I don’t know. It seems that way: there was no reward for doing it, it wasn’t mandatory, it wasn’t advertised. The time frame was all wrong, etc.
Maybe, this whole thread just rubs me the wrong way. I teach and hear excuses about not getting homework done. Some of the posts here reminded me of my students.
I think somebody already mentioned that many teams don’t meet regularly through the summer or even the fall. I think it’s rather self-evident why it is impractical or unrealistic to expect those teams to make a video, so I’ll focus on why my team (a team going into our eighth competitive season, having won a couple of Engineering Inspiration Awards and a RCA along the way) didn’t do the homework.
We didn’t do the homework.
That’s the summary of “why we didn’t”-- heck, we even have a student that loves to do videos that, had he heard about this, would have leapt at the opportunity. Sometimes there is no excuse-- and sometimes there isn’t any real consequence either.
That being said, I would hazard a guess that many of the teams that fall into our “boat” of having the resources but not making a video certainly have made good usage of their time during the fall-- we’ve been busy mentoring the seven new FTC teams that we started this year, thank-you-very-much, in addition to doing our own recruitment and fundraising.
Like other teams, the Dean’s List Homework was just something that kind of fell to the side and was (wrongly) forgotten among a list of offseason projects, which was admittedly long this year for us (5 offseason events, complete renovation of our build space, major fundraising and planning for increased travel expenses, summer and fall weekly teaching sessions, 3 new FLL teams, planning for NJ State FLL and our district event, etc.)
That being said, we have a lot of footage from over the past year that was used for our weekly Build blogs and chairman’s effort (both of which have already begun for the next year) and we have started to put together the video, regardless of the due date, as many others are starting to do.
But I don’t agree with those who say “It’s just a two minute video, teams could have easily pulled something together quickly.” It’s not the most challenging project, but I still think that if a team wasn’t really going to/wasn’t able based on time and available students to put in enough effort to make a well thought out, meaningful video, there would be no point to it, at least in my opinion.
I’m not making excuses but since the OP asked a question…
The reason we didn’t is simply because we are out of bandwidth. We meet about 4 days a week from CMP through Kickoff and our current projects are burying us. We have another 3 minute video project that is going to take 3 months to do, minimum, and we are 6 weeks behind. This project has a higher project status than the homework so that’s how that happened.
For the general question about all teams, there are already lot of comments, but I’ll add the Parato principal, or the 80/20 rule. It is unfortunate but probably 80 % of the teams in the world don’t meet that often right now if at all and are probably not motivated enough or capable enough to do the video. Maybe they excel in some area. Maybe they are in the top 10 % of robot building, or top 10 % of something else.
This whole Parato thing frustrates everyone everywhere in what are know as socially unconstrainted situations, like any volunteer organization… Trying to get the 80% of the crowd to do as well as the upper 20 % is tough. It’s just like 20 % of the team members build 80 % of the robot, etc.
I can rant forever but I’ll stop here…
Yes, I remember this and I honestly didn’t know it was assigned at champs until this thread. Other then receiving email blasts about it I saw it nowhere else.
Nobody is blaming FIRST - teams just have other priorities. As a student, your homework should be a priority because it reflects on your grade (wow, if only I went by that in highschool…). In this case, teams like my own are busy trying to stay afloat. Dean’s homework doesn’t secure us funds for the next season. Its not a good way to look at it, I myself don’t agree with it, but it is what it is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more then happy to use ‘FIRST’ in my every day life, spread the word, and inspire. We just don’t have the students for a media team, or the support, the time, ect. Therefore it just doesn’t happen because we’re focused on other things.
For us, it was due six weeks after our team started meeting again, and we really only got more organized in the last 4 weeks or so. Training a new crew of students in the ways of cinematography and editing, filming, actually doing the editing, etc. was just not in the cards. We intend to do some kind of video in the fall as kind of a Chairman’s training thing, but it obviously won’t be done for Dean’s Homework.
Our team thought about doing the homework, but, in the end, there was just not enough time for us.
