Hello,
I’m Vlad, Combustible Lemons (team 5113) Software CoLead. This year we had issues in regards to education of both new members (getting them started on Java and WPILib) and older members (more advanced projects, cementing their knowledge of programming). Realizing these short comings, we have worked to create a more comprehensive curriculum that starts from the basics in Java and progresses to more advanced topics such as the core structures of WPILib and robot controls.
Though this, we realized that our structure of people just listening to a speaker or one on one instruction was woefully equipped in handling the scales of material that we need to present while maintaining a good retention rate. Due to these possible issues, we feel that it is best that we switch to a model where our students work alongside the instructor to complete certain tasks as well as understand the general idea (and other nuances) by listening to the instructor.
For this, we would need to have a “1 to 1” program for computers that students will be able to use to complete these assignments. Thankfully, our school already provides laptops to all students as part of a school wide electronics policy. While we have considered using already available websites (for example repl.it), their lack of functionality constrains us only to specific topics, something we would like to avoid. This means that the only viable option to have interactive work for all of our lessons would be to install applications (such as VSCode and git) on the laptops provided by the school or the desktops provided in the room adjacent to our build shop.
I would like to ask if anyone has had experience with working with school administration and/or IT department on policies such as integrating the robotics team as a part of the school or any other projects that gave legitimacy to the robotics team. Any help / suggestions on expanding our curriculum for new and existing programming students would also be greatly appreciated.
Getting your own team laptops could be a good idea. It would depend on how many you need and that might be cost Prohibitive. Also, some schools will not allow non-school regulated devices on their network. If you have a school employee as part of the mentorship on your team, they could lobby for you with your IT department.
You need to phrase the argument that this software is required for this extracurricular activity. I would send a mentor to talk to your IT person first. If that doesn’t work, I would talk to the most robotics friendly administrator or school board member to get them to lobby on your behalf.
I could not agree more. Being able to install any software you need for FRC whenever you need to is so nice since you don’t need to wait for the school’s IT department before you do something.
If you can’t afford to get non-school-affiliated dev machines, be sure to talk to the school IT department about the difficulty of setting up dev environments on machines with restrictive installation policies. Maybe you can convince them to give you a few “unlocked” machines with relaxed settings.
Installing VSCode is just one of many requirements for an efficient dev environment. You really want a computer with full admin privileges, or else the experience is going to be very painful.
@sanddrag has it right…
You don’t need super powerful or even very expensive laptops!
IMHO the key items are “no school big-brother ware” and “real, non-folding ethernet port”.
We finally got a pile of cheap used ones, washed their brains, and installed all the FRC software for programming and -driving- the bot on all of them.
The advice here to get your own laptops for the team is good if you have the funds and ability – but it’s worth understanding that you might not. Even if you have the funds, the school may have a policy prohibiting buying computers they don’t own for school programs and/or connecting them to the network.
As a former K-12 IT person, talk to IT. Explain your situation. Lay out all the things you need, and ask for their solutions.
I’d also go in with a plan A, B, and C:
A. Give us local admin rights on the computer to download whatever we need
B. Make a teacher/mentor the local admin
C. Download the software we need as we need it
Options A and B are the best for you and the easiest for IT – you can highlight that. Depending on the size of your institution, though, there may be policy against it. Luckily, even with option C, you get what you need.
As an aside, not having admin rights on a driver station computer can be very difficult when you need to change advanced network settings at an event. For this reason, it’s essential that you either have admin rights to your DS or own the computer outright.
We do currently have 2 laptops, one primary DS and one programming, that we have full control over (admin rights + no school control). With those, the IT department has been quite hazy, almost depending on whoever was in charge at the time, at times giving us network access and at times trying to ignore us. My best bet is working with the staff mentors that we have to communicate with friendly school admin on getting us a consistent policy.
I’m not sure of our exact budgetary stance, so I can’t say if we can afford extra computers (most probably with cheap 2nd hand ones if we can), but it would be preferable if we can start the transition without significant capital investment, so that it’s easier to justify using budget on.
We do have a computer lab, which with the right actions can get the necessary software (like with our programming teacher), but that would revolve around whether the IT department would let it happen.
