The Triplet Challenge

[Alexander McGee]

The fact of the matter is that people don’t want to see collaborated teams join together and win regionals together. When this happens, it makes people think that teams collaborate simply to win regionals. Whatever the real reason is, however good a team’s intentions may be, it is human nature to think this way.

If you are going to collaborate, prepare for an onslaught of criticism if you ally with the other teams at an event. There are too many people in this program who are against the concept in the first place (For whatever their reasons) to make it universally acceptable.

I personally don’t like the idea of collaboration. I feel there is importance in the rookie year for a team, to get a hang of how things work and to develop their own identity. Mentoring a rookie team or another team is fantastic, but I would disagree with holding the team’s hand throughout the season and building identical robots.

I believe that overcoming failure is just as important as success when you are actively developing student’s character and inspiring them into engineering. This concept pertains to building a team’s identity too.

People talk about inspiration here a lot. I ask, what kind of inspiration is most effective? I would argue that having teams build their own bot’ and having the students do the work is the best way, as would a lot of other people on these threads. However, stray from this ideal and you may be accused of covering up alternative intentions under the veil of “inspiration”.

The sad fact of the matter is that this actually does happen. The worst part it, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as people seem to think. Collaborated teams seem to get the finger pointed at them often for this.

So, morale of the story, if you are going to collaborate with another team, show exactly what your intentions are; do it clearly and publicly. Perhaps this will lessen the onslaught when you start succeeding.

[Joel J]

There is something "cheap" about these collaborations. Especially when people try to talk about the ethical reasons they collaborated. It sounds like spin.

But the collaborations I've seen thus far haven't really bothered me. So I guess the "cheapness" factor is just a glum outlook on what could happen in the future.