Looking Back: 3 Day Robots

[Katie_UPS]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

This is just ridiculous, to call FRC a "kid's" game is extremely disrespectful. We do this for the students but the reason so many of the great mentors we have in FRC do it is because it's not a "kids" game. It's an extremely hard engineering challenge that we give to students. The challenge keeps a whole lot of very bright people coming back year after year to work right along side students to find a good solution and very rarely do any of them find the "correct" solution. If it were easy a whole lot of people wouldn't come back every year.

It is a competition aimed at high school students. The challenges are hard, but they should not be mind boggling for a seasoned engineer with experience in the sport. There is no "correct" solution for basketball... but there is a difference between the pros and the high school leagues.

Additionally, the word kids is in quotation marks for a reason. I don't honestly mean its a game for children.

[DampRobot]

Originally Posted by Katie_UPS

It is a competition aimed at high school students. The challenges are hard, but they should not be mind boggling for a seasoned engineer with experience in the sport. There is no "correct" solution for basketball... but there is a difference between the pros and the high school leagues.

How is this different from how some teams function normally? Almost all the perineal powerhouses (as well as some teams that don't always do so well) are driven by dedicated, seasoned engineers with experience in the sport. They do so well because the challenges are easier for professional engineers who have been in FRC for years than for inexperienced high school kids who graduate every four years.

Personally, I'd rather have those professional engineers share their experience with everyone than keep it to their own teams. But pick your poison, I guess.

[Katie_UPS]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

How is this different from how some teams function normally? Almost all the perineal powerhouses (as well as some teams that don't always do so well) are driven by dedicated, seasoned engineers with experience in the sport. They do so well because the challenges are easier for professional engineers who have been in FRC for years than for inexperienced high school kids who graduate every four years.

Personally, I'd rather have those professional engineers share their experience with everyone than keep it to their own teams. But pick your poison, I guess.

Last post and I'm out.

I'm maintaining my analogy:

An NBA star coaching a basketball team is wonderful and fantastic. I love that there are awesome mentors out there helping students and working with teams.

Mentors playing robots with students is great, fantastic, and I love it. I like seeing mentors being awesome with students. I've worked with teams that have seen the whole spectrum of mentor involvement and have no qualms.

I think robots in three days is weird because it cuts out the students and becomes, like I've said, watching an professional athlete play in high school sports.

Mentors playing robots in a high school competition (without students) is weird to me, and I find it off-putting. I'm not trying to imply anything further than the situation of the Ri3D.

[Nemo]

At a minimum, it was really interesting to see what the teams could come up with in three days. I'd probably agree that it feels a little odd for the "pros" to take over the game for a few days without any students. Still, it's only three days of work, so even really brilliant people aren't going to come up with a world champion caliber robot that fast. It's more of a baseline that other teams can start from.

Our team certainly benefited from those designs, using a bunch of ideas from the Ri3D and Build Blitz teams. I don't feel too bad about that, because creating a completely original idea is tough in a competition where so many solutions to similar problems have already been created in the past. Our team had a lot of fun and learned a lot from testing and refining the ideas we used. I think engineering is more tweaking and iterating and refining than outright invention. We made a roller collector, a catapult, and a winch with a ratchet wrench + pneumatic release. All of those were different than the originals in some pretty significant ways, and there was plenty of sweat and TLC put into those modified designs.

I wonder what we would have built without Ri3D? I suspect that we would have looked more closely at a Simbot SS design. We would have been researching previous designs in any case.

I'm particularly glad that roller collectors came out in the 3 day robots. That was a really doable mechanism that any team can pull off, and the more robots that can collect a ball, the better. The 3 day teams didn't invent the first ever roller collectors for FRC, but they showed everybody that they are effective for this game.