Percentage of Work Done by Students.

[Uberbots]

Well first ill start out by saying that we had 2 robots.
the first one was built 75% mentors, 25% students, but 90% student idea. THe robot stank when we took it to the scrimmage, as it was topheavy and had indigestion (the loaded balls never reached the shooter).

so our second robot was about 40% mentors and 60% students, but 100% student idea (at the time of shipping). The robot obviously performed alot better (after we had fixed a major shooter problem) and won us the regionals.

I think that the mantors are the ones who take the responsibilty in the pits because the robots have to be fixed fast in rder to be ready for the next match. If we had students fixing our bot, i dont beleive we would be ready for the next 2 matches. the mentors are there when effeiciency of build is needed, as far as design of the bot goes its the students job.

[Libby K]

hah. our team was 100% students.

we, as rookies, had problems with engineers and funding.

so we just did it all (as per my signature)

Its fairly and equally designed out and worked on by everyone on our team (meaning students and mentors). The students on my team do alot of work on it. Even from one year being on electrical subteam and mechanical subteam, i remember alot of the tools i learned and used (which is really good from me hehe), and still alot of the electrical based things. Its really good when students do alot of the majority of the work, but while getting alot of help by engineers or mentors. They learn something new every day that they work and put their effort into. Its really exciting.

-Court-

[thatphotochick]

all the work on the robot is about 90-95% done by students...some parts done more or less by the engineers. most of the engineers and mentors simply guide the students, and students have a say in everything. everything else..like animation, CAD, marketing, logistical work, even most programming..is done 100% by students, or at least close enough.

[geowasp]

while I also believe, like most of you, that students should be as independent as possible, and try to design and build, design, and program most of the robot ourselves, but there gets to a point in some seasons where the mentors have to step in and say "alright, it's a week to the ship date, and we need to do this, this , and this". They are there to make sure we don't screw up, and to make sure we have a feasible bot at the competition. It is all about the level of "guiding". Our bot is mostly built and assemblied by the students, but unfortunately, we are not experienced enough to independently write our own code and machine certain parts (can be partially attributed to the lack of facilities), but the mentors are there so that we will be able to do that somewhere down the road. I mean certain stumbling blocks are always gonna be there every season, and the mentors should let us, the students, attempt to solve it by ourselves; but if its a week from the ship date, and the robot is still 4 different half-working parts, there just isn't time for this sort of "learning process". I guess what i'm trying to say is-- at the end of each season, sometimes, just trying our very best to create the robot by ourselves (the students) is all that we can do.

[RebelWithARobot]

I know this is a touchy subject for many people but let me explain the way I see this.

1) No company is going to hire a student simply because they worked on a FIRST robot.
2) You can be inspired to be an Engineer without knowing how to build anything.

My point is that if a student is very interested in being an Engineer they will go to college to do so. They will learn what they need to know in college. I'm not going to argue that you can't learn as much from FIRST as you can from college, but company's don't care what FIRST team you're from, they care about your degree. FIRST his in place to show you what Engineers do, not to teach you how to be an Engineer.

Our Engineer is Richard Wallace, one of the smartest guys I know, and I would not for a second think that he could teach me everything he knows. Nor do I think it is his mission as a mentor to teach me everything he knows. But if he can inspire me by showing me what he does, what is career consists of. THAT is mentorship. You don't have to teach to inspire.


Just my opinion.

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by RebelWithARobot

1) No company is going to hire a student simply because they worked on a FIRST robot.
2) You can be inspired to be an Engineer without knowing how to build anything.

Being inspired to be an engineer without actually knowing what it involves (i.e. being inspired without actually knowing how to design or build anything) is pretty dangerous. Someone creative who might otherwise go into arts or the humanities might say "gee, that mentor of mine sure knows how to build a good robot, I want to go into engineering!" but be horribly disappointed when they realize engineering is calculus, math, and many other somewhat boring (to a creative/artistic person) things that they may not enjoy.

If you only understand the ends that someone achieves without understanding the means that got them there, you might get a very wrong impression of what they were doing and whether or not you'd like it. If someone doesn't like math but they like designing/working with robots, a career in marketing or sales might be a better choice than engineering. They'd still get to work with them and perhaps set specs for new robots, but they wouldn't need to deal with the nitty-gritty.

