what happens when you give a nonFIRSTER a robot?

[lukevanoort]

Okay, I've meant to post this for a while.

At my team's school (I've moved but still participate) there is this thing called Ag day. The Agricultural Department has a fairish thing where the display tractors, tables, chickens, pigs, etc., and all the extra-curricular clubs and teams recruit, and raise money. Now, due to the fact that FIRST is so pricey we don't really focus on raising money, we recruit. So, we decided to have a $1.00 USD price for 1 min of robot driving time, and if you got the highest score of the day you won a $15.00 USD gift cert to Best Buy. We decided to use our easiest to drive robot, OCCAM 2, from '02. At the time OCCAM 2 was just a drill powered RWD box, the goal gripper and ball shooter (CIM driven wheel on a ramp) were disabled for safety reasons. We made a soccer inspired field that was basicly a few 2x4s or 2x6s making low wall about ~10'x8'. One side had a little pocket for scoring old playground balls left over from an earlier year. Well, our first driver utterly failed at scoring since all he did was wheelies, cracking the wood our front casters were mounted on. Then we had a few normal people that were pretty bad drivers, but since most of them had never even heard of tank drive, that's expected. Then we had this one girl, who I think was a school cheerleader, or somebody told me she was. Well I don't think she quite grasped that the joysticks weren't on/off switches and she slammed the robot around in wheelie-turns and into the little wall we had made, then, somehow, she drove over the wall, then back. Somewhere in there she shredded a drill tranny, so all it did was turn, but this girl I don't think was FIRST material, since she didn't realize there was a problem, and kept jerking the one joystick that had an effect. Well, this was getting out of hand and a bit dangerous, so one of our team members (not me, I'm not brave enough) jumped on the robot (literally!) to hit the master breaker, incredibly she kept jerking the robot as he held on for dear life. He did manage to hit the breaker and disable the robot, so then she lauged, got up, and left. WHAT!!?? So now all OCCAM 2 is is a paper wieght, and she thought this was funny? Have any of the rest of you had FIRSTer/nonFIRSTer problems like this? How do you deal with them? This was last year, by the way, so cluebats are not a solution. I ask because we're trying to get better PR within the school, and this clearly didn't work, so we'd like to avoid any other minefields.