Robot in 3 Days 2017

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by MooreteP

What did your students do in the patinated past for the answers that you reminisce about? Popular Mechanics? The Encyclopedia Brittanica?

The Ri3D program is an efficient program to introduce students to the engineering design process in an educational format (YouTube) that has become the "new normal".
They do a good job documenting their thought processes, design iteration, and manufacturing. It all occurs in that crucial week after Kickoff.
Although anecdotal, I believe their presence has improved the level of competition in FRC.

It's not the medium (Youtube, the internet) that's bothersome to people who feel uneasy about Ri3D. It's the fact that fully formed and viable solutions to the specific challenge FIRST puts before us are available in short order. In prior years of FRC, and in a majority of real-world engineering problems, you are charged with a new problem which may resemble one you and others have faced before, but is also different in non-trivial ways; that's what makes it an unsolved problem rather than a solution waiting to be purchased. Of course you would look at past solutions to similar problems and build upon them, modifying them to fit the new problem -- that's part of the process. But being able to fill in the blanks and create something new, even if it's largely an act of combining the old in new ways, is also mandatory. Ri3D is a small step in taking this element as both a skillset and a learning experience as applied to FRC from "absolutely mandatory" to "optional depending on what your goals are," and that bothers many people.

Put another way: would FRC's educational and inspirational value would be unchanged if the game stayed the same every season, but the rules required us to build a new robot every year? Or is the fact that every team gets the experience of solving a previously unsolved problem an integral part of the educational and inspirational process, connected strongly to what we hope our students gain from the program?