In the midst of training rookies, revamping the robot for CTTD, and trying to get new sponsors, we did not have time for the 10 of us to make a video. We honestly would have liked to do it, and thought about it, but never had enough free time to put together some filming, let alone editing (which can take just as long, if not longer, than the filming.)
We might make one anyway, who knows? We will have to see what our schedule form now until build looks like. Sure, we could not submit it, but it would be fun to make.
I emphasized that part because I want to ask, when you teach you don’t assign the homework clearly to less than 1/4 of the class at a major event and obscurely to the remainder who happen to be absent do you? We’ve never had the opportunity to go to St. Louis, but if we had we would have heard about this directly from the source. I looked back at email blasts and the homework assignment was mentioned three times (5/23, 10/4 as a side bar, and 10/17) and I can honestly tell you that at the times I got those emails, I never noticed them because it was the last thing on my mind. The only other place to find out about it was the FIRST website and there have been multiple threads about how easy it is to find things there…
I don’t think anyone is making excuses, they are just giving their honest reasons for not getting it done. And never knowing about an assignment is a pretty great reason, not an excuse, for not doing it. We would like to give this a shot and see what we can come up with, but I’m not about to let my students do something with less than 100% effort just so they can get it done. So as was said earlier, we might still put something together, but it will be on our schedule and worked on until it is right.
The difference between these posts and “the dog ate my homework” is that the latter is trying to avoid consequences. For ourselves at least, and I think most others, we’re more than willing to own our decision. I can wish our priorities were different (like we didn’t have to move for the 13th time), but I think the decision that led to us not finishing was correct for us in this case. We’re trying to increase our bandwidth overall, which will hopefully change the outcome next time, but I don’t regret it this time.
I’m happy to “blame” myself for it if you wish–I don’t feel there’s any fault in the rational decision to enrich and inspire in other ways more befitting of our circumstances. I saw this thread as the community endeavoring change the circumstances that led up to many teams’ similar decisions.
Maybe most of us would rather build robots than make videos. While making videos is a lot easier than it used to be, it still requires a specific skill set to do well, and you can only be good at a limited number of things.
So if your team has a group of students that passionately wants to TELL the FIRST story, go for it. But don’t get disappointed with teams that are busy BEING the FIRST story for not being storytellers too.
Then I think you are missing a large part of what it means to be on a FIRST team. IMHO.
For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.
We all have different ways of inspiring and recognizing science and technology. A video is one tool, but by no means the only tool. Nothing is one-size fits all.
A business must make priority calls due to limited resources, time, money, knowledge base, etc. I think that teams who display this active decision are demonstrating a clear understanding of a tenet of business practice.
Do not presume that your definition of what it means to be on a FIRST team is universal, and do not presume that you have the right answers for every team.
Haha right… the Beach Bots are missing what it means to be on a FIRST team. :rolleyes:
But seriously, a lot of teams use the off-season to scrape together funding so they can simply exist next year, and you’re upset that they didn’t make a documentary video in their off-season instead?
Our team is busy designing a practice drive and teaching students how to CAD, improving our relationships with sponsors, using our previous season’s robot to demonstrate & inspire at football games every week, and more. It’s my job to ensure our students are ready for build season and I’m sorry to say that making a documentary video doesn’t help us out in that aspect.
Every team has their priorities and I don’t think you have the right to make a judgement call on a team’s character because they didn’t do a video for FIRST.
Let me rephrase:
Why can’t we BE the FIRST story and TELL it at the same time?
And with that I will take off me teacher hat and step down from my soapbox.
Because we don’t have ENOUGH FIRST stories available to do the telling!
Let me explain this one: Each student (and in some cases, the mentors) is a FIRST story, and has one. The problem is that many of them are distinctly unavailable during the summer, or during meetings of another activity, or at some other time that is convenient for telling the story, for a variety of reasons not necessarily relating to lack of interest. A larger team has more members that might be available, but large/huge teams tend to be the exception rather than the rule, particularly if all their students are fully active!
