Sippin' on the haterade

FIRST General Forum
1

Now that several days have gone by and I have digested the events of this weekend, I want to address a recurring issue at many regionals. At GTR, it sounds like many teams don’t like 1114 because they win every year, the same seems to hold true for teams like 148 and 217 at their “home” regionals. While not comparing 1771 to any of those those teams, we have done well at Peachtree for the last 4 years or so, and we are starting to see some of the same behavior from other teams there. I sit in the stands with the team during matches, so I don’t hear any of what goes on in the queuing line or on the field, but the students do. They heard many comments such as " where did you buy that robot?", “how much did you have to pay someone to build that for you?”, “how many mentors did it take to build that robot” and “It must be nice to have unlimited funds to build with.” In addition, we played nine matches during quals, and every match we solicited the opposing alliance teams to balance with us on the coopertition bridge. Only three times did we get a team to attempt a balance, two of which were successful.

Having said that, let me tell you a little about team 1771. We have ~18 students on our roster, about six of which show up with any regularity, and four that were there every day, week in week out. The teacher sponsor is a sponsor in name only, to give school legitimacy to the team. For mentors, there is me (a mechanical engineer), and one college student mentor, studying mechanical engineering. So we had six people that showed up every day, four students and two mentors, with a few students that showed up with some regularity. I should mention at this point that we invited kids from a nearby school (Lanier High School) that plans to have a team next year to participate with us this year, and had several join our kids this year, one of whom was our human player.

This year we lost one of our larger sponsors, so our entire budget, not including entry fee, was ~$4,000. That budget includes all costs associated with the running the team: T-shirts, sponsor recognition, robot parts, etc. I don’t know how much money other teams have, but I would not classify our team as rich, or having unlimited funds.

Finally, design and build. On kickoff day, we had a big turnout of students. One rule we have on kickoff day is that no-one can talk about robots. We spend the whole day talking about the game. How do we want to play the game? What are some good strategies for playing the game? What are obstacles to overcome? etc. Then we develop a strategy and a game plan. This is an interactive process, with input from all students and mentors. After the first day, we try to figure out how to execute that strategy, is it even possible? etc. We then prototype different aspects of the planned design. Often what we find out in this stage causes us to re-evaluate our game plan or strategy. Again, this is an iterative process, with input from all students and mentors. Once we finalize the design, the CAD work starts. We don’t have many kids that can use CAD programs (CAD is not taught at our school), but one of the Lanier kids was well versed in Inventor, so he did the CAD for the frame, with some guidance. The rest of the CAD work was done by myself and the college mentor, with constant input from the kids.

While we didn’t have a lot of money, we did have some great sponsors in the laser cutting field, one of whom cut out the wood frame for us, and the other cut out our aluminum parts.

Once we had the parts, plus a lot machining on our lathe and mill, we built the bot. Everyone that was there pitched in to build the robot. Yes, the mentors helped, but with only four students there, all the help we could get was required in order to get it built.

Edit: I forgot to mention programming. I used FORTRAN in college, so I know nothing about C++. 100% of the robot programming was done by a 17 year old senior. He had no outside help other than suggestions on algorithms and interpolation.

So, when someone makes a comment such as mentioned above, it is not fair to the students or the mentors, all of whom put in many hours every week for six to eight weeks to get to where we are. Comments like this just show the ignorance and prejudice of the person making the comment (prejudice means to pre-judge without facts, not racist)

2

Reading your story is certainly interesting. Since I’m not familiar with your team, I’ll respond regarding teams I am more familiar with, which may or may not have dynamics similar to your own.

Personally, what can make me begin to dislike a team isn’t budget, or even mentor experience, but how much the kids actually work on the robot.

I know you don’t “buy” your robot, and I wasn’t trying to imply that. What often bugs me is where mentors do much of the design work, and sponsors do much of the machining work. It really seems that if it shouldn’t be impossible to built the robot you want to build with students. Why not teach more kids CAD? Why have your students machine all the parts in-house? To me, the design and machining experiences are one of the things that makes the FIRST experience truly valuable.

