Teachers just designed our entire robot and the students are barely getting a say in anything. What do we do? 
I used to love FRC, but now it’s misery every day but I don’t want to quit. Help? ):
Here is FIRST’s FRC stuff for mentors, maybe you wanna send your teacher (s) a link to it http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/content.aspx?id=14034#III
It’s time for a meeting. Do the other members of the team feel the same way you do? If so, have the student leadership speak with the teacher. Ask for more input in design. Ask for more ownership of the Team. Teachers are human. Sometimes we let our excitement get the better of us.
All I can say is stick with it. 461 has one of the most student-driven teams out there, so its hard for me to know what that feels like:o
However, if you can prove to them that you guys really want to do the designing yourselves and that you’re up for the task, maybe they’ll let you. Don’t be afraid to be a bit assertive.
Good luck,
-duke
Talk to your teacher. As a mentor, we have to walk that fine line between applying The Stuff We Know and Doing Your Homework For You. Sometimes, we go a little too far off that track, but sometimes we butt in for a reason. The only way to know what the case is here is to talk with your teachers in your calmest, most professional tone. (Coming in shouting and fighting gets you nowhere.)
Just an aside: I notice this is your first post, and one with no team listed. If your aim is to be anonymous while discussing a topic, the FIRST-A-Holics Mailbox may be of interest to you. It’s also the legal way to be anonymous, as duplicate accounts are not allowed under CD’s rules.
Sometimes mentors need to be reminded about what the program is really about. Is it about building robots? Yes, but only so far as it relates to the underlying goal of INSPIRING students. So what it’s REALLY about is the inspiration and learning opportunities that are there. The robot building is just a process that allows this inspiration and learning to occur. However, if you feel that the learning and inspiration is not happening, it is a situation that needs to be brought to the attention of your lead mentor/adviser.
Also try not to make a distinction between “teacher designs” and “student designs” but think of them all as “team designs”. This isn’t to say that it would be okay for teachers to make designs and decisions without student input or doing it with students or vice versa. As long as teachers and students work alongside one another throughout the design process, there is no reason to think that there have not been inputs into these team designs by both groups.
Also remember that these robots are sophisticated machines. In most cases, the expertise of mentors/teachers is necessary for a robot to be built and operate.
For the students reading this i have one thing to add;
Mentors, whether or not engineers, teachers etc., have a lot on their mind. So take it easy when they get frazzled.
When my colleague and I hear 17 different robot designs, ideas and details we sit one on one or by group and sift through the ideas. At times, the two mentors take over the conversation and students sit idle listening. There is a reason for this:
- We tend to foresee interferences
- We have a lot more experience with the technical issues associated with systems
- We love to K.I.S.S.<----keep what you’re doing as simple and to the point as possible and within the means of your facilities.
Other than that, step aside and talk one on one and show that you have concerns. It helps if you try to develop your ideas/designs instead of blurting out a wiley coyote/ACME idea.
Hope this helps.
I’ll chime in here and, like everyone else, tell you to talk with them. This isn’t a terribly uncommon problem in FIRST - after all, every year I’ve been a mentor I’ve gone home from kickoff and sketched out several robot designs. it’s cool fun, interesting stuff to do. Despite that, however, I’ve never brought one of those sketches in for the team.
We had a similar issue in 2008 (our second year) - the mentors were doing too much, and the students not enough. The students brought the issue up, talked about it, and we worked with them to improve things that year. I’ll tell you right off - we didn’t improve much that year. It’s hard to make a radical change in the middle of the season. But we did work with the students to layout the groundwork for improving. We came to an understanding that, in order for the team to be successful, roles on the team had to be clearly defined. We needed clear expectations of what our jobs were. And that summer, we worked out that document. 2009 was better than 2008, although it was still largely mentor-driven. 2010 was even better still. This year, we’re almost entirely student designed and student driven. As mentors, we walk around and offer thoughts on discussions, but we aren’t leading the talks. We aren’t leading the experiments or the prototypes. We’re simply helping the students where needed, and when they ask for it.
So please, open the dialog with your teachers/mentors. If it helps, write out the issues in an anonymous letter for them. But above all, keep things constructive. You don’t want to push such dedicated people away - you want to talk about what makes FIRST so great, and how you want your team to evolve into something that gives you an even better understanding of the design process. Let them know that you appreciate the time and effort they’ve put in, and that you love their dedication - but they need to find a way to include the students and allow you to share in the process. The last thing you want is for this to turn into a finger pointing game, or to sound whiny and immature. You have legitimate complaints, and if you approach them with the right attitude, you can get a lot accomplished.
Well, regardless of how you might feel about your mentors’ involvement in the design process, just remember that without their involvement you don’t have a team. They are also under pressure to keep your build program on schedule. Depending on the schedule for your team’s build, you may NEED to have a design ready to go. NOW.
It is also important for students to know that you can’t just show up on the first day of build and design a robot. In my experience new students have been able to contribute ideas to the design process, but only my most experienced students (three to five years’ experience) can really visualize the entire machine from gears through to grippers based on sketches and drawings.
