"In the Cloud" Good or Bad?

[Jon Stratis]

The choice of doing things locally versus in the cloud is entirely dependent on local circumstances. For me, I know that the internet at my house is both fast and reliable. I know the Wi-Fi at our school buildspace is also reliable, although there are firewall blocks in place that can be annoying (how is our business team supposed to promote us on Facebook and Twitter if those services are blocked while we're meeting?). So from that perspective working on the cloud for robotics related activities makes a lot of sense. The internet is almost always there when I'm doing robotics stuff. Exceptions would be competition and air travel. When I go to competition it's a relatively simple process to pull stuff off and store it locally for those few days, merging in any changes when I get home. Air travel isn't much different.

Unexpected internet outages do occur. And if a team is relying on the internet during the season, our time limitations make those outages hurt a lot. But the benefits of the cloud when it comes to remote collaboration (having students do work at home and merge in changes outside of meetings) can be a great benefit.

Maybe the best compromise situation would be to have a single individual (in a separate location on a different internet source) in charge of downloading current versions of everything to a flash drive before each meeting as a backup. Present it to your students as an interesting challenge, to create a "1-click" solution for getting everything - basically a little program that would download all of the files for the team from whatever cloud services the team uses, so it doesn't have to be a big manual process.