Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Ekcrbe

The day a team decides not to fight the closing of their shop because "well, we can get everything we need from COTS components anyway," I'll eat my robot.

Assuming you took from my statement that I meant that the team would get that decision. A school may decide that they simply had no reason to have a shop, and won't need to support it any further, just because you can go around it with COTS and still get on the field.

When there are superstar teams that leave everyone else in the dust year after year: it just furthers that point.

If your goal is just to teach the non-fabrication skills and you don't care if you are massively competitive someone can join and say 'that's good enough'. Worse if you have a shop and aren't always a superstar team anyway the school may decide the fabrication work isn't worth the cost. Maybe arguing the'll just send it all out for fabrication. The more your school as a whole is detached from actively supporting FIRST the worse the risk. A few teams have had to leave schools for a variety of reasons. It is not easy to detach from, at the minimum, a convenient roof over a team's head. One of the things you loose is a place for the shop.

It is, after all, very similar to the argument schools use to close shop programs: it's the very expensive program serving a minority of the students and it's not getting us anything. If the quality of ROTS continues to rise beyond a certain point the quality of 6 weeks of school student conducted fabrication will not compete.

High school shops were extremely common place for a very long time in the United States. Over time the arguments that protected them slowly eroded because there wasn't a way to protect something like this when: most people involved in the decision decided that there weren't great jobs locally that could compete with the items filling the shelves of Walmart in a global economy. I also frequently heard colleges did not require them to teach these fabrication skills. US FIRST (which became FIRST) provided a counter argument (intentionally or otherwise). It specifically encouraged some schools to revive programs they were abandoning with these shops because it supported the competition, which was like a sport. It turned the shops into cost equivalent of sporting fields. Once you don't need to develop your skills to play a sport why wouldn't you reduce the number of schools maintaining these fields? Why not use the one at the park or someone's grassy lot?

If you asked the students in a school loosing the shops if they were happy about it - I bet they were not. However it takes a community to keep a commitment of resources like that and the more opportunities you give the detractors to the cost the more likely the resource is at risk.

The COTS/ROTS argument is a strong argument. It allows more competition in FIRST. It allows FIRST to go to places that *might* be willing to eventually have shops. It is an inclusive argument but not carefully managed it seeks ever cheaper and more complex goods. The cheaper the goods the more likely they are made elsewhere removing the need for the skills locally. The less fabrication skills you need locally to support FIRST the less fabrication skills you need to teach and if the quality of the COTS/ROTS reaches a point you can't compete. We in America have lived this cycle. It in part created US FIRST. It was a big selling point way back at the start. I don't see any control actively in place, and the $400 control is often manipulated, that will prevent this outcome and personally I feel that it is therefore inevitable. I mean we teach students to work like this in FLL/FTC with each passing year: why would those students not wish to continue to buy systems with parts fabricated for them eliminating their effort during the 6 week season? As long as we assume it's actually a 6 week season. The competitive aspect is at best a temporary control.

I seriously doubt 20+ years ago if I had walked into the room and you told me the goal was to sell lots of parts and play a game I would have hung around for this long. I know people, by the way, that are no longer around for this reason as mentors. Why fight a situation that looks like you want to exclude people from the game on the surface? I deeply applaud all of you that continue to teach the fabrication skills but if the manufacturing power of America couldn't avoid this outcome it is highly unlikely FIRST can either. By 1996 US FIRST had already switched to FIRST. Sooner or later design will be more important than fabrication because on the scale of America we still hold leads for intellectual property. You'll just be buying the parts for that work from some place else doing some short run prototypes and best hope the logistics work out from whatever global source you selected. Based on the rate of transformation currently it will be before I die. It will be great to teach engineering in a global age but with each generation that doesn't get fabrication skills it will ignore what every old manufacturer in America I know tells me - it's a cycle - the guy over there looks great for now but just you wait till they don't get the work to you in time or there is a problem. It only needs a few generation gap in available fabrication skill knowledge for a really unpleasant issue to develop in which the guy 'over there' can dictate what you can actually accomplish. If you doubt the reality of that argument - stop buying 3D printers that promise to let you make plastic parts in your home. I mean you could just fulfill your interests by buying that from somewhere else. I figure that won't happen so some element of what I am saying here hits the mark.