Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Monochron

Can we stop including that cost if we refer to the machinists as "members of our team" to avoid this headache? That doesn't seem like the intent of the rule, but I get the impression that this is what larger/powerhouse teams do. Please correct me if I'm wrong

I'm not sure how you came away with that impression based on the quoted rule.

It's quite clear that FIRST wants teams to develop relationships with companies and consider them team members. It literally says that. It then says that if a sponsor is a team member, you do not account for cost of labor.

[FrankJ]

If I had one, I would give an CNC of your choice for a top notch CAD mentor. With good CAD the need for high end machining is less. Without good CAD, high end machining is difficult.

With Solidworks & Autodesk donating their products, the ability to model the robot is there for teams with the will to do it. Our team isn't there yet, but we are working on it. [sarcastic irony] BTW one of my favorite things to do is to walk around and say "The Mentors obviously cadded your robot" [/sarcastic irony]

With 80/20, modular gear boxes, plywood & VEX stuff you can build a competitive robot without a mill or a lathe.

A complete practice field is a huge advantage. That is why we actively encourage teams to come use ours.

[philso]

Originally Posted by Joe G.

But our team's culture refuses to accept mediocrity as a way of doing business, and we've done a number of things to change the quality of robot our team is capable of putting out.

• We have three incredibly passionate students from a team which folded last year, who bring an incredible amount of knowledge and dedication to the team.
• We meet for a ridiculous number of hours.

This is really what the powerhouse teams others find inspiring have in common. Having extensive resources is a result of their attitude, culture and work ethic, not the other way around.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

Now, onto some of the things sheet metal does and does not do for us.

• It does not auto-win events.
  
• It does not cost an inordinate amount of money.
  
• It does not necessarily improve your robot's level of functionality.
  
• It ABSOLUTELY does not improve the quality of engineering on your robot.
  
• It does not necessarily result in you having a robot done in 4 weeks.

So, why do we do it?

• It revolutionizes what our team is capable of building.
  
• It forces sound engineering.
  
• It gives our students pride in their work, that they made the robot happen.
  
• It does make our robot look nicer.

Joe is right on about how this program exposes student to the way things are done in the real world. All of these things that Joe says that having a sheet metal supplier does and does not do for his team can be applied to the company I work for, a large multinational manufacturer of industrial electrical equipment, with the appropriate substitutions.

[Basel A]

Originally Posted by Cory

I'm not sure how you came away with that impression based on the quoted rule.

It's quite clear that FIRST wants teams to develop relationships with companies and consider them team members. It literally says that. It then says that if a sponsor is a team member, you do not account for cost of labor.

Well, no, it says if the sponsor employee is team member, which is a very real distinction. Let's take a look at R11, example 5.

EXAMPLE 5: A Team purchases steel bar stock for $10 USD and has it machined by a local machine shop that is a recognized Sponsor of the Team. If the machinists are considered members of the Team, their labor costs do not apply. The total applicable cost for the part would be $10 USD.

This clearly indicates that the machinists are not team members by default through the company's sponsorship of the team. Now, how you define who your team members are is up to you. But I for one am not sure that (in the extreme case) someone who, over the course of the entire season, spends two hours machining a few parts for the team should be considered a member of the team.

I would, however, agree that these rules are encouraging teams to build relationships with sponsors and to integrate those employees into their teams. But the way the rule is written does draw a line in the sand. Sponsor-machined parts are not by default free of labor costs.

[Oblarg]

Just going to offer a bit of perspective from a current mentor, former student. This is not some normative claim about how teams ought to be run, just a couple of observations based on my own experience.

Team 449 is a decidedly student-run team. The robots are designed and manufactured by the students - mentors provide valuable input, but they do not do the hands-on work. That approach was a conscious choice made by our head mentor, and I am exceedingly grateful for it. When I was in high school, I was already a nerd. I did not need "inspiration" in the form of "seeing people do cool things with technology." I knew that cool things could be done with technology. What I needed (and received) were hands-on lessons on how to do things. This is sorely lacking in high-school education (and even in many undergrad programs), and is exceedingly valuable. There is a huge disconnect between knowing some of the theory behind a problem and being able to actually construct a solution. FRC is far-and-away the best program I have encountered for learning how to do the latter. Robotics was probably more valuable to me than the rest of high school put together, all-told.

