Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

* Pre-fabricated items add an interesting layer to all of this. On one side, they give the less-experienced teams a chance to at least play on the same field as those teams flush with strong mentors, great facilities and cash. On the other, they potentially cut into the kids' learning experience.

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* At the same time, it's not right if it is possible to put a competitive robot forward with little or no engineering knowledge. It seems fundamental to FRC that students must be forced to develop engineering skills and knowledge in order to compete. Students who have more such ability should be able to produce products superior than what students lacking such knowledge could produce.

These are the two points that I think are the most pertinent, and I think my differing opinion comes from my differing understanding of the second.

Can you put a minimally competitive FIRST Stronghold robot on the field this March with very little previous engineering knowledge? Yes. I don't think that is bad. I think it is a requirement that a rookie team not feel completely incompetent and disheartened after its first season, so there should be a support structure to allow any team to put something on the field. Can that team instead field a moderately competitive robot without adding anything to their repertoire of engineering knowledge? I don't think so. It seems to me that when you are a team that knows next to nothing, having these "plug and play" options can give you the ability to start moving up competitively, which makes the competition more appealing (that's the inspiration), which in turn fuels students' drive to learn more and pushes them further. And this model says nothing of the fact, which others have mentioned here, that it's a lot easier to recruit members, mentors, and sponsors when your robot works and looks impressive, which drives yet more improvement.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I challenge the notion that COTS parts are erasing the advantage of having experience and knowledge on your team. They simply augment your capabilities and allow your students to focus on building more non-COTS systems. As long as you can't literally buy a whole robot in a box, that will remain true.

I doubt that there are many teams who have the capabilities to build the same robot they actually did, but without the COTS components they used. The purpose of buying COTS is to save time and effort, so we would expect that taking away the COTS components would require teams to cut back on other mechanisms to have the time and manpower required to build those components from scratch instead. Perhaps students are plugging in a COTS gearbox to give themselves the time to properly design, build, and test an arm. They lose out on learning about designing a gearbox, but instead get to learn about designing an arm, and their robot is more competitive (which makes them more inspired) to boot. Is learning about one mechanism more valuable than the other? I say no, which is why I say COTS components don't take the experience away from anyone.