Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative

[jweston]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

At one of our district events, FRC judges came in and asked our team, a few dozen times, in a few different ways, who built the robot. Before entering our pit, I happened to overhear that they were trying to figure out "who the mentor built robots are". The questions they asked my team were "gotcha" questions, all phrasing essentially the same question in different ways until the kids referred to a sponsor or mentor as having helped with some portion of the robot, at which point the judges would harp on that point. I believe these were the culture judges, not the technical judges, and they simply would not ask about anything other than different ways to phrase the question "did your mentors build and program the robot". We were not asked about our STEM outreach, our business plan, our team spirit, and ultimately I can't help but fear we were disqualified from those awards at that district because our kids' answers to the "mentor built" questions didn't pass the judges' standards.

Walking the line between "mentor built" and "mentor enabled" can be a fine one, especially for teams that are deficient in certain student skillsets. "Mentor built" often means different things to different people.

It can be a tough call when you have, for instance, advanced students on your mechanical and electrical team but only basic skilled students on your programming team. Do you tell the mechanical and electrical teams they can't build certain things because the programmers won't be able to support it? If you do allow mechanical and electrical to build to their potential, how much and what kind of support as a mentor do you provide to the overwhelmed programmers? How do you balance success to encourage pursuit of STEM with student participation? It's not easy. The answers will be a little different for each team in any given year.

Getting back to judges, another worry I have is once in a while a judge will mistake one of our students as a mentor. This usually happens to taller, mature, highly knowledgable seniors. Sometimes I get the feeling that we weren't believed when we correct this misperception.

Originally Posted by jtrv

Oh man. This is real.

When I was a student, as Chris knows, I spent a lot of time in the pits. However, I was a programmer who did only programming (and driving in 2015). I knew nothing about the details of how it worked mechanically - only a basic overview, e.g. this did this and that did that. If something broke, I was not the one who knew how to fix it or why it broke, unless it was quite obvious. I was constantly nervous that I would get asked a question about the mechanical details of the robot and that I wouldn't be able to answer it well enough, and thus hurting my team's chances at any awards. Thankfully, I was often busy during judge visits with code, but this worry was a very real thing for my first couple of years on the team, and I am absolutely sure that I was/am not alone in that.

This is another thing that concerns me. It's impossible to have all students thoroughly cross-trained to the extent that any one of them could equally answer all questions.

I think the best a student can do when a judge approaches you with questions that you don't know the answer is to be honest. Tell them what your role is with the team, offer to find another student who can answer the judge's questions, and ask them if they have any questions that pertain to your role.