Mentors Not Reading Rules

[Alan Anderson]

As a mentor helping with the team's robot design and fabrication (and as a sometime Robot Inspector), I make sure I know all the Robot rules. The electrical rules are especially vital for my role as a Control System Advisor. I admit that the Game and Tournament rules are less important to me personally, as I'm not going to be playing the game myself.

[RunawayEngineer]

Dealing with mentors is tricky - it's a volunteer gig, so you don't have the freedom to demand much that they don't want to do. Respectfully handling disagreements is paramount.
I find the phrase "Show me in the manual where _________ " helpful when I am confident that the rules support my position. At the very least, it will reveal if someone is simply being bullheaded (they won't look in the rules, but will continue arguing). It changes the conversation from arguing on what you remember the rules to be to the actual wording of the rules. This puts you on the track to an answer, rather than on track to the better arguer.

[IronicDeadBird]

Also I need to mention that while I don't memorize the rules perfectly and don't read them or bother to read them well enough to memorize, what I do memorize is the structuring. When I need to know a rule I look it up and I am able to do so quickly. Generally speaking between that, keeping up with qna and, keeping up with delphi, and reading everytime I think I find a loop hole I eventually get to the point where I am famliar.

[Taylor]

This entire thread bothers me.
If you don't know the rules, you shouldn't be designing a robot. End of story.
We hold the students to this expectation; adults should be held to the same standard.
Ignorance is not an excuse, and misinformation is worse than no information.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by Taylor

This entire thread bothers me.
If you don't know the rules, you shouldn't be designing a robot. End of story.
We hold the students to this expectation; adults should be held to the same standard.
Ignorance is not an excuse, and misinformation is worse than no information.

Which is completely valid but some mentors do not have the capability to sit down and read the manual in one go due to time constraints. Some students are incapable of reading the game manual effectively. It is one thing to read but understanding is diferent. The information in the manual is useless unless utilized and you can't use what you don't understand. For those mentors in this position my advice would be the same students do your best as long as that happens I won't give flak

[Navid Shafa]

How I envision your mentors...

[TedG]

Originally Posted by Taylor

This entire thread bothers me.
If you don't know the rules, you shouldn't be designing a robot. End of story.
We hold the students to this expectation; adults should be held to the same standard.
Ignorance is not an excuse, and misinformation is worse than no information.

And yet here it is.
We all know that all mentors and all students won't/can't read all the rules.
Even if you think they should.

However, don't be arguing with those mentors or students who HAVE read the rules unless you can point to a rule that allows what you're arguing about.

Sometimes EGOs get in the way.
It's good to have a great idea, as long as you can back it up (with a rule or a proper engineering practice.. etc).

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

And tournament. At very least the Qualification Seeding section. It never ceases to surprise me the number of folks who don't understand what you have to do to seed high.

I can't stress this enough. The Tournament is always the first section I read. If your goal is to win an event, you need to understand what it takes to win the event. By reading the Tournament section you learn by what criteria teams are ranked and how matches are win. Once you understand this information, you can read the rest of the rules and start brainstorming strategies to maximize these criteria. FRC changes their ranking criteria regularly enough that it's essential to make yourself aware at the very beginning of every season.

[JesseK]

Unless reading the rules as a group is part of the original Day 0 activities, the rules can't be forced upon a mentor. Even then, many mentors simply tune out the strategy discussion and start envisioning devices to play the most obvious parts of the game. In my experiences on my teams and at competition, most mentors don't care about the rules until they hit them.

It's a double-edged sword - not knowing the rules removes the perception of what is "supposed to be" or "what the GDC wants", leading to more creativity or outside-the-box thinking. Yet not knowing the rules has a major impact on a team's success when everything comes together.

Each mentor has a role on our team, and is charged with being the best at that role. Even the build lead does not need to know every Robot rule in order to be effective at his role so long as he has people guiding him along the way. He has personally accepted that some of the things he and the students come up with will have to be modified to fit within the rules, yet that's the double-edged sword/fine line he walks. The student leads are also expected to know the rules that apply to their sub team(s). I fulfill the role of rules/strategy guru for the mentors, and the student leads have their responsibilities for doing the same within their groups (or cross-groups, for some of them).

I think it's important to remember that many mentors have active lives outside of mentoring, even during the 6-week build season. Find a way to work with them in a way that doesn't make their lives harder, especially during that time. Arguing is the probably worst possible thing to do, even if the student/other mentor is technically correct. The best way our team has found to do this is better communication via written drawings or typed documentation (or posting of phone photos of pencil drawings). Most ideas and decisions are compound and constructive on our team, leading to decisions with associated rationale. If someone was out of the loop on Day 2, then there may have been a lot of progress by the time the person returns on Day 3. We simply tell the person to read, follow links to rules, part sources, etc and then re-join the conversation. We have implemented this via an online forum & Drop Box ( maybe Evernote one day).

[Christopher149]

Originally Posted by Taylor

Has this information been made available? I remember Frank's Blog mentioning that they're working through the translation from WLT to QA, but I haven't heard of final results.

They've finished the district advancement structure, but they haven't published it just yet.

[MrJohnston]

OUr mentors spend so much time volunteering with the team (and away from their families) that it just does not seem right to demand that they all read the manual and know it well.

However, a working knowledge of the rules is absolutely imperative before robot design commences. Here is how we handle it:
1) We spend most of the first day after kickoff going through the rules and making sure we all understand them.
2) We encourage everybody to study the rules and require it of certain students - such as the drive team.
3) We have one mentor and one students who are the "rules experts." Their primary position in the club is to konw the rules inside-out and to study research any questions that might arise.
4) Before we design any part of the robot, we discuss both the desired functionality and any applicable rules as a group.
5) We nearly always have one of our "rules experts" on hand to clarify anything that might come up.
6) We make sure the mentor who oversees any specific aspect of the robot has a hard copy of the written rules pertaining to that aspect.

All-in-all, this seems to create a group of mentors who can spend their time doing what they love best (helping kids to design robots) who are knowledgeable enough about the rules.

[GaryVoshol]

Long ago on my daughter's team we had a lead mentor who didn't read his email. I was so grateful for those who pasted the email blasts here on CD.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Karthik

I can't stress this enough. The Tournament is always the first section I read. If your goal is to win an event, you need to understand what it takes to win the event. By reading the Tournament section you learn by what criteria teams are ranked and how matches are win. Once you understand this information, you can read the rest of the rules and start brainstorming strategies to maximize these criteria. FRC changes their ranking criteria regularly enough that it's essential to make yourself aware at the very beginning of every season.

The longer you've been in FRC, the better this idea gets. You can read through the robot rules and start turning the wheels on some initial strategy ideas based on approaches you took in the past to a game that looks similar, only to realize how meaningless an approach to the game can be because how it wouldn't do squat for your position on the leaderboards. (2006 didn't have a little white bridge that held the same value as a win, iirc)

[seg9585]

We always have the exact opposite problem. All the mentors read the rules in depth, read all game updates and FAQs.

Only a small handful of students actually do (I polled the team in Week 2 asking how many honestly read the rules, only a few students raised their hands).

We sound like broken records when students keep coming up to us with ideas in WEEK 4 clearly in violation of rules and we just say "Can't do that, Read The Rules!!"

[orangemoore]

Everyone should read the rules. It doesn't matter who you are, a mentor, a student, or even a parent helping. If you haven't yet and you are at robotics, spend the time when you are in robotics to do so. There isn't an excuse to not have read the rules if you are at robotics consistently.