I am not opposed to the sharing of information–after the point where is is impossible for teams to copy designs from this year! There are many years worth of prior knowlege and designs already posted without having to share this years designs where everyone can copy them.
To put it simply, when you have two or more groups in the same project, you’re ultimately going to have one of them doing more work than the others. And no matter how much you try to make them equal, there will ultimately be someone coming out ahead on the arrangement. (See also: separate but equal.)
The suggestion of a group of documents on how mechanisms work would hold promise, though. Knowing how a well-done telescoping arm works, for example, would do me better than getting the complete drawings from 233’s robot last season. At least that’s how I see it.
The difference is that I believe that FIRST is a multinational non-profit organization that aspires to transform culture, making science, math, engineering, and technology as cool for kids as sports are today. Experienced teams (and individuals) withholding information from those trying to learn are valuing the competition over learning. I don’t really care if you ever win a tournament. I don’t care very much if we win or not as long as our team does everything right. After you graduate as a youth member of FIRST, the number of tournaments you won will be irrelevant, but what you learn about teamwork, program management, engineering, fabrication, mathematics, and physics will help you the rest of your life.
I suppose it’s a mentor/student thing. A lot of students think FIRST is just a robot competition – but I think it’s an exceptional learning opportunity. If someone thinks it’s all about winning, they will withhold information. If they think it’s about learning, they will share whatever they’ve learned. It’s not like a student joins a FIRST team at 14 years old and reinvents all this from first principles. Nearly all of what all of us know about this has been learned from other people. When we refuse to share that with the next generation of learners, we are cheating them of the chance to do their best, and ourselves of the pleasure of helping someone.
Everyone can follow their own wisdom, but as for me, I will at all times try to answer any question asked in good faith to the limit of my knowledge and experience, especially one from a student or a new mentor. Frankly, I find an attitude an attitude of secrecy disappointing in a FIRST participant. This isn’t NASCAR or Formula One. We’re supposed to be friends.
I’d like to bring this back to FIRST and not society at large. There are teams which will take another teams idea and use it verbatim - is this bad? Maybe. Maybe not. For a rookie team simply understanding how said idea works is a step in the right direction. That simple act of understanding may have just turned on a student to a career in engineering. Seems beneficial to me. Are there teams that abuse this, sure but I’m more interested in turning on that one student the preventing those other teams from copying our work.
Now a returning team simply copying is not what I would like to see. I know I don’t permit it on our team. Innovating and improving on previous (or current) designs is fine. Quite often our design discussions will include statements like “Oh do you remember how team XXX did that in 200X?” then someone will go and find a picture and we will talk about how and why their idea worked well (or poorly). Then we will talk about if it applies to what we are doing and if so try to make it better. We also have many crazy ideas and over the years many of those ideas have worked their way onto our robots for good and bad. I don’t feel that this depends on “Higher Minds” but rather simple creativity and hard work.
Choosing to share a design now or later is a team by team choice. Our team has no rules on what can / can’t be given away before the competitions. I work with engineers who help other teams and we have a fun time sharing ideas some of them even show up in final designs. However no other team is going to create our exact (winning :-)) robot, so I am not worried.
Either way I am always blown away at competitions by the creativity show by all the teams. I am not at all worried that we would EVER end up with 2000 identical robots.
Very few things are black and white in this world. Don’t believe me read FIRST’s rules. Always gray. 
Joshua
This is FIRST, not the real world. I believe my role is to help more than just the students on our team. I do program management and related tasks for money in the real world. At FIRST, and in other volunteer organizations, I do it for free.
As for blackberries, you don’t have to plant them, they just grow. Stop by next August and pick up a couple of tons…
Does anyone recall how teams 60/254 did in 2004? What about teams 22/60/254, 217/229, or 1114/the other triplets did in 2005 (among many other teams)? These teams worked together in their respective years and did very well design-wise and in the rankings.
Like Maddie said, working together on projects will make all of our lives easier in the long run and still allow us to push the envelope with new ideas and mechanisms. If you’re worried about getting credit for stuff you’ve done, the majority of the FIRST community is more than happy to be up front of they’ve copied or borrowed an idea or design from another team. Of course there are some bad apples out there, I’ve run into one in particular, but that’s just life. It’s not a big deal.
Despite apparently not having a team this season you never fail to teach the students, but instead of teaching them how to make Straw Man Fallacies I would suggest teaching them something about mechanics, electronics, or programming instead.
By the way, Blackberry and/or Chicken farming is a profitable market. If it wasn’t, people wouldn’t do it. Not to mention they taste great and can be prepared in a multitude of different ways. Or maybe you meant the PDA Blackberry…
Now I’m getting back to working on my robots with other people…
Our team has always been open with ideas we regularily post updates of our robot and ideas our website.
If a team does copy our design we still have credit for coming up with it, I mean we’ll know and they’ll know, so what else matters?
…besides mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery…
I know that. M.Krass went off on a tangent asserting that protecting proprietary information somehow means that you profit at someone elses expense (a real world situation).
Some of the things we experience, and some of the culture in FIRST translates into engineering / real world experiences and culture, and some do not.