[indieFan]

Originally Posted by RebelWithARobot

1) No company is going to hire a student simply because they worked on a FIRST robot.

My point is that if a student is very interested in being an Engineer they will go to college to do so. They will learn what they need to know in college. I'm not going to argue that you can't learn as much from FIRST as you can from college, but company's don't care what FIRST team you're from, they care about your degree. FIRST his in place to show you what Engineers do, not to teach you how to be an Engineer.

On the contrary. I handed my resume to someone at a career fair and had listed my undergraduate research and my having mentored/coached two FIRST teams. He looked at the resume and said, "Oh, I see you have 5 years robotics experience." He then proceeded to write down "5 yrs" on the resume. I later received a phone call asking for an interview and got the job working with robots. He barely even touched on my undergrad research or my college during the interview. You never know what an employer is looking for until you're there.

Getting back to the thread at hand:

Yes, it is great when the students have the time and opportunity to do the majority of the building. However, many schools do not have the time and/or resources to do this. Many lessons can be learned, including how *not* to build a robot from watching the engineers/mentors. (Those of you that saw 1070 at AZ on the first couple of days will know what I'm talking about.)

In addition, the engineers/mentors actually get benefits from working on the robots. 1) They refresh their memory on the more basic engineering fundamentals. 2) They learn things outside their area of expertise. 3) They get hands-on experience which is absolutely invaluable. In order to be able to fix a process, you need to be able to see the mechanical issues at hand. In order to design an effective piece of equipment, you must understand how things are machined/manufactured. Don't see FIRST as only being for the students, see it as being for the present engineers/mentors, as well as the future generation.

indieFan

[pwilczynski]

FIRST as an organization makes it so that every choice the team makes is totally up to the team. Therefore, each team is different when it comes to placing control in the hands of the mentors. While a student might learn a lot with 100% student built robot, they would learn even more if they worked with a mentor on a robot. On my team, we use a kind of 'board of directors'- 3 students and 2 mentors who make final decisions on the robot. People from the team can voice their opinions to this group who then choose. Actual physical construction occurs with about 80% student:20% mentor. We seperate our team into different sub-groups, with one or two mentors per 5-7 students. They will tehn show the students how to create the parts if they don't know how, and in general just help them. While I agree that 100% mentor-robots are not the best, I also think that 100% student robots are not the best. Students need examples from the mentors in order to learn.

[Dermot_135]

100% Student Built Goodness!


With chocolate!

:yikes:

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Greg Perkins

Was it just me or did you all think FIRST tried to narrow the playing field with the 5' height rule? I personally think that they did; this takes away any major leverage that teams (who have ambiguous resources) have with creating arms and whatnot. I like this idea, it gives each and every team the ability to compete fairly without one team being restricted as another is unrestricted. As for mentors/adults/enginners who build robots....I have no comment.

I think it was partially because the game would become significantly easier if your robot could be arbitrarily tall. There would be nothing stopping a team from building their shooter at the 10 foot level and just kind of pumping the balls in, which would eliminate the need for use of the camera. The field-leveling was probably a side effect.

[Commanchetruck]

Our robot is 98% built by students. We built it in a classroom at our school with an everyday toolbox, a saws-all and some drills. Yet we still came in 23 at the Granite State Regional. I personally hate it when adults try to help. The idea is for students to build the robot. If im around and i see a parent or mentor with a tool i ask what needs to be done and i take the tool away and do it. I dont want to become one of those teams where all the work is done by professional engineers and the whole robot is made with a water jet cutter. We all know teams like that are out there.

[Dan Richardson]

Originally Posted by Commanchetruck

Our robot is 98% built by students. We built it in a classroom at our school with an everyday toolbox, a saws-all and some drills. Yet we still came in 23 at the Granite State Regional. I personally hate it when adults try to help. The idea is for students to build the robot. If im around and i see a parent or mentor with a tool i ask what needs to be done and i take the tool away and do it. I dont want to become one of those teams where all the work is done by professional engineers and the whole robot is made with a water jet cutter. We all know teams like that are out there.

