Girls on FIRST teams

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Otaku

In my eyes, there are very few limitations for people (these apply to everybody):

-You must know what you're doing.
-You must know what certain tools are used for/what tools you need (one of the freshmen asked me what a philips screwdriver was... I forcibly removed him from the shop. And yes, our team does training sessions to try and prevent this).
-You must keep a channel of communication open. (675 has had communication issues in past years, they were minimal this year, which is good)

Those first two don't sound too promising, if you plan to have team members with no prior experience (i.e. most high school students). Being able to satisfy those first two things requires a bit of context, a bit of intuition, and most notably, the ability to ask the right questions. But not having those things at the outset shouldn't be an impediment to having the opportunity to learn those things.

The freshman needs to know what needs to be done (this is distinct from the idiomatic 'he knows what he's doing'), how to perform it, and why this is the case. If he doesn't know, while it might technically be his responsibility to educate himself, it makes a whole lot more sense to give him whatever assistance it takes to make him understand, than it does to simply kick him out. Think of it as in investment in his future abilities. If you just kick him out every time he asks a dumb question—and is it actually dumb, considering the state of his expertise—what incentive does he have to continue to participate, and what good are you doing for him? Now he's not just wasting your time, you're wasting his.

Similarly, even experienced people don't always know some trivia regarding a tool. If I'd asked you to pass me a 3/8" R8 collet, would you have known what it was? (It's the thing you use in a Bridgeport-style mill to hold Ø3/8" cutting tools.) Odds are, if you'd told him "a Phillips screwdriver is the one with a four-pointed cross and a tapered tip", he'd have had both incentive and context to cement that piece of knowledge in his mind. And he probably knew already that such a thing existed, but didn't know its name. Instead, it seems that he earned a trip outside.

The third point is universally good advice, and probably the most difficult to implement. Communication isn't just telling the new members "this is a Phillips screw, this is a Robertson screw...", etc.; it involves responding to their particular questions and needs. If the freshman can't ask a simple question, then it seems that communication could stand to be improved.