To me (and there certainly are a lot of differing opinions on Chief Delphi on this), the students are the ones that should be learning, and the best way to foster this learning is hands on. Ask yourself if they learn much from others making the design and others giving them parts. Is this a “lesser of two evils” that allows students more learning somewhere else? In my opinion, no. There is very rarely anything that needs to be done in the build process that a student cannot do.

This is my opinion, and I know it may be unpopular. You may even see it as part of the “haterade,” and if so, I’m sorry. I only want to present my thoughts and provoke discussion, not anger.

3

Even if a hypothetical team somewhere “buys that robot”, “pays someone to build that for them”, “uses how many mentors to build that robot” and “has unlimited funds to build with”, and I say this with absolute seriousness,

WHO CARES?!??!!

Is the team celebrating Science and Technology?
Is the team creating Inspiration?
Is the team Recognizable?

If any or all of these answers is even a little bit “yes”, then Mission Accomplished.

It’s a learning process for teams and individuals to understand this. It took me about 4 years for it to sink through. I don’t believe any team is 100% student built or 100% mentor built (for those that claim to be completely SB, who do you think created the KOP? It wasn’t 15 year old kids!)

If I were in your shoes, I’d take those interactions - while quite unfortunate - as a compliment. Perhaps you could create a flyer outlining the different abilities of your robot, and highlight the team member who spearheaded each component. Invite the naysayers to your shop. Point out to them that students are in the pit working on the robot, not adults. Haters gonna hate; kill 'em with kindness.

Congrats on the ICA.

4

While I agree that “students should be learning” (that is what a student does), I think you are misinformed as to the purpose of FIRST. We are not trying to teach kids to be an engineer or to design a robot, or even to machine parts. The purpose of FIRST is to INSPIRE kids, to make them take a look at engineering and technology as a career choice. If they learn something about CAD, or designing, or machining, that’s just a bonus.

Using our model, how successful has our team been at that goal? Let’s look at a few examples. The founder of the team graduated from MIT and is a grad student there now. Not the best example because he was destined to be an engineer from the day he was born. In 2009, 100% of the seniors on the team went on to college in engineering. I know of three that had never thought of engineering as a career before being involved with the team. By the way, all three of those happened to be girls. I consider that special because there are so few women that choose engineering as a career. In 2010, only one of the seniors did not choose engineering. She wanted to be a veterinarian. she has since thought about it and may change her major to biomedical engineering. Last year, we again had 100% of the seniors go into engineering. This year’s crop are all planning to go into engineering. Every year, a high percentage of the team is female.

So is our model successful in inspiring kids to go into engineering and technology fields? I doubt you will find anyone who can honestly say that it is not.

5

All I can say is that I’m deeply sorry to hear this. The worst thing to read in this post is that the high-school students are the ones getting attacked. If someone wants to say a robot is “mentor built” go after the mentors [Insert I’m a man, I’m 40 rant].

I feel a lot of the time people forget in the heat of battle that these are high school students who are trying to get inspired about engineering. Claiming that a group of students hard work isn’t there own might be enough in some cases to lead them away from engineering.

In 2009, as the coach, my human player committed a penalty at championship. While I was getting chewed out by our alliance partners coach after the match, I stopped him and simply thanked him for coming after me and not freshman who made the mistake. It allowed me to calm the student down, have a laugh with him, then go to the practice field and work with him 1 on 1 to make sure the penalty wouldn’t happen again.

I’m not going to lie, as a mentor, I advise my students not to get the robot painted. It usually ends up that we don’t have enough time, but the advice is out of protection for the students. Once you have a professional looking machine, the "mentor built " card comes out.

6

These comments are unfortunate, but jealousy does set in. When a group of students sees a robot that is absolutely an engineering spectacle and then look at their robot made of plywood and c-channel, they tend to get a little jealous. Little do they know, it doesn’t matter what your robot looks like or even how your robot plays the game, if your robot functions the way it is supposed to function, it is an engineering success. But when you see a ‘perfectly engineered’ robot, you just want to believe that the team ‘cheated’ in a way. It is completely the wrong attitude, you should go to those people that make those comments and compliment their robot, ask them about their design process, give them tips and hints on how they could master your techniques.

