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Unread 20-03-2005, 20:27
Matt Reiland's Avatar
Matt Reiland Matt Reiland is offline
'The' drive behind the drive
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Re: engineer bots

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay TenBrink
I can certainly understand your frustration but would hope that you would keep a positive attitude. We were also one of those new small teams once with no money and only two mentors. It was tough competing with the “big” teams, but starting off is always tough.

As far as who should be building the robot, I frequently use the analogy of teaching someone to cook.
1) If the students were told to sit outside the kitchen and just watch the cook, the end product would be great to eat, but most students wouldn’t learn much.
2) If the students were sent to the kitchen to experiment freely with no direction, they might have fun for a bit, but the results would not be very good to eat.
3) If the students were right there side by side with the cook in the kitchen learning step by step and getting their hands dirty, the product would be pretty good and the students would have learned how to cook.

Taking this analogy further: Some people learn to cook from their mothers or grandmothers in small kitchens with old equipment. Some learn “on the job” at restaurants, and some study at large institutions. All can be very effective.

So, what does all this mean? Every team’s situation is different and we all need to do the best we can with what we have to work with. Some of the most impressive students I have had the pleasure of meeting through FIRST have been from very small and very frugal teams. These students had been inspired and were inspiring to me.

On our robot I have the students do as much as they personally can and teach them to do more. For some, this means cutting, filing, drilling, and assembling. Others have learned how to use a lathe and milling machine. The same is true for the programming.

On a practical note, if you need help, please ask. Most teams would love to help out in any way they can, during the design/build period or at a competition.

Jay
I 100% agree with Jay, back in 1999 and 2000 we showed up definitely outgunned for the competition but we did our best with what we had and each year tried to do better. Now after being part of the team for 6 years I have seen many a student come and go and you have to work your team based on the level of talent, pride, and skills of the people on the team. Some years we have had students that either wanted to machine or already knew how to and they did their thing, other years none of them showed interest in the build phase but they wanted to assemble it and maintain it at the competition. Each team is different and actually each year is different. Heck this year neither the engineers nor the students made a bunch of the plates for the robot, they were laser cut by our sponsor. Keep in mind that 99.9% of the mentors and engineers don't build robots for a living or anything even close to robots, except for those guys on 217 and 469 . Our whole team is electrical engineers that are learning as much about gearboxes and mechanisms as the students.
Don't get down, use your drive that got you this far to propel your team to the next level. I have to believe that any of the rookie teams that go out and come up with a super duper mechanism that toasts a many year veteran team get some sort of extra satisfaction.

My only word of caution, don't go to the extreme of not looking for any help from mentors just to say you did it yourself, IMHO you WILL be missing one of the biggest parts of FIRST and that is to be working with people out there in the real world. It starts the ball rolling from a networking perspective when you are in college looking for a job or just being more comfortable in an interview after college. It may even tell you that engineering or science is the right path for you or even which discipline. This kind of experience is very valuable for most students and they wouldn't have this kind of access without FIRST.

The level of competition has certainly advanced this year. This is the first year where I can say I didn't see any robots at the regionals that went out 5' and fell apart. Nearly every year in the past you could write off 20% of the teams as being totally non-functional, NO-LONGER.

Congratulations FIRST and all of the students, mentors, and teachers that make it all happen
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