Team Update 14 (2016)

[meg]

Originally Posted by mathking

I agree with this. Some of the most important tasks my team and my classes undertake are the ones for clients. Learning to make something that the client or customer wants is important. And yes, sometimes a really novel approach is awesome. But if you submit a bid, get a contract and produce a final product that technically satisfies the the terms in the bid but is not what the client really needs or wants you are not going to keep getting clients.

Breaking the game, to my reasoning, isn't finding a loophole in the rules about spare parts. It is great to think about the rules of the game and come up with an off the wall strategy that may never have been considered by the GDC. Such as figuring out you can redirect soccer balls right back into a goal with the right bot in a fixed position. And when that is a strategy goal you should always prepare for the possibility that someone clarifies or changes the rule and takes that strategy off the table.

All that said, I see what teams likely want this year. If you can bag two complete robots, you can effectively absorb twice as much damage. It makes practice field work less risky, since you aren't worried about breaking the competition robot. And I do think that teams that bagged two robots shouldn't be penalized and should be allowed to use one as spare parts for the other. Teams that bagged just spare parts of every component can do the same thing.

I think it depends on what you want to teach the students. What if the engineers at Google had decided that because cars are vehicles driven by people, they couldn't start to automate that process.

What if the Wright brothers had listened to the whole world telling them that it was impossible to fly? Where would this world be if all the engineers and inventors just accepted what is and what has been assumed? Cars? Space exploration? Computers?