As far as people not wanting to do the cooperition bridge with you, this could just be strategy. I know at Waterford, HOT was wanting to do the coopertition bridge every match…and they did it 11 our of 12 matches. The one they didn’t get it on was a failed balance, not being rejected the opportunity. I don’t know if it is just like this in Michigan, but the elite veteran teams are teams that we look up to. Being from Crevolution, a spin-off from the Thunderchickens, it will take quite some time before we can compete on their level year after year…but we will get there. We have adapted many of their practices and it shows, this year we took home our first ever banner. It took 4 years of biting at TC’s ankles to finally get our own banner.

To the teams making those comments, I have 2 things to say:

  1. Coopertition in every single match, you can’t seed high without it.
  2. Stop ridiculing teams and start learning from them instead.
7

I think that in general people should worry more about what they are doing, and less about what others are doing. That goes for a lot more than FIRST.

8

Martin,
This behavior really gets me steamed. How can any team know what another team does in the confines of their own shop/school/sponsor? Where does it say that students are the only ones that are part of the inspired masses? Where does it say that we should dislike a team because of our perception on how that team decides to best run it’s program, inspire it’s students or participate in FIRST? So let me state the facts one more time for effect…

We believe that our students get the most out of this program when we stand together and work side by side. We are not a ‘rich’ team nor do we have sponsors with deep pockets. We are simply an old team (1996) and have collected a lot over the past 17 years the same as any team that has been around for multiple years. We have learned over the years, mostly from others, how to best utilize our resources, design our robots, and compete with other teams. Above all, that formula changes all the time as our student population and mentor group changes. Our students this year are one of the best groups we have had and they seem to get better with each passing year. I consider them colleagues and will do whatever they ask. I am proud of them and every mentor that works on the team. I am also very proud of every team I see that builds a robot whether fully student built or not, mentored or not, rich or not. I have never seen a team that has not built on what they have accomplished each year and become more successful in our mission which is to inspire. My only regret is not being able to do more to keep teams from closing their program.

If you believe in your program and that what your team does/runs is best for your students regardless of your formula, then keep doing it!

9

Very well put. And congratulations on doing so well with what you had to work with. Rather than being the object of scorn these other students should see you as a source if inspiration and information on how to achieve without a lot of resources. From what I have seen so far this year, I believe that most teams in our region have difficulty raising much more than about $4000 in most years, so learning how to make that money go as far as possible is really important.

But I have been struggling with a different aspect of the same problem. Our team has had mixed luck over the years both with funding, numbers of mentors and students, and support from the school. Right now we are really struggling as many teams are due to a loss of financial support. The students go to the regionals and sometimes fail to see how many teams are in the same boat. What they do see are the power house teams with scores of mentors, a fancy robot and pit, perhaps even their own trailer to hall all of their stuff around. They go to the pits of these teams and pick up brochures and business plans and they say this is what our team needs to do.

It is really great that there are teams like that out there, and I am glad that so many of them are so willing to share information and advice. However, it it is not always useful for our students to get too focused on what those power house teams are doing. Most teams will never have even one large sponsor. The math just does not work out. If we are to ever reach Dean’s goal of a team in every high school it cant. There simply are not enough large companies or enough grant money out there for all of them to compete at that level.

So where does that leave us. Many teams will probably not know from year to year where the money will come from to pay for even one regional. But that is no reason obsess over getting some huge sponsor. Sure, try for the grants and do whatever you can to raise money, but never begrudge teams that have more funds. What we need to do is to always strive to do the best we can with whatever we have available. After all, it is the learning and experience that is most important. Hopefully one day our team will be as successful as yours in leveraging what we have. If that day comes, I hope we have found a way to leave the sort of sentiment your team has seen a long way behind us.

10

It is unfortunate when events like this occur to teams, especially at your home regional where everyone should know you and how your team operates. However it does sound as if you have the right attitude knowing that the folks that spoke ill of your team are just drinking the haterade and trying to come up with reasons as to why they could not reach your level of play. Which are all false and baseless as you have explained.

Once again 1771 had a great robot this year, here is to a future where events like this do not take place and other teams aspire to be great rather than attacking the ones who are.

11

I feel the need to jump in on this. There were definitely some teams floating around with some attitude.

For those of you out in CD land, 1311 and 1771 were on the same alliance and I’m glad to say, alliance captain. For years it has been our goal to catch up with 1771. I’m comfortable saying we finally got there.