The competition aspect of FIRST puts a lot of energy into the program. Over the years I have seen teams attempt to do off season projects (work on a shifting transmission design, or take the robot places to show other people about FIRST) and sometimes NOBODY shows up - nobody is interested.
The competition between teams is important. What happens before and after ship date is like two different worlds. New students get to ship date and think, wow, this has been great. We have to tell them “you aint seen nothing yet”.
Look at all the teams that take so much pride in 100% student designed and built robots. Why is that? Ownership.
I know that FIRST is not a robot building contest. And I know if you take the robot competition out of FIRST the program would fizzle and die.
Being competitive is a part of human nature. The standard in FIRST is similar to what happens in the real world. People design things, and keep it secret until they are ready to release their product to the market. Then everyone gets to see what they have been up to, and if possible, knock-off products start showing up 6 months to a year later.
Same in FIRST. Many teams openly share what they have done in the past, but want to keep this years design under wraps until ship date, or the 1st regional.
I dont see any conflict there.
…a team forgets to plug in their battery before a match and your team, competing against them, realizes this. You can keep that information to yourself and win the match as a result; or you can share that information, potentially still win and earn increased qualifying points because your opponent’s score will be greater than 0. Profit isn’t synonymous with earning money, Ken.
Experiences in FIRST are not meant to translate into the real world, they’re meant to change it.
If Chrysler figures out how to make an efficient, affordable hydrogen-powered vehicle, they can choose to keep that technology to themselves and charge consumers a premium for it or they can make that technology available to all manufacturers.
One choice let’s their shareholders buy a nice new house and a big screen TV. The other keeps our planet inhabitable for another 1000 years.
I find that it doesn’t help to tell someone exactly how to do something, but rather it’s better to get them thinking about how to do it. Part of FIRST is the journey and then the final product. It’s kind of like the whole discussion on whether or not a team should throw a game for their sister team… a championship trophy is just a piece of plastic without the journey behind it. Sharing design ideas is the exact same thing. We should strive to make our competition better in order to make us make ourselves better!
or they can license the technology to other car manufactures for a reasonable fee, use the money to continue funding their (excellent) R&D department, enjoy the fruits of their labor, and still save the world.
competition and cooperating are both important, and there is a balance between them. Our patent laws give reseach companies protected competition rights for a limited period of time, then their inventions become public domain.
Xerox is a good example. The competition for a good document copy system drove the companys founder to invest his own time and money to invent xerography. Xerox enjoyed a monopoly under their patent, and created a new product line under the protection they had.
When the patent expired (forced cooperation) the competition flooded in like a tidal wave, which drove the prices way down, and forced Xerox to become far more innovative than they had been.
It works both ways. If you take away the competiton we will loose incentive to try new things. If you take away the cooperation then the state of the art of science and technology will become stagnent, because companys will keep the results of their research as trade secrets instead of applying for patents.
Same with FIRST - we need both, the competition and the cooperation.
This is a personal issue of mine, I’m very open to sharing information, though none of the other students on my team are open to it.
What are you losing by sharing a design? Originality? Is that secret design of yours exactly what the winning key in all 71 robots have? (no its not PVC, the other secret)
What are you gaining? Your probably gonna get feed back, constructive critism, ideas to help make your robot better. And by showing what you got ahead of time people know at a competition to make sure to go and check your robot out more in detail. Its all publicity, if people know you got a product theres one step in the marketing process that you’ve got done. As for more specifics, you don’t need to say what kind of sprocket size you have with all your chains, you don’t need to go into detail about it. A picture (or movie) is worth 1000 words.
Why not? You’ve got nothing to lose (and if your saying originality, start looking at the stuff the patent office gave us in the kit)
i dont know if this “tangent” is what the original thread was made for, but it seemed fitting, maybe if the discussion was split? Mods feel free to move it
Disclaimer:
The views expressed below do not necessarily reflect those of the rest of my team.
Now then…
Personally, I believe engineering is not simply about applying this concept, and building that design. Engineering fundamentally comes down to problem solving, and if the students can’t get excited and inspired by the problem solving process because someone has spoon fed them a solution, then nobody wins.
Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime.
One of the most remarkable aspects of FIRST is the variety of different designs seen at the competitions. Without fail, every possible design that we brainstormed and ruled out for whatever reason will have been implemented, and in a way that we may have thought could never work. Yet it does. It’s a learning process throughout, and seeing how everyone else solved the problem after you’ve come up with your own solution is all the more valuable.
In my mind, FIRST is kind of like school. It’s here to teach students about engineering, and inspire them to consider making a career in the fields of science and technology. When I was in school, I learned a whole lot more doing something on my own and comparing it with the solutions and methods of other students than I ever would have if they simply told me how they solved the problem before I started.
I don’t believe anyone is saying that information should never be shared. It’s simply a matter of when. Allow teams to experience the problem solving stage without influencing them. Necessity is the mother of invention - but if you no longer need anything because something has been given to you, then there’s a loss of creativity. And sure, you can argue that simply improving someone else’s solution could make it worthwhile, but I stand by the argument that you should come up with your own solution first.
