F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)

[Poseidon5817]

It seems like there is a bit of a shift here from the beginning of the thread to this point. It started off being:

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

...F4 Connect will allow anyone to ask questions, and get them answered by students that are willing to help...

Emphasis mine.

But now it has changed to:

Originally Posted by asid61

...Posting on Chief, contacting Senior Mentors, contacting regular mentors who know what they're doing are on our list of places to direct students, either in companion to or as a replacement to talking to a student...

So, again, it seems like the purpose of Connect has changed a little bit. The second alternative is obviously preferable to the first, but still, it seems like a better idea to direct students with questions to CD rather than Connect, even if only to expose them to a place where they can continuously learn from watching and reading other conversations rather than being limited to knowing the answer to that one question they needed an answer to in the first place.

Relying on inexperienced students only to answer potentially difficult questions could also leave a struggling team worse off than they already were, as well as potentially denying them access to a wealth of other interesting, unrelated knowledge in the future. Who can say they haven't learned something new from keeping up on the newest threads here? I'm reminded of the old saying, "give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for life." If you show a student a place where they can find answers to almost any FRC-related question, they will be able to get quicker answers in the future rather than waiting hours/days on a response from a student every time their code crashes or a Talon isn't getting power, as well as getting the knowledge of people who actually work in the engineering field. And this isn't only related to CD. It is an obvious fact that the more people you have, the better it will be.

Just my $0.02.