Hey all
I’m doing research into the different competences/skills used, learned and taught in FRC. My main focus is on how difficult it is for students to learn them and how difficult it is for mentors to teach them. I would appreciate it if people could fill out the form below and send it to their team, asking for both students and mentors to fill it out (it should not take long). The more people fill out the form, the more information I will have to draw conclusions.
I hope everything is explained clearly inside the form itself, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask!
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Can you make the questions optional? I’ve never really tried programming and therefore didn’t have a good answer option.
Idk, at least from programming the problems are very different from when I started (shortly after dinosaurs) but idk that the absolute “difficulty” of learning is all that different.
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Done, good feedback, thanks!
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I coached FRC for 8 years but now I coach FTC, and am not currently affiliated with an FRC team. Would you still like me to fill out the survey based on my experiences with FRC, and if so how should I answer the “which FRC team are you on” question?
If you’re currently not affiliated with an frc team, but have been in the past, your experience is still valuable. As team number you can enter the team you used to be in
Something you may find is that perceived competency is different from actual competency, and that the years spent do not correlate to actual skill development.
For example, a sophmore with access to the correct resources, motivation, and tolerance for failure/learning can be significantly better than even mentors who’ve been in FIRST for 6+ years, but work in a vacuum. (And I know of a sophmore like this!)
As a result, it may be difficult to determine competency just based on “years spent,”
From a design + technical logistics perspective, you may find that the difficulty of prog/mech/assembly partially depends on the strength of a designer. A good designer can make frc a breeze, (everything is easy to make, put together, and the robot just “works”) a bad one can make every subteam a nightmare.
Is the reason why a person thinks mechanical is hard is because they are new, or because the designer is requiring insane tolerances? Is the designer doing a 3 dof arm with 40 degrees of backlash or are they doing a robust simple elevator that takes a few hours to program? Was there adequate space for electrical or is the difficulty coming from the lack of space or design planning?
I don’t know if you know of the dunning kruger curve, but I’m curious on if there’s any correlation with the data you get and the curve, though I’m not sure how to determine competency.
Additionally, availability to resources may play a factor into the ease of learning, which your sample from Chief Delphi may be slightly biased. I don’t really know of a way to solve this though.
Just a heads up mostly, keep up the work.
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This seems like a cool survey, but none of the skills listed besides logistics and soft skills are part of my FRC experience. I know I’m not the norm, and especially on CD, but I would appreciate options for awards, media, outreach and other such things.
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