me mad (and what has caused me to write a friggin book for a post) is that we lose to robots built by engineers. We choose to build our own robot because that's the way to learn, and in return we get flogged by a robot that is driven by a student who hadn't touched the thing until it was completed. Seems ridiculous to me.... oh well at least I know that i could do a better job fixing their robot than they could.