Instead of sitting around whining, this team worked their butts off. Very often starting before the sun rises, and ending late at night.

About money. We stretch money till it screams. If you walk around a typical event, there is a ga-gillion dollars worth of parts being thrown around in boxes like the daily trash. You don’t need a ton of money to be successful. You need a ton of resourcefulness. We count and inventory every part all the way down to the lock washer. It is a crime how many teams treat their parts and tools.

Resourceful - guess what one of the factors was in keeping this team #1 seeded ? TWO RUBBER BANDS.

If you look at our sponsor board, half or more is material or services “in-kind” which is as good as cash. Money is an on-going struggle. People think we are rich and we are definitely not. Straining every day.

The students own this program, hardware, software, and Chairman’s in a HUGE way. My personal goal is to spend time this summer and learn how the students designed this robot in Inventor. We don’t have single mentor on the team that knows how.

This link take you to our Chairman’s video, but if you take the first 15 seconds, and substitute ‘Chairman’s’ for ‘Robot’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4FA5RBWVg

A large point in this video is to work hard, think hard, and have fun doing it.

12

The # 1 seed had a c-channel kitbot base.
If I’m not mistaken, the 2 seed had a plywood frame, but Martin can correct me if I’m wrong.

13

You bring up an interesting question. Are these the most valuable skills that students can generate through the FIRST program? Answer as you will, but I’d answer with a resounding “no.”

I would much rather have my students designing parts, than building parts based on someone else’s drawings. I’d rather have my parts manufactured at an outside facility, precision machined from a student’s drawing, so that the students can see EXACTLY what they designed come to life. I’d rather have my students learn to prototype, design, think, and iterate. I’d rather have my students learn how to think like a software engineer, than how to punch Java code into a computer. It doesn’t matter who builds the robot. It doesn’t matter who drafts the robot. It matters that the students learn what it means to engineer a robot.

And one could argue that even that doesn’t matter. The bottom line is, FIRST is about inspiration. It is about being inspired to go into STEM fields, not about showing off what you can do with your current skill set. It is about working with mentors, and being shown what’s possible…what you didn’t think could be done…what CAN be done. Good FIRST teams teach their students that they can do, what they didn’t think they could, through mentors. Good FIRST teams even show members of other teams the amazing things that can be done with good engineering.

Without teams as strong as 1771, we wouldn’t have a constant, dependable source of inspiring robots and teams. We wouldn’t have anyone to look up to. Sure, there would still be an imbalance in the teams…some students would of course come into the program more prepared than others, and sometimes a bunch of particularly skilled students pair up and make something amazing. The team would probably fall back to mediocrety in a few years, since the students would have no incentive to stick around in a “student only” program, and we’d loose our source of inspiration. And, most of the haters would still find a reason to hate. If they find a reason to hate teams better than them now, they’d find a reason to hate later.

And the majority of us? We’d look like this. Trust me. I’ve been there. You don’t want to.

Finally, a reminder. It is NEVER in anyone’s best interest to hate on teams, because they may run themselves differently than yours, or value different things. Doing so only drags the program down.

14

I always find it ironic that the teams vomit acid on the Elites time and time again but the Elites are the ones in their pits fixing their robots at the competition so they can get out there and play. They are often the teams that supply a good portion of the volunteers so the event happens as well. There’s alot more to those team than just a robot and blue banners. All it takes sometimes is just more than a moment to look at not just what they are but who they are.

15

Martin,

I’ll start out by saying Haters gone’ hate! Apparently this is becoming the price you pay for being a top team in a region.

Now with that little bit out of the way, I will say that I was actually standing around while some of these comments were said and was frankly shocked, considering the teams that were saying them. With us (2415) being in the same situation the past few years, I have been hearing more and more mindless banter directed at our team in addition to 1771 and until this year it hasn’t bothered me. However, this year, multiple times have I heard that I have personally designed our entire robot. As much as I would like to take credit for it, this is a blatantly wrong comment and it irks me that other students and mentors alike don’t believe that students are capable of designing our machine. It has been a strange year for me, I have never had a problem with people complaining about us having money and resources because that doesn’t personally insult my students but once teams start insinuating that students aren’t capable of what they clearly are, I take offense.

