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  #76   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 09-07-2015, 12:51
Ian Curtis Ian Curtis is offline
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Re: Team 1717 retires

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Originally Posted by sanddrag View Post
And this is why FIRST as a national organization needs to integrate themselves with education rather than separate themselves from it.
I'm not so sure. I don't know if FIRST's mission and DPEA's statement about educational objectives necessarily align.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Noozhawk
"Learning objectives and outcomes simply must be prioritized over other considerations by an educational institution, and retaining the FIRST Robotics program as a capstone project cannot be justified when the Mechatronics project offers students a substantially more enriching educational experience.”
http://www.noozhawk.com/article/stud..._robotics_team

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Originally Posted by FIRST Mission
Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.
http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/vision
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Unread 09-07-2015, 13:01
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Re: Team 1717 retires

As a current resident of Santa Barbara I can offer my support to any group of students who want to start an after school program in the area.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 14:53
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Re: Team 1717 retires

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Originally Posted by mathking View Post
Through all of that, one of the things I have been most concerned about is keeping the team from dying when I step back. I don't want the program to be about me. I don't want it to be "my program." I want it to be the team that the school (or in our case the school district, since all three high schools share a team) has. I want it to be just like the football team or the band. When the teacher leading it resigns they get someone else to do the job. Thanks to the painstaking efforts of one of our school board members there is now a small stipend which the teachers split. It is not a lot of money, but the fact that there is a stipend is important because it means that when I resign there will be a position to fill.
.
.
I want to insure that the program survives when I am no longer running it. In my career I have taken over teaching and coaching for some long time, highly successful (and locally legendary) teachers and coaches. Each time they gave me the advice to lead the program the way I think it should go. And not to worry if I think changes are needed. I want to make sure that when I pass the torch team 1014 won't miss a beat.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sanddrag View Post
And this is why FIRST as a national organization needs to integrate themselves with education rather than separate themselves from it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Curtis View Post
I'm not so sure. I don't know if FIRST's mission and DPEA's statement about educational objectives necessarily align.
I'm fairly certain sanddrag's reply was to the immediately preceding post, which was not about DPEA. The point here is that making FIRST a part of the curriculum at the school board (rather than an individual teacher) level will provide better continuity. Unless there's some awful baggage, it is usually easier to operate an existing team than to spin up a new one. The teams under our school board are working towards these same goals.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 16:09
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Re: Team 1717 retires

I think this says a lot about the state of the FIRST program and not positive things.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 16:16
Lil' Lavery Lil' Lavery is offline
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Re: Team 1717 retires

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Originally Posted by techtiger1 View Post
I think this says a lot about the state of the FIRST program and not positive things.
That one team that was run in a very atypical way with slightly different goals than the program/most teams left the competition says bad things for the program as a whole? I'd like to hear your rationale for that one.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 16:17
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Re: Team 1717 retires

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Originally Posted by wilsonmw04 View Post
(the following is speculation)

It seems to me that there is a split between the team and the staff/admin of the school. I wonder if there is something going on in the background that we haven't been told about. It looks like the school wants more control/oversight/accountability in what is going on with the capstone project. This seems odd.
There doesn't seem to be a split between Amir, based on the four articles I have read on this topic, the other teachers and the Dos Pueblos administration. In my opinion the back story is Amir wants his life back. Amir then came up with a replacement project that he considered equal to or better then FRC, he convinced the principal and the letter was written.

Creating an extra curricular team may not have even occurred to Amir. Hopefully the students and mentors who are upset, according to the articles, will step up and either resurrect the 1717 team or start a rookie team. Then they will see why lead mentors get burned out. When teams stop competing the number one reason, in my experience, is the lead mentor can't go on any longer.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 16:19
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Re: Team 1717 retires

Quote:
Originally Posted by techtiger1 View Post
I think this says a lot about the state of the FIRST program and not positive things.
I'm usually one of the loud mouths bashing FIRST for the most trivial things... but I don't see how we can draw any conclusions about FIRST from this specific school's decision.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 17:16
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Re: Team 1717 retires

Quote:
Originally Posted by teachsail View Post
There doesn't seem to be a split between Amir, based on the four articles I have read on this topic, the other teachers and the Dos Pueblos administration. In my opinion the back story is Amir wants his life back. Amir then came up with a replacement project that he considered equal to or better then FRC, he convinced the principal and the letter was written.

