pic: 100% Student Built

[Mark Pettit]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Last year our entire robot was about 98% student built. We bragged about this for the longest time but at the competition the judges weren't very impressed. In fact they seemed kind of disappointed. The reason behind this is that any bunch of kids can get together and make something but what is special about FIRST is the interaction with professionals in the industry.

I believe the judges look for the relatinship between student and mentor to be somewhere around a 1/3 mentor 2/3 student work load.

991 had a similar experience where we were bragging to a judge that we did all of the work ourselves and she chastised us for not having an engineer on board. I know all of the ideals of FIRST but it was almost like they would rather have the robots be 100% engineer built (you know who you are) than for the students to do everything.

This year, we put the word out everywhere we could and one of the parents found a neighbor that was a retired ME. We couldn't be happier. We still get to be student-built, but now we're in compliance.