It seems many of these “haters” would be much better served to take the time to talk to my students who designed the majority of the robot and the same for all these teams that are traditionally in the crossfire for being “mentor built and designed”. I can’t remember a single person from any of these teams that were so eager to call us out actually taking the time to talk to myself or any of the students who were responsible for the majority of the build and design. It might just inspire some of these adults as to what they should expect from their students with a little bit of guidance and mentoring.

Finally, of course their are teams with insane budgets and that are fully mentor built and designed but WHO CARES. FIRST has never taken a stance on this subject because these teams still manage to inspire kids to go into the engineering field which is the entire point of the program.

16

It took us 9 years to get there… And as awesome as it would have been to get a robot winner trophy, it is REALLY awesome seeding ahead of 1771…

lovin it man…

There are a lot of rookie teams in Georgia, and a few vets that need some help. We sent out an email to all the rookies yesterday asking them to keep working on their robot because we are going to have a series of mini-tournaments from May till September. We have not yet contacted the veteran teams.

No, it will not be IRI or GRITS, or Rah Cha Cha Ruckus. So for all you powerhouses wanting to spend a summer rocking and rolling, back up…

It will be oriented toward improving these weaker teams. All this leads up to GRITS in October.

What we need is strong vets is to work alongside these other teams to help them improve. Any vet team that wants to jump in contact me offline.

While I’m here - next year 1311 is going out of town chasing our non-robot awards, Peachtree will be robot only for us. We are looking for an out of town regional to go to.

Ed

17

This is not a new debate. A lot of folks think that T in FIRST is teaching and forget that the I is for Inspiration.

Inspiration is the yardstick that all things FIRST should be measured against (imho). It the kids learning new skills gets us to more inspired kids then let’s get teaching. If kids seeing engineers and scientists do their magic behind a glass window gets kids inspired, then let’s do more of that. The I think the optimal case is somewhere in between.

Two things that we should keep in mind.

First, it is about more than the kids on FIRST teams. I really believe that if it is about just our kids on our teams, then FRC is a very inefficient vehicle. Really. I am sure that my kids would be just a psyched about competing in a half dozen (much easier and much cheaper) robot competitions. I am equally sure that the community AROUND my team would not be as impressed with a tabletop robot competition. The size and spectacle of FRC make an impact that justifies the difficulty and expense (again, imho).

Second, I STILL think back to Hexcaliber, my rookie rookie year (the first year I was a rookie :wink: Our team was lucky to have a robot at all with all the mistakes I made designing that robot. And here was Hexcaliber. You could literally shave by looking at the mirror shine they had on their seat motor cans. I have no idea if how much the kids on that team did, but I can assure you, our kids were really impressed (“Not only does that machine kill at playing the game, they had enough time and energy to polished their MOTORS!”). We all swore that next year, our robot would be awe inspiring as well.

So… …this is an age old debate. I know which side I come down on.

Joe J.

18

This is the 8th season for FIRST Team 1296. We have gone through a progression like many of the teams in this thread. These days we do not do a lot of large-scale machine work but it has nothing to do with money. We have 2 in-kind sponsors who help us. One makes commerical window frames and can cut out robot chassis built of reinforced 1" Al extrusion. The other is a first-class sheet metal company that can laser anything we need. Should we not take advantage of sponsors like these? Plus we have always had numerous EE mentors to help make the electronics and software fool-proof. But the students develop the design, learn CAD, wire the robot, write much of the code and other useful activities.

148 is a few miles up the road and we have always looked up to them. Their mentors have been very helpful over the years, extremely generous. There is a playful rivalry I reckon (because many of the 148 mentors work with our mentors or have kids in our schools) but we harbor no jealousy of 148 and never did.

I think it is a good thing to learn how to run a mill, lathe, break, sheer etc. It helps one create a build-able, testable design. But in reality most engineers do not do this day-to-day, they do the math and produce drawings.

19

It is very unfortunate to hear about this going on. Being a student and a mentor, like many people in this community, we know how hard it is to build and program in six weeks. Personally the best part about this whole experience is when its over and the competition arrives and all you can do is dream, think, and talk about robotics. Then the big day arrives and you see your robot out there competing it just brings everything altogether.

