Adviser Role

[Nemo]

Originally Posted by CENTURION

If a trained engineer makes all the decisions, yeah you'll have a better robot, but the kids lose out on the learning inherent in that process.

I think the focus on who gets the ultimate decision authority obscure a bigger picture. A successful FRC team will typically have some experienced adults supporting the students with good advice. They will tend to impose some structure onto the build season to avoid wasting time and keep things progressing toward a finished, working robot.

Example adult decision: mentor leader decides it's time to end wide open prototyping and pick a robot concept and throw all resources at that one robot design. That's a decision that might be imposed by an adult leader, possibly over the protests of students who still want to prototype the next idea and the next one after that. But it might be the right call for the team. I'd argue that a team is generally going to be more successful and satisfied with their experience if a mentor assumes some decision making authority to keep the team on track during the build season.

With significant, fundamental robot design decisions, we try to discuss and reach consensus. We'll discuss until the pertinent evidence and logic have been put out there for everybody to consider. This discussion will tend to eliminate ideas that are overly complicated, fundamentally flawed, poorly suited to the game objectives, and so on. The tricky part is deciding between alternatives that each sound pretty good on balance. When I'm facilitating those discussions, I want us all to figure out which set of arguments and trade-offs is most compelling and then coalesce around that choice. When the arguments are all out there, typically a critical mass has tended to go one way or the other and I convince the whole team that we should just go that direction and lock in the decision. If two alternatives seem equally viable and the students are mostly in one camp after the discussion, we'll go that direction.

For smaller scale decisions that happen within a particular system of the robot, a smaller group of people will communicate and make the call. I might be involved in the discussion, and I might offer my opinion. A mentor will probably be in the conversation - this helps us avoid pitfalls that a student doesn't recognize at the outset. (Sometimes the mentors recommend something that doesn't ultimately end well... such is life)

Decision making is a significant challenge in FRC. It's a balance between keeping the build project on schedule, giving students the best experience possible including giving them all of the ownership they can handle, and utilizing mentors in the most effective way.

Anyway, I think it's a false choice to say that you're either going to let an adult call the shots or be successful on the field. What you really want is to get your students and mentors prepared to have a rich evidence based discussion of trade-offs when decisions come up. Prepare your people with the knowledge and skills to present objective arguments, identify and evaluate trade-offs, listen to other points of view, and change their minds when better arguments come to light. A group of people like that can reach consensus around the best idea, and a minority that prefers the other choice will still recognize the merits of the decision and jump on board to help implement it.