Perfect! This is exactly what I was trying to say through my posts earlier, though unfortunately I came across much harsher.
Nice job Kevin!
The problem with your analogy is that a large portion of these students (at least the ones I work with) don’t know what a fish is, that fish are good to eat, how to recognize a fish when they see one, and how to catch one if they know all of the above. This isn’t about a student trying to choose between a V-belt and a timing belt, it’s about them not even knowing that such things as belts exist. This is very common to rookie team members and to rookie teams. Assuming that rookie mentors are all MIT-trained NASA engineers who custom fabricate motorcycles in their spare time is a bad idea, too. We helped a mentor for a small team last year who barely knew which end of a screwdriver to hold. The girls at his school wanted a team, so he did his best, and several PNW teams helped them finish their robot (on Thursday of the tournament).
I will continue to answer any question about technology, approaches, strategy, or “how are you going to do this” that anyone on CD asks in good faith and that I think I can meaningfully address. I think it is how I can best advance the goals of FIRST.
well, they reflect some of our views quite well
Woodie once said he wanted to make our brains hurt. And I don’t think he was talking about getting beaned by 198 grams of foam…
Here, here (or is it hear, hear? - oh well). This is another one of those discussions that occur every year.
I agree that the struggle to solve the problem is part of what is great about FIRST. There are a lot of great designs from past years that the teams can learn from - how to build drive trains, arms, grippers, transmissions, etc. These mechanisms can be modified and tweaked to make a basic shooter for this year - there’s no reason to give away detailed shooter designs.
There’s a great saying: “you can fight without ever winning, but you can never win without a fight.” This doesn’t literally mean you actually need to fist-fight - it means that in order to gain something, you need to struggle a bit. Similar to “no pain, no gain”. I’m all for letting every team struggle on their own; not because I don’t want them to beat me on the field - it’s because I want them to maximize their learning process.
If you build something that someone else designed, you learn what that mechanism does. By being forced to come up with the design on your own, you not only learn WHY it works (which is also important), but you also learn how difficult it can be to solve these problems, and why a good problem solving process is needed, and why research is important, and why getting an education is important - these are the major goals of FIRST.
I’m torn between my inner hippie and my practical knowledge of engineering when it comes to IP debates, so I’ll save that for another day (generally I lean towards consumer rights - put a price on IP so companies strive for it, but limit the power of a patent so as not to shut out the competition).
However, when it comes to FIRST, I think people are overprotective of their ideas to some extent. For the most part, the brilliance in engineering in FIRST is in the implementation, not the raw concept. Our robot is shooting balls with a spinning wheel - not this years’ most unique idea, but there are a few things we think we do differently than the competition. When people go on Delphi and try to talk in spy-like secrecy about the fact that they are using a spinning shooter, I just scratch my head.
Two, the build season is 6 weeks long. Almost every team out there will be working on something until the last day or so. If you don’t have your concept ironed out in the first couple days and you don’t have a working drivetrain in a week or two, you are behind schedule and will REALLY be in a bind. If I were to post my brilliant ideas on Delphi right now, in week three, no one would be able to implement them in time - at least not the same way I did. So in a way, FIRST IP is protected because of the limited period of time to duplicate design.
FIRST management has also consistently given nudging in the direction of more disclosure. This year every technical award winner will be asked to write an entry for a FIRST book - and I guarantee FIRST teams will be its #1 buyer.
Lastly, if I’m unsettled about propriety during the build season, I am absolutely dumb-founded by propriety during the off season. I’ve been at off season events, seen something cool, asked about it, and been told “no, that’s a secret.” I can’t see any defense for this…it’s not like I’m being force fed a design and not learning about my robot - I’ve recognized a feature that intrigues me and want to learn more.
Competition is what draws people into FIRST. Cooperation is what keeps them there.
Long time reader, first time posting.
Part of the problem I see with the idea of sharing designs follows along the “slippery slope” argument. Where does it stop? If we are going to provide kids with ideas why not designs? Why not the (custom) parts? If we give them the parts, why don’t we assemble it for them? Maybe we should just outsource the design/assembly and order a robot? They can still compete with it. If the students aren’t designing things, what are they doing?
In the end, maybe a team doesn’t have the best design, or the best idea, but next year they will learn more from their experiences when they can look back and discover how and why they made that decision. Now, with that said, I don’t think there is a single team within FIRST that wouldn’t bend over backwards to help any rookie team to design/implement their own ideas, but giving them your design would take away that aspect of the learning process from a team that probably needs it most.
Every team has their own philosophy, strategy and attitude. Every design decision involves some cost-vs-benefit consequence and this need to be evaluated by each team. What is “best” for one team may not be right for another team. Help people learn to solve problems; don’t give them the solution.
I also wanted to mention that yes, FIRST is about getting students excited about math, science and engineering (first and foremost). What is MORE exciting than a group of students designing that small competitive advantage (on their own) that takes them to the national championship?
I haven’t been with FRIST for as long as many of the people that I work with, but I have noticed an amazing trend in my 3 years: The more you expect from the students, the more they will accomplish.
Update: Here is a a “proof” of my above logic:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pictures.php?&action=single&picid=13260