Is there really inspiration in teams?

[Sean Schuff]

Originally Posted by Philip W.

What is the degree of inspiration on your team? What sort of post-secondary schools are your alumni attending? Are you a student-built or engineer-built team? Are you a student-managed or mentor-managed team (i.e. who is the leadership)?

Question 1 - My guess is that we have a pretty high degree of inspiration on our team. How do I come to that conclusion? Alumni students who volutneer at IRI year after year. Graduates who pursue careers in engineering and technology. And the fact that after 6 years of doing FIRST I still hear from alumni who were on the team way back when and quite frequently get together with them to reminisce about the old times, both good and bad.

Question 2 - MTU (quite a few, actually), UW-Platteville, UW-Madison, UW-Stevens Point, UW-Fox Valley, Rice, United States Navy, UW-Stout.

Question 3 - Depends on the year, the game and the resources available. We do, however, try to focus much of our attention on our students getting their hands dirty and doing the work. From a teachers perspective it is far more beneficial educationally for students to do things rather than watch them done. Research indicates that understanding and retention increase significantly when the learner is actively engaged. But FIRST isn't about education, it is about inspiration. I happen to be an educator so I meld the two together. To each his own on how the robot is built - I'm still having fun!

Question 4 - Mostly mentor-managed if your talking about administrative details. Most kids don't join a robotics team to make hotel reservations or shop for groceries the night before a competition. If you're talking about management in terms of decision making, it is very much a shared responsibility. For our team, sharing the decision making responsibility inspires ownership in the project at hand.

Originally Posted by Philip W.

IMHO, students that can lead themselves to develop a successful organisation like a FIRST team are the leaders of tomorrow. Maybe you can't say that your students are as devoted as a team where students run themselves, but please try to mention how devoted your students are (as a whole, again, I ask for no long single person success stories). The amount you work during the off-season says a lot about devotion as well.

I CAN say that my students are as devoted as a team where students run themselves! Maybe even more so. There are probably many students out there who do have the ability to lead themselves, however, there do need to be mentors around to guide them when things get rough. We can talk all day long about the professional expertise that mentors bring to teams but I think we are missing one of the biggest assets mentors have: the wisdom of years of life.

When I read some of the posts on CD I’ll pop over to the posters public profile to see how old they are. 95% of the time my guess as to their age is very close. Why? Because there is a time in everyone’s life (and it seems to typically happen during middle school and high school) when they think they know it all. Heck, I had a solid decade in the 80’s when I was certain I knew everything! Then I went to college, got a job, got married and started having kids and I realized that my WHOLE life was going to be a learning experience. That’s why they call it lifelong learning. I don’t know it all. I’ll go to my grave not knowing a fraction of it all. But I will die being satisfied that I have positively impacted the lives of those around me.

Don’t let the medals you win and the trophies on your mantel define who you are. Let it be the lives you’ve touched and the legacy you leave behind.

Sean