Ultimate Assent - Best game for teaching and team development?

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

As a teacher, I am qualified to give my opinion on whether or not this is the best game for teaching. If the goal to teach students that real engineering challenges are really hard, this game achieves that very well. If the goal is to spend a lot of time with the students, taking them through every detail from which way to turn a screwdriver to CAD constraints and proper wiring techniques, this game most certainly isn't it.

If you are holding your students' hands at every step of the way then it sounds like your team is not prepared to build the robot you have envisioned. Rome was not built in a day.

I got waayyy better at robots in my six years as student, and I expect all of our kids (and everyone's kids) go through this process. You can't hand a freshman a box of parts and come back a few hours later and see a running robot. But, there are some students who by their senior years will be capable of this. It's all about pushing students toward this. When they are new, you may have to show them exactly how to do something. When they've been around the block a few times, you drop by and hand out advice. And when they are about to graduate, hopefully they are running the meetings and you are there for insurance purposes only.

My goal as a mentor is to make myself irrelevant. Is that possible? Probably not. But this is one place I am willing to aim stupidly high. In one of those mentoring videos there is a great quote by JVN along the lines of "If I've done my job right, one of the students will say, 'John, that's stupid, you're wrong' and tell me why."

I think our kids get a lot more out of a simple shooter, human loader, and Z1 hanger that they get to be actively involved in than designing some complicated mechanism they have a hard time understanding or building. Hopefully everyone involved learns a whole bunch this season, and next year we aim higher in an achievable way.

In my opinion there has never been and probably will never be a 'bad' game for teaching and learning. Sure some games are more fun and result in more varied robots, but they all consolidate entire product life cycles into 6.5 weeks.