In other words, there is a severe lack of available manpower to do the telling and do what is needed to build a robot* at the same time. Time to get some more inspiration going!
*This “what is needed” includes fundraising, outreach demonstrations, keeping up with schoolwork, robot building/maintenance, moving shops if needed, planning logistics, and all the other stuff that goes into showing up at competition with a robot.
Middle of list 2 is a good year. Deans homework is not in list 2.
I don’t get it: did the fact that it was called “homework” imply to you that it was the same as homework from school, and should thus have been given equal regard? I don’t think that’s a well-founded presumption.
The rationale for doing any kind of homework should be a clear connection to greater understanding, future accomplishments and perhaps even societal benefit in general—not merely the fact that some authority figure said to do it. In that frame of mind, there are plenty of good reasons not to do homework—if it can be expected that greater benefits accrue from those alternative activities.
If the homework wasn’t sufficiently related to the mutual objectives of FIRST and the teams, or untimely, or uninteresting, then we should by all means blame the parties actually responsible, whether they be FIRST’s leaders, our teammates or ourselves.
I think that judging someone based on what their ideals appear to be from one post is also missing what it means to be in FIRST.
Don’t you think this is a little extreme? Around 40 teams were able to send in a robot unveil video for the top 25 premier 3 days after ship day, and over 100 were made at some point last season.
That said, I really hope FIRST utilizes some of the awesome unveil videos that are already being produced. Who wouldn’t be interested after seeing one of 118’s videos? Maybe the next homework assignment should be to make a robot unveil video.
Robot reveals are
a) not always FIRST quality submissions (truthfully, I’d say fewer than 5% are)
b) “made themselves” because everyone builds a robot and puts it on some kind of field at some point in time
c) not outreach events. This video required a worthwhile non-robot activity, and outreach footage requires an outreach activity worth documenting, properly documenting the event, and having enough footage from the event to create a submission FIRST-quality
d)made during a time where students are not taking AP exams, state exams, and finals, prepping for graduation, and teams are not changing the guard in leadership and starting to fund for their next cycle.
I don’t know about your team, but whenever I’ve been on a team making a submission for something, you put the award submission/robot/chairman’s video/judges handout/etc. through a battery of criticism and scrutiny. Keep in mind that these are things that we should be doing and try to do properly every year. This is different than an ideal target but not one without any pitfalls associated with not doing it. Sure it’s something that, if I was on a team, I would want them to do it, but teams easily can find other priorities that range from recruiting to funding their next season, or those priorities become problems that find them.
To document whatever cool thing you’re doing, you would need not only the people actually heading up the activity/event/thing to follow through on the plan, you need to have people there almost specifically to properly document it. Then if you have these standards in place for all other FIRST submissions, you put through the ringer, all over the summer.
Say I’m making excuses (I don’t know who for, I am not actively associated with a team), say I’m totally off base, but, well…
Just like the ancient trifecta of worn-out debates on Chief Delphi (“mentor-built” robots, adults as coaches, and building a second robot for practice) these are all totally optional things that teams have the luxury of choosing to forgo if they wish, or are backed into a corner by a dearth of the resources necessary to even consider any of these decisions (low mentor availability, low revenue), and I’m pretty sure we’ve all resolved to reach a loose consensus of “Whatever you do in your team is your business.”
Yet here, we have seen even more extreme debate over an even smaller issue. I guess you could call that the status quo here, I guess you could say ignorance is a two-way street, and I guess everyone could talk in circles for weeks on end about how their position is superior empirically, morally, and Dean Kamen himself came down from Mt. Sinai to preach the exact words you speak… but at the end of the day, whatever you do on your team is your business. I’m confident FIRST will still be here tomorrow even though few teams did their Dean’s List homework. Teams will still be out in their community and in their build spaces.
Also, just because it’s been bothering me, all I have to say about this
And out of 3,800 Jr. FLL Teams, none submitted an entry. 0%.
is this:
http://www.reactionface.info/sites/default/files/imagecache/Node_Page/images/1314029819767.png