We’ve been fortunate to have a great relationship with our school’s administration and IT. First, we got integrated with the school’s GSuite account. This was pitched as a YPP-type of effort - with all the mentors getting school emails, it meant the school controlled and had access to all the communications. We could also set up Team drives to share documents in a more visible way, and direct our team email addresses through Google Groups, again giving visibility to the school as needed. All of that was great for us as a team, and great for the school’s policies, so it was a win-win scenario.
We then leveraged that relationship to get what our programming team needed into the school’s app store so our students could download it (the school provides Macbook Air’s to all students).
So, my advice is to find spots where you can work with the administration and IT at the school where you can generate a win-win scenario, and then build on those relationships to get additional things you need!
Our team has one computer that we have admin on, but the condition was we cannot connect it to the schools network. This is the computer we use for the driver station. This works really well as we can offline install all the software we need and it keeps IT happy. For our programming laptops we just user install WPILib.
I’d venture that a decent enough laptop can be had for around $200. I’m not sure if that is too much for you, or how many you would be looking to get. DonorsChoose might be another option to get some. You might also have parents ask their IT department at their work what they do with old computers. Often they love the write-off, and you would only need to buy hard drives.
Our team has a very strong connection with our school’s Administration and IT Department. We highly recommend getting friendly with your Director of Technology or equivalent role because they can help a lot. We currently have 1 DS Laptop and 1 desktop and use both for programming. We also use our desktop for cad. Most of the rest of the computer tasks are done on either student Chromebooks or the computer lab’s desktops which happen to have some of the software we use.
Vlad, definitely work with the IT department if your school is already 1 to 1. At least at our school they already have a software center app on their machines for adding and removing programs for the classes they take. It should be as simple as the IT department adding whatever programs the team needs to the software center.
The trickiest part is likely convincing them of the need. My approach would be explaining how it could be used in whatever software / CS classes the school offers.
It’s actually not as easy as just installing new programs. We actually tried that last season since we had a bigger programming team, but quickly ran into problems because Windows Group Policy settings stopped student accounts from running any scripts, making it impossible to use the tools necessary for FRC.
Instead of using existing student laptops, we were able to get five less-restricted laptops from the IT department for the duration of the school year (like what Oblarg mentioned above). This let our programmers do whatever they wanted and was way easier than going back and forth with school IT over un-big-brothering the normal student laptops.
Getting dangerously close to breaking a Chief rule, here.
General advice: it’s always better to work within a system than exploit it. If you work around policy, in addition to the obvious ethical/legal/moral complications, you’re also just setting yourself up for failure. Exploited a vulnerability? Expect it to be patched up at the time least convenient to you, without any notice, and with double the force locking you out the next time around.
Do yourself a favor and befriend your IT people. It has many benefits.
No, I’m not just trying to make more friends. What would make you say that?
Our school also offers a software “center” (more of an inventory management program pro, with the ability to install certain optional apps, such as Office), making this a nonproblem. Our most significant roadblock comes from having to justify why we need this (one theory is that IT making our lives harder in hopes that we would leave them alone). This was most recently exhibited when we tried to put a new laptop on the network, and were forced into communication limbo for 2 months, until someone went down and personally asked the IT department to register the laptop as BYOD (how that works is beyond me).
We know that they indeed have done exceptions in GPO (group policy) for other classes, such as the Programming class offered at our school (some arcane version of eclipse is explicitly permitted in GPO). The issue comes down to our relationship with the school, teething between mild interest and apathy (or just ignoring us). While it is always tempting to just dirty hack our way to a working solution in this issue, it isn’t going to be a long lasting solution and it isn’t going to please our school all that much. Overall, I would say that this comes down to more communication between our business team and school / district admin on hopefully building a win - win relationship between the team and school, because with apathy the best we get is deluge of bureaucracy for no gain at all.
I’ll echo what others have said, get your own laptops and keep them as far as possible from school IT.
Also, my team has had great success reaching out to tech companies with local branches (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, ext.) and asking for equipment including laptops. Tech companies replace thier laptops every few years. They won’t come with hard drives but you can get some killer deals on 500gb SSDs (including M.2s) on sale in bulk online during Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Prime Day. While all that sounds like a lot of work, all told you can get ~12 last gen workhorse laptops for the cost of ~$700 in SSDs and a little elbow grease.