If you want to have more impact on your team’s design process, I’d suggest getting as involved as possible in this year’s build, learning what works and what doesn’t, and taking notes of your ideas. In the off season, learn to use Inventor, and re-build a virtual robot that addresses the issues you saw. Talk to your teachers about how your design would work.
When you start next year’s build you’ll have more experience with design, you’ll have Inventor to help you express your ideas, and your teachers will know that you are serious about wanting to contribute ideas.
Sometimes the reason people “don’t get to have a say in anything” is because they don’t have very many useful things to say. If you and your teammates learn during build, and keep at it over the off-season, you’ll likely have many useful things to say next year and will be surprised at the impact that you will have on the design.
Jason
I understand your concerns. Can I ask whether or not the students on your team are bringing ideas and designs to the table during the design process? That’s where I believe student’s should begin to show their teacher’s and mentor’s that they are committed. No designs = No Robots so sometimes I feel that the adults need to step up and being the process for their students. But for the past 6 years and now in our 7th year, My philosophy is 100% student built. We do not send any of our parts out to be machined. Everything is machined in house. Sometimes students struggle in manufacturing the components but on the 2nd or 3rd time they get it right with the correct guidance.
Talk to the teachers. Ask them why did they design it and whether you had an opportunity for input. Maybe there was opportunity you just didn’t realize.
Be realistic here. If the students all are very technically advanced, then feel free to suggest designs. However, if students aren’t that advanced and are just saying unrealistic designs, be aware that your mentors will probably be building the majority of this robot.
It sounds like the problem isn’t that the teachers didn’t like the students’ ideas, but that they didn’t listen to them at all.
This is coming from a college student mentor / former FLL/FVC/FRC team member.
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**Communication is key! **You are lucky to have talented mentors that care about and support your team! If you want a more active role in ___ process, communicate that with the mentors, teachers, etc. If you sit in the corner and wish you were more involved, you will never become more involved. While mentors may be smart, we’re not always psychic.
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As a mentor, we need to look out for the overall health of the team. Depending on the student’s interests (which vary from year to year), we may vary our involvement in particular subteams each year. If one year we have lots of student interest in X subgroup and not much in Y subgroup, we’ll let the students do most of the X subgroup work and we’ll take a much more active role in Y subgroup to make sure all the work gets done. Your teachers could have designed your robot because no students expressed an interest in being involved with the design process.
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Most mentors are often more than willing to teach students and get them involved, but our hours of teaching are limited. Don’t wait until the build season to want to learn how to do X, Y and Z. We have limited time, and can’t dedicate 110% of our efforts onto multiple problems simultaneously. Sometimes, we make case-by-case decisions that it’s better for the team to do X ourselves now and teach the students X in the off-season, than to teach them now.
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For the future, organize your team into sub-teams and select student/mentor leaders for each sub-team. Team 228 has about a dozen different sub-teams, with each group having a student leader and a dedicated mentor. We give each of our sub-teams a fair amount of autonomy to pursue their goals. At the end of every meeting, we dedicate the last 10-15 minutes to everyone stopping all work/cleanup to listen to the lead student from each sub-team talk about their progress/problems encountered/future work.
We’ve found this works well, as people like being given autonomy, it keeps the team updated as to the progress of sub-teams, and it helps the mentors focus their efforts on areas which are most needed.
This happens more often than you may think.
Without knowing how your team works, these are my thoughts:
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Were the students involved in a high enough capacity to where they could’ve designed the robot? In my six seasons I’ve seen at least 20 kids come for kick-off, miss brainstorming and then show up in week 2 upset that they weren’t allowed to be involved in the Design of the Robot. Can’t design if you’re not there.
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There are often cases where no one steps up and wants to design the robot or no one is capable of doing so. I don’t intend to sound mean but, I’ve seen a lot of kids that come up with ideas that just aren’t feasible to build or won’t be successful in competition. If this is the case, then someone needs to make the hard decision to build something feasible and functional.
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Personally, I do, and have done 85-95% of the design work for 816 and have done so since 2008. What I do is take the concept decided on in Brainstorming, make sure that it can work and then turn it into a CAD model. The amount of Student involvement in this part is often minimal, because the kids are often not available, nor has anyone shown a dedicated interest in learning CAD or doing design work… Was this the case on your team?
I have to echo what theFro said, I seem to fill the same role on my team. What I try very hard to do is to justify, in a tangible way, all of the design decisions I do make and ensure that there is a consensus supporting the decision. Sometimes there is not a consensus, and I change the design. However, I keep all of the goals in mind that the students decided were important (mini bot deployment, scoring on the top row, etc).
When students are saying things like: “we should use shape memory alloys to shift our two-speed transmission instead of pneumatics or servos” I am reassured that my design oversight is a good thing.
Having said that, if your mentors are just handing you prints and saying “this is the design, live with it” that’s not what FRC is about and you need to demand a voice in the robot’s design.