Creating an extra curricular team may not have even occurred to Amir. Hopefully the students and mentors who are upset, according to the articles, will step up and either resurrect the 1717 team or start a rookie team. Then they will see why lead mentors get burned out. When teams stop competing the number one reason, in my experience, is the lead mentor can't go on any longer.
Pretty sure Amir didn't coach the team this year, so he already had his "life back".
There are plenty of teams across the country every year that get declawed or axed by school boards for a variety of reasons, and these decisions come with various levels of pushback. The only difference here is that this is the most high profile FRC team shuttering in a while.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 17:29
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Re: Team 1717 retires

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Originally Posted by wilsonmw04 View Post

Was there some group (teacher, Department Chair, Admin) that the team has rubbed the wrong way? Was it that the team, that was not totally in the school's control, was becoming the face of the school?
Well, even though we are 2nd semester seniors by the time robotics rolls around, we still have other teachers and other classes, who have various levels of vitriol toward the program. I mean, I don't blame them. Some of us would be sleeping through class, not attending for competitions, falling behind on homework, and they knew it was because we were working on the robot til 2 am (we might be idiots taking AP classes AND robotics at the same time but that's another issue). As far as I know though, the administration was very proud of the team. It's probably more complex than just that.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 18:25
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Re: Team 1717 retires

Disclaimer: The following opinion is purely my own and does not represent Team 1717 or the DPEA.

I am one of these years seniors and its sad for me to see this program that has inspired me so to be leaving this awesome community. I was an academic mentor this year for two of the different classes of the program(the sophomore and freshmen class). From the moment I joined the program my eyes had always been on senior year robotics competition. Being able to hear the freshmen of this year saying that they didn't really want to join the team kinda disappointed me. Being part of the "trail blazer" class obviously gave me a way different experience than the far more polished version of the program that they now have, but its still sad that the majority didn't join for the same purpose as this years robotics team did when we were freshmen. Also sad that we never got to use team 3434. Hehe . Team 1717 will definitely be missed by the surrounding community.

By the way the trail blazer class was the first class of 100 students that the program had.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 19:00
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Re: Team 1717 retires

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Originally Posted by dgilbueno View Post

By the way the trail blazer class was the first class of 100 students that the program had.
Was the creation of the Mechatronics program in response to the increase of size, and does it scale well? Because as I recall, a class of 100 is a sizeable increase from the 30 the school had when it started, and a step up from the 60 it had a few years ago (I didn't know that it had grown to 100 until I saw this). If it scales better, switching over to Mechatronics makes a lot more sense, since competitive robotics organizations don't scale that easily once you get close to 100 students, even if they did multiple programs like VEX and FRC.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 19:29
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Re: Team 1717 retires

ArtK we never had a class of 60 it went from 30 one year to 100 the year after that. So the program as it stands right now has about 400 students overall. So this year was the first 100 student senior class. About 60 did mechatronics and about 40 did robotics.The mechatronics project, which was introduced late last school year, was just another alternative project that we had available as this years seniors.

Last edited by dgilbueno : 09-07-2015 at 19:35.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 21:03
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Re: Team 1717 retires

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Originally Posted by dgilbueno View Post
ArtK we never had a class of 60 it went from 30 one year to 100 the year after that. So the program as it stands right now has about 400 students overall. So this year was the first 100 student senior class. About 60 did mechatronics and about 40 did robotics.The mechatronics project, which was introduced late last school year, was just another alternative project that we had available as this years seniors.
Did you guys start having juniors attending competitions some point? Because that could explain why I thought class size stepped up to 60. If not, my mistake about the numbers.

My original point about the size of an FRC team still stands, since there is only so much work that can be done on a robot or at an event, and still have everyone feel like they are contributing.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 21:36
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Re: Team 1717 retires

First of all, I BLAME KOKO ED FOR GETTING ME INTO THIS. *shakes fist*

Also, thank you jankBS (oh the irony of that name) and dgilbueno for your insight with the team.

I was a life long member of 384 during high school and the experience has formed who I am today. FIRST isn't just an engineering program or a competition, it's a full business simulation. Engineers, programmers, engineering minded students, and programming minded students build the robot, but a full business system builds around it. One robotics friend this past summer got married and he graduated college going into video production for TV stations.

I will be honest, my small exposure to Mechatronics sounds like a good engineering program, and that's the problem. I see no engagement or captivation beyond "engineering kids". FIRST built a program around a business, governed by mentors, that attracts kids of all interests.

During my involvement late in 384 I was asked to assist with moving part of the program to a new high school opening up in the county. I had two paths going at that point: one with a variance due to other issues and staying at 384, or going to the new high school. Working with the new principle was a major problem; any conversion surrounding transition plans with 384 would result in complaints of a lack of new 'school spirit'. Honest, open communication about success were stifled by what I perceived at 16 as being confusion. Later, I would find he was working on his own plan with other teams in the area, eschewing relationships build over the years. After significant push back and a clear sign he did not care I pulled the variance cord and stayed at 384 until I graduated. This taught me an important lesson in education: politics never should interfere with education, but do.

1717's plight reminds me of my issues dealing with education system politics. I cannot comment on what they've done raising awareness, but I feel for these students to the point I come back years after swearing myself out of FIRST to post here. What their board of education has done is short sighted. That board wants is to teach kids engineering; not how to interact in a business, work with others of various ages, or inspire all with the importance on engineering.
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Unread 09-07-2015, 21:48
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Re: Team 1717 retires

ArtK nope its always been just seniors.
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