I am fairly sure that I would not have gained much of anything from watching a team of professional engineers construct a robot. Does that mean there is nothing to be gained from that model, or that that is not an appropriate model for any team? No, of course not. But it does mean that there is something lost when you marginalize student involvement. It'd be nice if the atmosphere here were such that people could say this without inciting massive debates, because it's really not (or shouldn't be) a contentious claim. It does not immediately follow from this that "mentor-run teams are bad" or "student-run teams are good" - a team should try to maximize the return for the students, and this is only one factor in that calculation. If you think your team's effectiveness is maximized by an approach that does not emphasize students doing work, that is fine - but there should be no offense taken when someone points out that there are costs involved in that approach.

I understand fully why some teams choose to have mentors do much of the work. On 4464, I do far more work on getting the robot finished than would be permissible for a mentor on 449. They are different teams in different situations, and their needs are not identical. This does not mean that I won't admit that there is valuable experience that the students on 449 receive thanks to their approach that the students on 4464 do not. There is nothing wrong with pointing this out, nor does it reflect badly on anyone. It's just one piece in a much larger puzzle.

Re: the team resources discussion, it is amusing how discussion of this always progress nearly identically to political discussions on socioeconomic disparity. I think it'd be nice to see a bit more understanding of the facts that there are teams with limited resources who are not in that situation simply due to incompetence or lack of motivation, and that teams with more resources are, indeed, at a competitive advantage (in the most general sense - I am not going to argue the specifics of how big this advantage is and how it scales). There is no perfect meritocracy distributing support to FRC teams. This obviously does not justify bitterness towards successful teams - but I think a lot of the vitriol we see when this subject is brought up is as much a result of frustration at the perceived condescension towards disadvantaged teams as of the disparity in resources itself. I don't think I'm the only one who has noticed this.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I am fairly sure that I would not have gained much of anything from watching a team of professional engineers construct a robot. Does that mean there is nothing to be gained from that model, or that that is not an appropriate model for any team? No, of course not. But it does mean that there is something lost when you marginalize student involvement. It'd be nice if the atmosphere here were such that people could say this without inciting massive debates, because it's really not (or shouldn't be) a contentious claim.

This is a contentious topic because it's constantly presented as a straw man where teams have "teams of engineers building their robots" and students just driving it. This is not reality. In reality the teams (like 254) who get called out under that logical fallacy are trending towards or past 50% mentor/student work breakdown, not 99% mentor, 1% student.

[robochick1319]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Re: the team resources discussion, it is amusing how discussion of this always progress nearly identically to political discussions on socioeconomic disparity. I think it'd be nice to see a bit more understanding of the facts that there are teams with limited resources who are not in that situation simply due to incompetence or lack of motivation, and that teams with more resources are, indeed, at a competitive advantage (in the most general sense - I am not going to argue the specifics of how big this advantage is and how it scales). There is no perfect meritocracy distributing support to FRC teams. This obviously does not justify bitterness towards successful teams - but I think a lot of the vitriol we see when this subject is brought up is as much a result of frustration at the perceived condescension towards disadvantaged teams as of the disparity in resources itself. I don't think I'm the only one who has noticed this.

Well said. I am FIRST alum and a FIRST mentor now. I have seen teams with huge budgets and teams with shoestring budgets. Even my team has had feast and famine years. The goal should be for teams to do the most they can with the resources they have. Socioeconomic disparity is a real thing in the real world so trying to stop it in FIRST seems counterproductive. Besides, if we start placing too many restrictions on teams we will lose the diversity and innovation that makes the program so great.

It reminds me of this campaign from Android.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Cory

This is a contentious topic because it's constantly presented as a straw man where teams have "teams of engineers building their robots" and students just driving it. This is not reality. In reality the teams (like 254) who get called out under that logical fallacy are trending towards or past 50% mentor/student work breakdown, not 99% mentor, 1% student.

If someone claims that a specific team is "a team of engineers building a robot and students driving it," then that is an obnoxious and likely incorrect claim, yes.

