The Meaning of FIRST

[connor.worley]

Originally Posted by sabruce01

Man-o-man....I'm not getting involved here. Last time I was in this discussion, my "reputation" was blasted off the board. (hence the little red dots by my name) All I will say is as a mentor I would MUCH rather teach a student than "inspire" a student. I've seen extreme cases of both scenarios. I've seen teams with NO leadership, and I've seen teams where the students are not even in the pits. But hey...whatever floats your boat. I'm not going to get flamed again for this argument.

I believe that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.

Engineering is a big, big type of fishing to teach. Inspiring kids to study it in college might be more practical.

[Jorge Ayala]

I have been three years in FRC and at the beginning I had the same problem with mentors provinding "excesive" help. In my first season our mentors didn't even know what was FIRST about so they only guided us, they didn't help us to build, the only thing they did is that they made an iron (yes, iron) arm to handle the tubes (my first season was in 2011, Logomotion). They made the robot just as we told them. Making an iron arm was just stupid, too much weight.

Then when we arrived at the Alamo regional the first thing we noticed was the Robowranglers (148) robot. We could not understand how an student-made robot was so great. Then we saw a lot of mentors of the team working with the robot and since that was not happening in our team we thought they were cheating. (Of course they were not, the thing is that we didn't know that it is OK to be helped by your mentors).

In that season I felt very inspired towards engineering because it was really challenging to built a robot without much significant help. I wanted to be just like team 148 (I really admire those guys). And our robot that season did horribly, I felt frustrated but the goal was achieved. I was inspired to be an engineer, I started appreciating sciences also.

In my second season, long story short, we recieved too much help from our mentors. Our mentors arrived early to our workshop (while we were in class) to continue working with our robot, when we arrived at our workshop the robot had some serious issues resolved and some team members were a little disappointed about that. However, that was not the end of it, in the competition everyone was very inspired because of our robot did well and we had the chance to appreciate the job that other teams had done . (Again, team 148 and 118)

This is my third season and now I know that mentors working along students have nothing wrong. That way students can learn from their mentors and mentors can learn from their students also. The thing is, you need to know that FIRST is about inspiring students towards engineering and sciences and this can only be done by cooperating between mentors and students. The balance between student and mentor work needs to be found by each team. Each teams needs to know what works for them.

You need to accept that a robot built 100% by students is not going to win against a robot built between students and mentors. Also the experience that an student get from working with its mentor is one of the best things of FIRST, mentors are there for a reason.

Work along with your mentors, you will not regret it. That is the meaning of FIRST and each team should work to find their way to accomplish it. It is all about inspiring people.

[Ivan Malik]

As many other threads on this subject have described, very Very VERY few teams exist on either extreme (all student vs all mentor) and if they do then they won't last long. I think all of us here on CD (and the FIRST community) can agree that the issue is one of "many shades of gray" instead of a black and white one. So why on earth do people attack the other side using arguments that assume a black and white answer?

Use your brains and actually think about what someone means by their statement. "Mentor built" may not mean that mentors are actually building/programming the entire robot. It could be meant that they are designing the whole thing, dictating what is done, heavily influencing its design through suggestion, building the tricky components, doing the majority of the machining, etc. The same for the flip side with "Student built." I know for a fact that my personal definition of "mentor built" does not match many people's definition and it has caused a lot of friction in the past. Think about the possible differences in perspective before you post! It will turn this into less of a trench war and more of a conversation!

This issue is as much an issue of a failure of communication as it is an actual issue. This debate had quite a few flame wars before I was even aware of FIRST, so I choose to suspect that some ancient history is the culprit for this chasm of assumptions between the two sides. None the less why is the argument stuck in the same spot it was when I was a high school freshmen? We should not be arguing the same things, but rather setting community-wide definitions so that future arguments are actually worth something.

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by Ivan Malik

We should not be arguing the same things, but rather setting community-wide definitions so that future arguments are actually worth something.

Good luck.

[bduddy]

Originally Posted by Ivan Malik

As many other threads on this subject have described, very Very VERY few teams exist on either extreme (all student vs all mentor) and if they do then they won't last long. I think all of us here on CD (and the FIRST community) can agree that the issue is one of "many shades of gray" instead of a black and white one. So why on earth do people attack the other side using arguments that assume a black and white answer?

Use your brains and actually think about what someone means by their statement. "Mentor built" may not mean that mentors are actually building/programming the entire robot. It could be meant that they are designing the whole thing, dictating what is done, heavily influencing its design through suggestion, building the tricky components, doing the majority of the machining, etc. The same for the flip side with "Student built." I know for a fact that my personal definition of "mentor built" does not match many people's definition and it has caused a lot of friction in the past. Think about the possible differences in perspective before you post! It will turn this into less of a trench war and more of a conversation!

This issue is as much an issue of a failure of communication as it is an actual issue. This debate had quite a few flame wars before I was even aware of FIRST, so I choose to suspect that some ancient history is the culprit for this chasm of assumptions between the two sides. None the less why is the argument stuck in the same spot it was when I was a high school freshmen? We should not be arguing the same things, but rather setting community-wide definitions so that future arguments are actually worth something.

Exactly this. It seems to me that the vast majority of the comments in many of these topics are attacking either entirely student-built robots or entirely mentor-built robots, when of course the vast majority of teams fall somewhere in between (and not particularly close to either extreme). It's not surprising that very little ever gets accomplished in these topics when most people are attacking concepts that few teams embody and few people are willing to defend or think is right.
There are legitimate issues about some teams possibly getting too far towards one side or the other, and the effects that may have on the greater FIRST community. It's unfortunate that they get buried under a bunch of strawmen most of the time.

[Seelix]

There are clearly two sides to this argument. As for me personally, I've been in FIRST for two years, and been on two incredibly different teams at very oposite ends of the spectrum. My first FIRST team (why does that never get old?) was a very small team. We didn't have the time or the student base needed to have the kids do everything alone, and we REALLY didn't have the mentor base to be able to teach every student to do everything alone. Our goal was just to get it all done in whatever way we could- even if that meant mentors stepping in a lot more than some teams think they should. It worked though, and because of those limited resources I learned that if you want of know something you need to step up and bother someone until they show you, and once you know you better be able to do it AND teach it to someone else too.
This year I was on a very large first year team. We were blessed with a lot of brilliant and dedicated mentors, a combination I was anticipating to mean that the students did practically nothing. Then we decided to go with a very "hands off" approach that meant that the kids learned a truley incredible amount of skills in a short time, but we could also afford to take the time and take students away from working long enough to explain how every little thing worked before letting the kids do it. Both these approaches have been praised and criticized, along with all the other 2000+ ways teams are run, but in my experience every FRC team values student learning- and values it in a different way than every other FRC team. As long as the students learned SOMETHING, (whether it was programing skills, shop skills, life skills, team work, or just that if you stay at school long enough during build season pizza will arrive) then the goal has ultimately been accomplished.