Corporations Build Robots

[casualobserver]

I am a recently graduated member of a "big-team" and the idea that mentors design and build the robot almost entirely is very reasonable. I am going to share my own experience with out naming names, etc... in order to stay GP.

My team has a large corporation as its main sponsor. Building is done at their facilities and the team of engineers numbers about 10 in total. It seems that in this thread, many people are concerned with all the work being done by 1 group or another. That, I doubt, has ever been the case. However, in my own experience, very little design work was ever done by the students. The electrical system was always designed/constructed by the engineers, and the most work the students ever did was assembly. Student input to the design was basically a presentation of our ideas, in a conceptual manner, to the entire team (mentors included) and then occasionally (i.e. maybe once every other year) some concept from a students design would be incorporated in some way onto the robot.
However, before I make this sound like it was all bad, I need to explain the full extent of what was going on. Sponsoring a team is an expensive endeavour, and our team in a sense needed to perform well in order to justify our rather large budget. This is completely understandable, however, the actual mentors were put under pressure to produce a well built, clean, effective robot that would represent our sponsor well. Also, understandable, because image can be inspiring itself. A well built robot, that is clean, effect, and robust is inspiring, we all can admit that we have stood in front of some of the robots in recent years and just drooled over them. However, at least on my team, although I supposed this is why a lot of teams might do this, this sort of pressure to perform and look good doing it, puts the mentors in a bind. I don't doubt for one second that the mentors on my team were people interested in achieving the goals of FIRST. However, I also don't doubt for a second that they thought that the only way to win was to have the mentors do the work.

As a result, as the build season progressed, students would drop from the team, finding the meetings boring because there was no real student involvement until week 4/5. A bunch of my team mates found it all to be some kind of joke, like the engineers were playing us into thinking we were involved in order to keep us around until the robot was essentially done. Personally, I don't entirely buy that idea, however, there did seem times when that was the case.

But what did this all mean? Some members of my team were actually pushed away from the idea of becoming an engineer because of their experience in FIRST. This is not what FIRST is about! If the mentors insist on designing the robot, for whatever justified or unjustified reason, they should still and always include the students, even if we just sit back and watch the engineers work through problems that arise.

I think it is important to note as well, that our robot was designed entirely on CAD by the engineers, the most the students ever saw, were weekly renderings of the progress. The parts were then shipped off to be made, and returned needing only assembly.

Yes, students can learn from assembly, but they can learn a ton more from design.

In general, I fear that teams that compete to win, will often cut corners in reaching the goal of FIRST, in order to reach their own goals. The students always lose in case, because even if their team wins the championship, the students will be no better prepared for engineering, or, in many cases, even know how their robot worked! (This is true, there were kids on my team who did not know how many wheels were on the robot until week 5). I think this leads to what I have really been trying to say in a rather long, round-about way, FIRST is not about the competition, it is about the 6 weeks we actually work as a team to achieve something. The competition is only their to motivate us to reach the rather short deadline, and to motivate us to do better. Those 6 weeks are when you learn about working with people, and about design, fabrication, construction, destruction, and all the other things that make robots the things we build to get inspired.

I hope that teams that do have the mentors design/build their robots at least keep the students in the loop every step of the way. This is so important to the goal of FIRST, students must know what is going on on the robot, even if they aren't directly a part of it.