While it is still way too early to judge how well this game will do in actual competition or for spectator enjoyment, it is already getting my vote as perhaps the best game ever for building teams, teaching technical and analytical skills, making design tradeoffs, and inspiring students. As they say, if you learn best by making mistakes, we are certainly learning a lot right now. I know that I have not been around long enough to see many build seasons, but that is my somewhat novice opinion.
This year’s game sets out a huge challenge for the students, but not ,IMHO, as some have suggested, too much of a challenge. The conflicting requirements of this game, and the tradeoffs that students are being forced to make, seem highly reflective of real world engineering challenges. And it seems to have more conflicts in the requirements than many if not all previous challenges. Also, just like many real world problems, the closer you look, the more complex the game seems to become. Of course, I also expect that it will be an exciting game to watch with Frisbees flying, robots scurrying for disks, defending goals, climbing huge towers, and perhaps (unfortunately) even an eventual fall or two.
So far this season I have been seeing a very positive reaction in our team as it takes on this challenge. Much more so than in some of the previous years. And the fact that some of the powerhouse teams seem taken aback by this game (even if just for a moment) seems to make it even more inspiring. It may just be that our particular team has some unique chemistry this year, but I think it is at least partly the game that is doing it. How about other teams out there? Do you find this game a better teaching/learning experience than some previous games? Are any of you seeing the kind of positive reaction from your team to this game that I am, or is it just my imagination?
As a teacher, I am qualified to give my opinion on whether or not this is the best game for teaching. If the goal to teach students that real engineering challenges are really hard, this game achieves that very well. If the goal is to spend a lot of time with the students, taking them through every detail from which way to turn a screwdriver to CAD constraints and proper wiring techniques, this game most certainly isn’t it. The simpler games are favorable here. This task is overwhelmingly difficult to the point where in order to finish a great product in 6 weeks, there is no time for learning, only for doing. In a game like this, the learning needs to happen before and after (which we have done, and will do), not during the build.
I think this goes for any game, really, and it’s very, very important for teams to understand. We had a ton of members graduate in 2010, probably more than 40% of the team, and in 2011, we only had one senior. Most members were either freshmen or sophomores, and we didn’t know nearly as much as a team with senior leadership would know. During, the last two years, and especially just last fall, we significantly more team rebuilding and training than we ever had done. In 2011 and 2012, too much of it happened during the build season, and we wasted a lot of material, time, and money.
Every once in a while a malapropism sneaks into the topic titling here on CD. I leave it to the reader to contemplate the difference between the games:
Ultimate Ascent
and
Ultimate Assent
We have extensive rules about how the first is to be played.
Back onto the topic. The game is difficult. There are several obvious solutions, but making them actually work is not quite so obvious. Unlike previous years, where our robot was the brainchild of one person, we have had to pull everyone together to get something to work. This process is messy, takes more time, hurts more feelings, but it produces a better product.
At least for me it has taught me how to design as a team. It has shown me the difference between brainstorming as a team (which we have always done) and an inclusive design process (something new this year).
Thanks GDC for opening a can of Chuck Norris Brain Hurt
If you are holding your students’ hands at every step of the way then it sounds like your team is not prepared to build the robot you have envisioned. Rome was not built in a day.
I got waayyy better at robots in my six years as student, and I expect all of our kids (and everyone’s kids) go through this process. You can’t hand a freshman a box of parts and come back a few hours later and see a running robot. But, there are some students who by their senior years will be capable of this. It’s all about pushing students toward this. When they are new, you may have to show them exactly how to do something. When they’ve been around the block a few times, you drop by and hand out advice. And when they are about to graduate, hopefully they are running the meetings and you are there for insurance purposes only.
My goal as a mentor is to make myself irrelevant. Is that possible? Probably not. But this is one place I am willing to aim stupidly high. In one of those mentoring videos there is a great quote by JVN along the lines of “If I’ve done my job right, one of the students will say, ‘John, that’s stupid, you’re wrong’ and tell me why.”
I think our kids get a lot more out of a simple shooter, human loader, and Z1 hanger that they get to be actively involved in than designing some complicated mechanism they have a hard time understanding or building. Hopefully everyone involved learns a whole bunch this season, and next year we aim higher in an achievable way.
In my opinion there has never been and probably will never be a ‘bad’ game for teaching and learning. Sure some games are more fun and result in more varied robots, but they all consolidate entire product life cycles into 6.5 weeks.
That is exactly what I meant. You can use almost anything to teach the basics. And you are better off doing that in the off season anyway. It takes a tough challenge to learn teamwork, design trade-offs, and the need to design with contingencies and fall back strategies. It also takes an occational departure form traditional challenges to promote more innovative design approaches. I know we will see some very interesting robots this year.
