The Triplet Challenge

[stefwitt]

Winning is certainly a motivating factor, but I would be the last one to promote the trend of collaboration in order to create winning teams. If indeed collaboration becomes an economic requirement, in particular the automotive industry, than it doesn’t make it any better to act as this would be the best thing in the world. The German competition may even use this to their advantage, selling more BMW’s with their very individual design.
Here is another example, how a team can win, have fun, learn and become highly motivated.
Team 1414 evolved from one single student, who seeded the idea of FIRST into the Atlanta International School and a body of very individual, multi cultural and multi lingual students.
I had the pleasure of teaching and mentoring these students (15 in 2003/4) in ACAD, electronic and mechanical design, but also grew some gray hair by teaching some tool basics, as most of the students had never used any tools in their young lives. Thanks to other parent mentors and students, I had to learn to ease off in my German attitude to have everything perfect and aligned.
All students, regardless of their technical knowledge and the feasibility of their ideas were involved in the design concept. The prototype drove well forward, but failed miserably in turning. The final robot managed to cap a goal in one event, but the final result was the last place in the Peachtree regional.
After all, team 1414 was fortunate to win the rookie award and even the rookie all-star award in 2004.
With 30 team members in 2005, the team didn’t receive any awards and we don’t want to mention the place in the ranking of the Peachtree regional.
In this season the students designed and built the robot completely themselves.
I would love to get another rookie team going.
Team 1414, now a team of 45 students, did cut each piece of aluminum extrusion very carefully ¼ inch shorter than maximum dimension, but the completed robot didn’t fit the shipping box, because the robot didn’t end up to be square.
At the Peachtree regional, team 1414 succeeded to score all ten balls in the auto mode, ended up in second place in the ranking and won the regional event together with two other teams. On top of it, team 1414 won the Daimler Chrysler spirit award and the ACAD visualization award.
These students may never get any CNC tools in their shop and their robot will be lacking the sophistication of the triplets for example. Needless to say that these students are very happy about their success, they don’t care about the triplets at all.