Did something break on your robot?
Did something not break on your robot?
Do you have a problem your team deals with?
Do you have a problem your team doesn’t deal with?
You may be experiencing something where n=1!
In FRC, every team has a unique robot. Even if the design is the same, built to the same specifications, the exact motors, gearboxes, and other parts of a robot are unique to that robot. This means that item to item variance can affect the end results on your robot even before you hit the infinite variety of ways something can be used, which also affect the results.
Speaking of those, when we design robots, there are as many assumptions and guidelines that we take for granted as there are teams as well. I take it for granted that our robot this year will be using specific parts, will be built with specific tools, by specific people in a specific place. When I describe an issue to someone on this forum, it’s important for me to describe those assumptions that are relevant to the problem I am facing, even if I assume that “everyone” does it that way, or that I am doing it the “objectively correct” way. This helps create a shared frame of reference that helps us communicate across varied experiences.
This also applies to team circumstances-- how many students are on your team? How many mentors? What do the mentors do? Do you have school support? What does your relationship with your sponsors look like? What are the socioeconomic circumstances of your team? When we discuss problems or situations that a team may run into, framing problems and circumstances in terms of your assumptions and situation can again be helpful in communicating across varied experiences.
Ultimately every team is running on a sample size of one experience in this competition. The experiment that is our season has a sample size of n=1, with an infinite number of complex confounding factors. There is not one FRC experience, there are as many experiences as there are people involved.
I’m posting this before kickoff because we can all use a reminder to exercise some of those mental muscles that let us both understand and be understood by others. Miscommunication is easy on a text-only forum, and the ways we react to others are often based on mismatched assumptions. When we make those assumptions known, and avoid projecting our own assumptions onto others-- or at least project knowing that those assumptions exist and may be inaccurate-- we can better help each other.
Best of luck in the competition this year, and I hope you interpret your experiment’s results as a success!