As an alumnus I frequently come back to the school and help the team anyway I can especially since we have only 1 teacher in charge + a couple other alumni to help. However this year as much as I wanted to participate I was taking far too many courses along with work and just didn’t have the time. Towards the end of the 6 week process when I stopped by to check up on the team I saw this unbelievable robot already done, programs running well. I was very proud and only comes to show how much a small team can do so much.

I don’t care too much about teams who actually paid for professionals and had their robot made. As much as it may benefit them on the arena, the students are the ones who truly are scarred from this. They get deprived of learning science and technology and fully experience something as great and wonderful as FIRST.

Although this probably goes on in every regional, I see very little of this negativity in NYC. Competing in the NYC regional we are blessed with a wonderful audience and remarkable robots everywhere you look. Although teams do have a reputation of doing well in prior events the competition is always up for grabs.

CONGRATULATIONS ON ALL THE SUCCESS YOU’VE HAD TEAM #1771

20

I also want to weigh in here. When I was a student, our team had a great sponsor, and four to six engineers from the sponsor would come help us out (not to mention great parents as well). We were a large team, and the different engineers were all interested in different things, so the mentor student ratio was pretty good all around in my view. We were lucky enough to have a machine shop in the school, and our teacher (A WFA winner) was the shop teacher and knew how to inspire kids, and guide design decisions with a light touch. The fancy parts of our robots were still made out of plywood and welded metal. I’ll end this part by saying my experience in FIRST as a student made me want to go into engineering, and made me want to be a Mentor.

When I was a mentor with 1318 in WA, I worked for a machine tool company that made waterjets. The school had some drill presses, and that was about it for machine tools. Our milling machine was a bunch of freshmen with files. We had a few students very interested in CAD and design, and we spent a lot of time together talking about how to design with the given tools in mind. I got them thinking about how to design things that can be made out of flat parts. Our 2008 and 2009 robots were jointly designed, but students had the last say for final design. One student was taught how to make DXFs for the waterjet, and I’d cut them out at lunch and after work. The students got a tour of our shop and got to learn about how our machine tools are similar to the robots they build (and what a machine shop looks like). I don’t think it should matter that I cut out the parts instead of the students. It was an exercise in ordering machined parts from a vendor. They had to learn about drawings, tolerances, and making sure it worked in cad before ordering. It’s very much like a real engineering company. Our 2009 robot went on to seed between 111 and 67 on Galileo, and the students all went on to good college programs in things they enjoy.

This year with 2151, I didn’t have access to a waterjet, but I do have a 3D printer. The tool situation is similar (they at least have a band saw). We were going to try to do CAD this year, and have separate Design/Build phases, but one mentor got sick, and the programming mentor had to travel for work for long periods during the season. The students turned out to be not interested enough in CAD for it to be effective, so we basically went to design while building. They decided the basic outline of what they wanted, but it took a lot of prodding to get them to prototype and build things. We made great strides this year, but I would estimate I designed at least 35% of the robot. I did not get to go into the design process as much as I would have liked with the students, but I think we’ll still have a good competition. I’ve heard the students talk about the “rich, mentor built” teams, and have tried to discourage that as being necessarily bad. Most of the 3D printed parts on our robot were designed and printed by me. Towards the end, two of our seniors got to get into the process, and they have parts on the robot that they designed.

I guess my main point is that each team is working with the resources it has. Some have money, some have engineers, some have a machine shop, some have time, some have large numbers of people, and some have tenacity and resourcefulness. The nice thing is that any combination of these elements can create a successful robot and can inspire students to learn. I no longer focus strictly on Science and Technology, but just about learning and thinking in general. FIRST is good at teaching how to run a business, how to build confidence, how to present and talk to strangers, how to build things, how to use tools, how to write, etc.

Our robot isn’t the prettiest or the best, but it works. 111’s robot will be prettier (They know how to make a robot look good), other teams in the area will have faster and stronger robots. (This is my first year in this regional, so I don’t know the other robots/teams well). Our mentors picked up tools and helped build the robot. Some teams frown on that to the point of extremes. We all do and think different things, and that is what makes FIRST great.

TL;DR, I agree with Taylor here. Student built vs. Mentor built is not as important as inspiring students to go on to do great things.