[FTC]: Please Don't Post Pictures

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by ttldomination

it hinders learning and frustrates the team when you build a robot, compete, then find that someone has taken your design.

In our case, it certainly struck our team as a bigtime compliment, and proved to us that we had learned a lot.

Originally Posted by ttldomination

Honestly, I don't think people actually *learned* by seeing 546's design. They went OH, nice idea, I think i'll take that.

I find that the two areas of design; Having the "Big Idea," and little engineering-ish things to optimise the "Big Idea," are learned in two different ways. You get better at coming up with general concepts the more you see general concepts. I have NEVER had a good idea that wasn't many, many other ideas put together, and usually not all of them were mine originally. And the more ideas you know about, the more likely you are to mix and match them into something great.

The "Fine Engineering" is learned best from doing it. And taking a general concept, with a clear bar set to match or exceed, is great. As I said earlier, there would be a problem with a team simply working from CAD drawings done by another team, but if they have to figure out how the team did it themselves, sometimes being wrong, and sometimes coming up with ways to improve upon it, then this is great experience. I don't think anyone has ever posted enough pictures of a robot that a team could realistically just blindly re-create another robot, part for part.



One other thing to consider: When you get down to it, there had to have been a SINGLE PERSON on 546 who said: "Hey, lets do it this way!" How is another team going "Hey, that sounds great" different than the rest of 546's members saying the same thing, if you are working to inspire the community, rather than just your team? (Especially if, as TheOtherGuy says below, the other teams go "Sounds great, but we could change X, Y, and Z and make it even better!")