YMTC: Can teams start cutting metal for 2005?

[Jaine Perotti]

I apologize to everyone, because this is going to be one long post. I will try to bold the main points.

Natchez,

You are right that a win-win situation needs to exist. The philosophy of FIRST has provided for this already. Everyone gives to the FIRST community, and the community gives back... all for the purpose of leveling the playing field' and helping those who are less fortunate. Often, my team is on the giving end of this kind of gracious professionalism. However, we are also often on the receiving end when we find ourselves in need. This is the nature of FIRST.

Originally Posted by Natchez

Since you can't take drawings with you onto the "island", you must post them to the web (a rule would state all written materials intended for use by a team would need to be accessible by other teams)
...The result of this would be teams would well document old robots and provide them to the FIRST family. This is the concept that is exciting! Now, old robots would be everyone's robot instead of just the robot of the team that inherited it. This fits in perfectly with Dean's idea of when two people exchange their ideas; they leave with twice as much as they came with.

There are a number of white papers posted here on chief delphi to help newer/rookie/even veteran teams to duplicate already existing mechanisms. This helps to 'level the playing field', in your words, significantly. In my view, many people are already sharing their knowledge to those who are less experienced. In fact, sharing of knowledge is one of the most significant aspects of FIRST. I have never, ever, encountered someone within FIRST who has been unwilling to help. To me, this seems unecessary because teams are already doing this; if a rookie team needs help, there will never be a shortage of veteran teams who are willing to give help.

Originally Posted by Natchez

As we level the playing field, you'll stop hearing administrators say, "How are we going to compete with THEM?" In a nutshell, by not leveling the playing field, we are discouraging weaker and newer teams to even participate in FIRST.

When my team registered our rookie year, we started 2 weeks late, and didn't even have a start on the robot. We searched for teams who were willing to help us, and we were rewarded. Team 237 and 157 decided to mentor us. We actually visited 157's shop, and they gave us much valuable advice on how to get started. They shared their experiences with us and gave us advice about design. In a sense, they were sharing their "inheritance", as you called it, by helping us find our way. Surely, the mentorship of these teams was one of our saving graces that year.

When we were struggling to establish ourselves, I don't think our objective was to 'beat the other teams'. I don't think we were asking ourselves "How are we going to compete with them?" either. I think the main question that we were asking ourselves was this: "How do we have a sucessful first year?"

In our minds, success was not going to be measured in awards or high rankings. Sucess was going to be measured by our ability to meet the six week deadline, have a simple robot that could reliably run every match, and gain experience for future years to come.

Greatness, in terms of the competition, is something that rookie teams are NOT going to achieve thier very first year. They will gradually work their way up to that level as they progress throughout the years. Do you think that today's 'greats', such as 45, 47, 71, and 111 (although there are many more) were perfectly organized, built unbeatable robots, and had perfected designs to work off of in their first year? Of course not.

When each team starts off their rookie year, remember that the 'great' teams of today had the same humble beginnings. It is a matter of persistence, hard work, dedication, and passion over the years that will raise the rookies to the same level of competition as the veterans who came before. Just as a seedling can not grow into a tree in one day, rookies will have to pass through the stages of 'rookiedom' to grow and build on past successes, before they can walk with giants.

Originally Posted by Natchez

All with some other team's robot, not your 2005 team but some team that built it for you. Granted, you may have been part of that team. As for the definition of a 2005 team, I believe that it is the students and mentors that come together on or after January 8th to build a robot to compete in a first competition; not the group that has built robots during the fall and build one for the 2005 competition. It's subtle but important.

I disagree. Reread the above few paragraphs that I wrote, and try to tell me that it was 'some other team'...not my team, that built those robots.

Although the founding members of our team have gone, they have left us with a foundation of past success and experience from which we grow and subsist. Therefore, they are still very much a part of our team, in fact they are a part of our lifeblood...just as much as current, and future, members of my team are. If it weren't for those founding members, we would have nothing to start from every year. More than having built our robots, they have established our existence, they have found support for us, and they have made us a part of our community. They are my team, even if they are no longer with us... they are the foundation upon which we stand.

If we were to lock away everything from the past that might help us, such as robots, parts, and knowledge, does that also mean that we should also throw out our pre-2005 fund raising ideas, our pre 2005 sponsors, our pre 2005 mentors and coaches, our pre 2005 students, and our pre 2005 parent volunteers? After all, according to your argument, anything acquired before 2005 must be hidden out of sight and not touched so that we don't have an advantage over rookie or newer teams. Rookie teams don't have experienced mentors and coaches, previous year's sponsors, or experienced students... so why should veteran teams have that either?

If that argument were to actually be implemented, what do you think would happen? I think that if previous knowledge, experience, and resources were to be made taboo after 2005, then FIRST as a whole would be in serious jeopardy. Many teams would die out. I don't think my team could continue without the use of knowledge from previous years. The playing field would be leveled, thats for sure, but that level would be extinction. Innovation throughout the ages has taken ideas from the past, has improved them, and has made great change possible.

For example: what if, as a math student, you were expected to teach yourself, without help or prompting, what it meant to count, how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, what fractions are, what squaring and exponents are, realize on your own that you can solve a problem using the letter x, find the Pythagorean theorem on your own, find all of the trigonometric functions on your own, find the area of geometric shapes on your own...etc?

Without help, I don't think that you would get very far. It took humans thousands and thousands of years to find and understand all of that stuff! Without help from the past, how can a math student ever expect to learn all of that on his/her own? Luckily, because lessons of the past have been embraced and built upon, I now have the ability to learn what took people thousands of years to discover...before I even reach adulthood! I have not been ashamed to take knowledge that was acquired before my lifetime and use it to improve my own.

To sum it all up, the concept of 'giving and getting' is alive and well within FIRST. Everyone pitches in to the benefit of the whole. Sharing of knowledge has been what many, many teams have been built upon, including my own. Making a rule requiring everyone to publish their old designs would be redundant, because there are hundreds and hundreds of teams, mentors, and students who are willing to share their expertise with those who have none. It is what makes this competition unique, beautiful even; how many Red Sox fans out there are willing to help the Yankees have a better season...and vice versa? (I'm guessing not too many...)

It is important for us to be able to use the experiences and accomplishments of those before us to our benefit. There is a parable that tells a story of a house that was built upon a rock, and a house that was built upon sand. When a storm came, the house that was built upon sand was washed away. But the house that had a rock for it's foundation was able to weather the storm. We as FIRSTers need to build our houses upon stone; for a rookie team, that means persistence and hard work over the years, as well as getting mentorship and advice from others. For a veteran team, it means never forgetting the lessons that have been learned in the past, and using them for the FIRST community's benefit.

I apologize to everyone, because I think that this is far beyond a "readable" post. But I felt that I needed to adequately convey the meaning of this message.

-- Jaine