Mentoring Question: Teaching to Fish

[Karthik]

I'll do the usual Canadian thing and say a bit of both.

Considering the following situation. A young student comes on these forums and says "We're planning on direct driving the Fisher Price gearbox to a 5 foot arm, will this be able to lift a tetra?".

The "teaching one to fish" answer would be, "Here are the FP motor specs, and here are the appropriate equations, you should be able to answer your question from here". Now here's my problem with that answer. Say the student can't navigate their way through the equations. Even worse, say they do it incorrectly. There's a very good chance the team will now show up at a competition with a non function arms. How inspiring is that?

On the other hand, it would be very easy to answer "No, it won't lift a tetra. Add in an 8:1 reduction, and you'll be fine." From here the team will have a functional arm, but how much did the student learn?

We've had many debates on the forum and elsewhere about which approach is right. My answer lies in between. "Here are the motor specs, let's work together on these calculations... <<calculations>>, as you can see from the above results, your arm will not be able to lift a tetra".

This way the student learns something in the process, but in the end they do have the right answer. This isn't a science fair, sometimes it's okay to give away the answer, especially if they learned something on the way there.