[moderated] Corporate Sponsorship

[Hendrix]

and only 6 weeks together - its impossible for us to teach the students everything they would need to know to build a highly competitive machine all by themselves

I would have to Disagree. Team 538 has uhh, 1 engineer on their team, and he is just there to approve what can be done. Every year we have a competitive bot, and every year we do pretty well. This year in the Atlanta regional we were first seed.

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by TF8

Things can change, I takes a lot of hard work but nothing is impossible. However you must want to make the change. It is nice and easy to turn screws at week three but if you want to learn and get involved you must take the incentive. Myself and other team members did. We took a sponsor dominated team and made it a way of learning. We packed as many underclassmen as we could get on computers into a lab modeling in pro-e while upperclassmen gave them instruction on 3D modeling, material selection, manufacturablity, safety factors and producing prints that parts could actually be made from.
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Not knowing much about east coast teams, I don't know what team you're referring to. Are you describing 190, or the team you were on in high school?

[chocolateluvrlr]

I think that it is uneccesary, and not right, for adults to be the cause of a team's success. My team, 1389, had only 2 adults helping us out, neither of whom were engineers. They did help us very much when needed, but we pretty much took care of things on our own. There is not part of the robot that at least 1 or 2 people don't COMPLETELY understand, and we figured everything out based on resources on the FIRST website, previous knowledge, trial and error, etc. We were able to learn so much because it is what we had to do in order to build the robot. If adults want to help the team, then teach members off season, so you can test their knowledge during the season. Otherwise, how are they really making any progress?

My team is not spectacular- but placing 29th out of 58 teams as a rookie team with probably the lowest budget of all the teams there, we were quite happy with our robot and could feel pride in our achievements because we knew that without our work the robot would not exist. This is what FIRST is about.

[KenWittlief]

but FIRST is not intended to be a crash course in engineering, or even an offseason mini engineering training program

not all mentors can spend time with the team all year - if your team works on design and codeing and control skills all year - thats great

but not to sound like a pompous snodwod - but a small handfull of engineers could start working with the students at the kickoff meeting, teaching them as they go during the 6 weeks, and have an excellent, technologically advanced, and very competitive machine - and then go home after the comps are over

remember the core idea here is only to give the HS students a taste of what it would be like to be an engineer - to see the light at the end of the education tunnel

if your team has a high retention rate, and the same students come back every year, and they are able to do 99% of the design and build work - thats outstanding - I commend you for that accomplishment

and by the same token, if your team has 100% new students every year, and the engineers and mentors have to spoon feed you for the first week or two, but you end up with a great machine in the end, thats super too.

[KevinB]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

if your team has a high retention rate, and the same students come back every year, and they are able to do 99% of the design and build work - thats outstanding - I commend you for that accomplishment

and by the same token, if your team has 100% new students every year, and the engineers and mentors have to spoon feed you for the first week or two, but you end up with a great machine in the end, thats super too.

That's probably the best I've heard it said. I'll agree with that wholeheartedly.

I think the problem that some people have is that on a few teams, the engineers don't even care about the kids -- they just want to play the game for themselves. They'll treat the high schoolers with a very condescending attitude, and the outcome is that the kids become discouraged instead of encouraged to pursue a field in engineering.

I don't claim to have a magic solution to this problem, but I do think it is a problem.

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

so I guess our team is in the middle - the mentors dont do all the work, and the students dont either - and when a crisis arises in the pits we are all there working together

thats our teams vision of FIRST - we dont build the best machines every year

but we do have two regional trophies sitting on a shelf, and a finalist trophy from this year (so far) - so we aint doing so bad either.

I think you hit the nail on the head again -- FIRST isn't about building the best machines ... it's about building machines period.

Just as long as the students feel like they matter and are involved ... FIRST will serve for their benefit.