Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?

[jgerstein]

Originally Posted by Fusion_Clint

Teams should push their limits, a regional of AM14U3's driving around playing defense is not one I want to watch.

Some of you are coming across very elitist. Will a team/student learn more from simply assembling kit bot or from trying something completely out of their comfort zone? Yes they should try to do it in the offseason, but if they only do FRC during build season, they should try something new.

Fail early and fail often, just learn from each one. It isn't a robot right?

Before I start - every team needs to do what works for them, which may or may not be what works for my team. My opinions are my own, I don't speak on behalf of my team here.

You seem to be setting up a pretty harsh binary set of options here - either building a box on wheels or going way outside a team's comfort zone. My experience has been that my students seem to get the most learning and inspiration from doing something just a little bit outside of their comfort zone, but still within their reach if they push for it.

Up until about 2013, 1257 was a shoot for the stars sort of team. Every year, the goal was to do everything. Every year, that goal led to chaos. Students bit off way more than they could chew, and that turned into frustration, which turned into anger, which turned into burnout. By the end of build season, nobody wanted to be around anybody else on the team. Nothing much happened in the offseason, because nobody wanted to be there. We were a terrible team - not just in terms of competitive performance, but even in terms of being a group of people who worked together.

In 2014, we started to listen to some of the mentors you're referring to as sounding elitist. We realized that we weren't ready to build an Einstein bot - we needed to focus on being able to build a robot that worked at all. We simplified, and we didn't try to do everything. We weren't a captain, or even a first pick, but we got picked. Given our team's recent history at the time, that was a big deal to us. The students had a much better experience on the team when they weren't overwhelmed by trying to reach too far out of their comfort zone, and they learned a lot more when the robot was simple enough that more of the team could understand what was going on and work on it.

Our goal since then has not been to build outside our reach, but to expand our reach a bit each year. If the KOP chassis starts to become trivial, we can modify it. If modified KOP chassis becomes trivial, we can try designing a custom chassis, starting with one in the off-season. If we know that we can absolutely, without a doubt, get one task done well, we can try for two.

Also, please keep in mind that for some teams, a basic box-bot truly is a challenge. I see multiple teams every year that struggle simply to have a legal robot that they can drive around the field.