On the contrary FIRST has never stated that they don't want mentors building the robot. In fact Dean has given many speeches the other way, the objective is to inspire, and obviously these teams that have mostly mentor built robots often time have the largest teams and win the most chairmans. The reason is because FIRST is there to inspire you to be a little bit geeky. That sometimes being a nerd is OK and to strive to be professionals like Andy Baker or JVN or DLavery or Woodie Flowers or Dean Kamen is completely OK.

These mentors are there so that you can strive to do well and perform professionally, and heck to hopefully teach you as much as they can along the way. Its definitely OK to learn proper methods of doing things along the way, and who better to teach you than a person who does it for a living. There are teams out there who have there bots water jet and cnced and what not just search " How we cut. " But even without professionals that will always exist there are schools with full machine shops and students who know how to use them. There are many teams who come up with very professional pieces of work that don't have much to work with and not much engineering influence. However, I'd rather have a job done right than by a student any day. If the student can do the job right than by all means I let them do it, but if he can't then you must do it properly otherwise no one gains anything from this situation.

The fact of the matter is if we spend to much time complaining about our situations, then we've achieved nothing. If we work hard learn as much as we can and inspire as many as we can, then you've lost nothing. The measure of a successful man ( or team ) is not where he's gotten to, but where he's come from to get there. If you measure yourself by how much you were able to accomplish then you can never be unsuccessful.

[Jaine Perotti]

I have to say that I have done quite a lot of thinking on this subject.

My team, the Who'sCTEKS, is primarily a "student-work" oriented team. With guidance from one engineer and several other adult mentors, about 90% of the robot is student fabricated. The only items we do not machine in our shop are the parts for our custom transmissions. The only reason we do not make these in the shop is because we simply don't have the machining capability to do so.

With that said, our team has a pretty straight forward philosophy when it comes to allowing students to do work. Any student is welcome to work on a project, as long as they are qualified and/or willing to learn how to do it. Our mentors care very much about letting students gain hands-on experience. Even if this means that the robot will not be 100% perfect, our mentors still encourage us to get our "hands dirty", so that we can have a chance to use and develop our problem solving skills.

Personally, I agree with what many other people have said already - it is up to the team to decide on the structure that will allow them to best "inspire" the students. In the end, I think a healthy mix of both mentor input and student input creates the most functional team. A team with no technical mentors will have a harder time trying to learn how to design, fabricate, and troubleshoot properly. Likewise, a team who has mostly technical mentors doing the work will have difficulty teaching the students how to do the same things.

In this way, both extremes result in similar problems. A student who never had a mentor to teach them will have just as much difficulty answering questions during inspection as a student who was never allowed to touch the robot. On a team where mentors actively guide the students, but still allow them to use their own problem solving skills, students are much more likely to come away with greater theoretical knowledge as well as hands-on experience. This is how my team has been run, and it has been a wonderful experience for me.

I have had experience on both ends of the spectrum, however. I have done numerous independent engineering projects where I became very frustrated because there was no one there to guide me. For example, in my freshman year we had to independently build a mini race-car to compete at the science fair. I had alot of very good ideas for it, but became frustrated once I started building because I didn't have the technical knowledge to make it work. Years later, after gaining much more experience, I know what I did wrong and what I should have done to make it work. But back then, I would have been very grateful to have someone who could have guided me towards the right solution.

In terms of the ability to inspire, there is no doubt that teams from all over the spectrum have been able to inspire students to choose careers in science and technology. However, I do think that the best way to inspire is through guided learning. It is frustrating and discouraging to not have anyone to mentor you, but at the same time, it is also discouraging when you are not even given a chance to learn for yourself. Discouragement does not amount to inspiration. In my opinion, the best way to inspire is to provide a hands-on, yet rewarding, guided learning experience for any student who shows a desire to learn.

-- Jaine

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Commanchetruck

I dont want to become one of those teams where all the work is done by professional engineers and the whole robot is made with a water jet cutter. We all know teams like that are out there.

We don't all know that teams like you describe are out there. Teams with access to waterjet machines are rare enough; having the whole robot waterjetted are even rarer. Teams with all the work done by professional engineers are the rarest of all. The combination of all three? Maybe one team in FIRST total. And that is a high estimate.

I'd like to request that this thread be moderated, as it has started to have very vague and general accusations thrown around, without reason or facts. Not to mention that some previous threads on this topic have become or almost become flame wars.