[moderated] pic: The 2006 NiagaraFIRST Triplets!

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by mluckham

... It seems that NiagaraFIRST's core team of Mentors is exceptionally experienced, organized, and accustomed to producing production drawings to a level of quality that teams of student builders can machine independently. Early enough to build, integrate, get the bugs worked out, and the robots humming - all in the same time constraints that everyone else has to work to.

We should all be so lucky.

Second that.

I'll confess my initial reaction to seeing the photo that started this thread: the design is an inspiration, but like some others I thought making three copies of it was somehow unfair.

Several weeks later I volunteered at Waterloo and saw the Triplets in action. My thinking changed.

Many of the things about NiagaraFIRST that are inspirational have been recited here already. To me the most inspirational is the speed with which the mentors developed the design for the practice robot.

In my day jobs, I've been an engineering professor, a lead engineer, a project manager, etc., and I've seen how difficult it can be to coordinate a good, usable set of drawings (or schematics or embedded software requirements) on a tight schedule. My opinion is that you can't really teach this skill -- you can only inspire people to develop it by example. And that is exactly what NiagaraFIRST is doing.