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Unread 19-02-2002, 20:58
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As another member of team 840, I'd kind of like to agree with Turbo although I have a different twist on the whole thing. I know a lot of people make a big deal about the competition, and I guess that's where some of the inspiration comes into it and all (I havn't been to one yet), but if you ask me, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, or get beat by some beautifully engineered powerhouse robot. What matters is that less than a year ago our High School had no robotics team, and coming out of these 6 weeks, at least most of us are addicted to building and already coming up with designs for our next robot. It really is amazing. That's where I think the inspiration is, and you just can't get that unless you know you can build the whole robot yourself without (and no offense intended Matt) the "magic machinists" coming in and getting you out of a bind.

However, something else to realize is that our team has a particularly unique situation. 1) We are actually pretty equipped as far as a rookie team is concerned, having found an incredibly generous mentor that bought a mill for us, etc. 2) We have an amazing group of top-notch seniors that wanted to see this happen. We more or less came inspired and we were willing to do whatever it took to make this robot work. Our key students have been putting in time from 3:00 -> 8:00 every weekday for the past 6 weeks, and probably around another 20 hours on the weekends. Heck, we put in 17 going from monday to tuesday morning. 3) None of our mentors ever having been involved in a FIRST competition before, so there wasn't an opportunity for them to say: "oh yeah, just do that like this," because as far as the particulars of what we had to work with were concerned, they knew just as little as the students.

The result? We have a nice, 104% student built robot (we had some adults help us in terms of man power when punching out about 5 lbs of the holes at the end, which counts as negative work, giving us a total student contribution over 100% ), and a bunch of inspired students. Sadly, I don't see this happening in the years to come. I don't think our current junior class has the kind of student-base to draw upon to pull it off. In addition, a couple of this years seniors will likely be coming back to help for at least a couple weeks of the competition, at which point the tendency will be to take over and show people how stuff is done. I can't imagine being there and not wanting to get my hands dirty. However, we're going to try our hardest to recruit and train so that next year another team of all students can pull it off.

As much as I'd like to say that all students is the only way to go, I don't know if it's possible. Our team this year may very well have been a fluke. Only time will tell. But just so everyone knows, it can be done, so why don't all of you engineers wait a little bit and see what the students can do before you jump in there and make stuff for 'em, you might be surprised.
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