However, it often seems on Chief Delphi that people treat any mention of student/mentor workload issues as if this were being claimed. These threads would not become so inflammatory without problems on both sides. In reality, this is a complicated issue and there are reasonable arguments to be made either way. The manner in which people usually post about it here does not usually reflect that.

It is very easy to argue against a caricature of a point rather than the point itself. This happens on both sides of this discussion with alarming regularity.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

If someone claims that a specific team is "a team of engineers building a robot and students driving it," then that is an obnoxious and likely incorrect claim, yes.

The only reason I made that point was because the first line of your post said "I am fairly sure that I would not have gained much of anything from watching a team of professional engineers construct a robot"

Obviously you didn't intend it that way, but the only interpretation of that statement is that the team of engineers is doing 100% of the work and a student would be sitting there watching and twiddling their thumbs. That was the construct you presented, which we both clearly agree is not the issue being debated.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Cory

The only reason I made that point was because the first line of your post said "I am fairly sure that I would not have gained much of anything from watching a team of professional engineers construct a robot"

Obviously you didn't intend it that way, but the only interpretation of that statement is that the team of engineers is doing 100% of the work and a student would be sitting there watching and twiddling their thumbs. That was the construct you presented, which we both clearly agree is not the issue being debated.

He probably did intend it that way, it's a pretty clear statement he made.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Cory

The only reason I made that point was because the first line of your post said "I am fairly sure that I would not have gained much of anything from watching a team of professional engineers construct a robot"

Obviously you didn't intend it that way, but the only interpretation of that statement is that the team of engineers is doing 100% of the work and a student would be sitting there watching and twiddling their thumbs. That was the construct you presented, which we both clearly agree is not the issue being debated.

That was a position taken to an extreme as a rhetorical device, not an accusation levied at a specific team. It is often useful to examine limiting cases of certain positions, specifically, the one quoted in the very first post of the thread:

Who cares who truthfully does the work?

There are two extremes here - the students doing all the work, and the mentors doing all the work. Observing differences between them provides useful insight into what happens when you trend in either direction. In this case, it can show why one maybe should care, in some capacity, about who does the work.

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

He probably did intend it that way, it's a pretty clear statement he made.

See above.

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I am fairly sure that I would not have gained much of anything from watching a team of professional engineers construct a robot.

Originally Posted by Oblarg

If someone claims that a specific team is "a team of engineers building a robot and students driving it," then that is an obnoxious and likely incorrect claim, yes.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm having a hard time reconciling these two statements, unless your intent was to say that you were making an obnoxious and likely incorrect claim. // {I'm slow at posting, you and Cory addressed before I could hit send.}

Regardless, you make some very good points about resources. The level of a team's resources (finances, experience, shop access) goes a long way in defining a team's limits. Team's with more resources definitely have an easier time. However, if a team works intelligently and efficiently within small set of resources, I content that they are much more likely to be successful than a team who lacks a solid strategic plan and is inefficient within a large set of resources.

[AdamHeard]

I'll throw out a scenario to think about.

Take any of the top 5 teams in FIRST, remove all their resources (machines, facilities, money, sponsors, etc...) over the summer. They have to start from scratch resource wise.

I guarantee they'll still be in the running to win regionals (or districts) the next year, and likely worlds.

[MrForbes]

Could be.

What is the difference? It's not money, sponsors, machines, facilities.

Is it the students? They change every few years.

Is it the mentors?

Is it the coaches?

Is it where they live?

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Karthik

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm having a hard time reconciling these two statements, unless your intent was to say that you were making an obnoxious and likely incorrect claim. // {I'm slow at posting, you and Cory addressed before I could hit send.}

I don't see how it's contradictory to believe that "'claiming a specific team has all their work done by mentors' is obnoxious and incorrect" and also "I would not have gotten anything out of simply watching other people do work, from which I can conclude that there is value in students doing the work and so claims that 'it does not matter who does the work' are ill-founded."

If I had mentioned "like team 254" in that statement, yes, it would have been obnoxious and incorrect. I did not. I think it's worth noting that the "team of engineers" hypothetical has been used multiple times by people on both sides of this issue, often to the tune of "if a team wants to do that, then there's nothing wrong with it." That doesn't carry the implication that any teams necessarily do that.