by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Saturday April 17, 2004 @11:11AM (#8891768)
Sure many of the teams are from 'inner city' schools but the competetiveness of team has nothing to do with the students and everything to do with corporate sponsorship. I was at a low income rural high school and we competed in 1997. There was no qualification to go to nationals, just pay up the $3000 entry fee. We had a local construction company pay for the entry fee and the high school gave a few hundred for parts. When we got to the tournament (we all paid our own travel and lodging) we found out the student built robots are an extreme exception. Most literally are built at the labs of GM or NASA or who ever is the sponsor, the engineers do everything, and the students have no clue. This is encouraged. A machine actually built by students in their school doesn't stand a chance USFirst is a joke in terms of education, it's just a big PR opportunity.
A machine actually built by students in their school doesn't stand a chance
Not true at all. Last year, my team, 212, had no corporate sponsorship, no engineers, no nothing: we built our robot in our school's machine shop with help from parents. Students had to pay their own food and lodging. None of that takes away from all of the knowledge, experience, teamwork, and of course, gracious professionalism that you learn from competing.
And oh yea, as for standing no chace...we won first place at the Central
I've been involved on the periphery of a not-so-local high school's (Rick Hansen Secondary School - Team 1241 "Force 6") development project and I'm disappointed in the extremely high cost of entry (ie to be registered and to get a kit), the sophistication of the projects as well as the other costs associated with it. It is essentially impossible to field a team for less than $35k CAN ($25k+ USD) to be successful. This includes money for the kits as well as travel expenses and, amazingly enough, promotional materials that are needed to ask for sponsorship funds.
The high cost of entry really bars schools from low-income inner city neighborhoods, which are the ones that would probably benefit the most from the experience. These schools also do not have contacts/parents in industry that could help as mentors and sponsors. This is probably the biggest issue I have with USFIRST right now.
The robot task is such that high school kids cannot work through them without substantial help from experienced engineers and what the kinds get out of the program (as well as put into it) depends primarily on how the sponsor engineers allow the kids to do. The best sponsors are high level advisors and make sure the kids plan out the designs themselves and help them think through the problems that they encounter rather than do the design themselves. I'm sure there are a lot of cases where the kids are barely able to play around with the robots before the competition because of the amount of time the sponsors put into the robots.
There is too much emphasis on the necessary fund raising. The Rick Hansen team had created a promotional DVD along with glossy brochures; there is an irony that these materials can be produced quite cheaply because they give the impression that the team has more money than they know what to do with.
Rather than limiting the kids to the materials supplied in the (incredibly expensive) kits, I would prefer seeing something where the bare minimum was provided by FIRST and the majority of parts were to be found at Home Depot/Digikey by the kids themselves. I think this would limit the price somewhat, would allow the kids to spend more time on design, building and experimenting (which is what FIRST should be all about anyway).
There should also be a restriction on how much the sponsors can do - clearly there are a lot of teams that benefit from corporate tool rooms with trained tool makers and do not rely on industrial arts rooms with the students learning how to machine parts on their own. To help enforce this, I believe that each team, to qualify must provide documentation on the robot to prove that the students were primarily responsible for the design and this documentation could be made available by USFIRST as guides for later teams.
Regardless of the warts, USFIRST is the best opportunity kids have to learn, design and compete with others. The events are amazing, fun and energetic experiences that are barely controlled chaos. The kids have a lot of fun, FIRST is a great way to build school spirit and it gives a few kids an opportunity to see if engineering/computer science is the way they want to go in life.
If the Rick Hansen SS you speak of is the Rick Hansen SS I'm thinking about, did your team participate in the 2003 Canada FIRST Robotic Games?
Just to inform/add a little shameless self-promotion of my own, last year marked the final year that the Canada FIRST robotic games were played. I was on the team for 3 years (2001-2003), so I just wanted to chime in.
I'm not sure how US FIRST handles things, but the biggest problems with Canada FIRST wasn't that people helped too much, it was that no one (not even
Rather than limiting the kids to the materials supplied in the (incredibly expensive) kits, I would prefer seeing something where the bare minimum was provided by FIRST and the majority of parts were to be found at Home Depot/Digikey by the kids themselves. I think this would limit the price somewhat, would allow the kids to spend more time on design, building and experimenting (which is what FIRST should be all about anyway).
That was sort of what was done this year. The kits still cost the same amount, b
I think you are overreacting to a legitimate goal.
Obviously the goal is less about how to get on first base and more about stealing second. Or in other words - what to do WITH a robotic platform - assuming you have a working platform as a given.
Whether you like this or not - a lot of useful applications for robots will be invented by people with this kind of experience - and lacking the detailed understanding of how to put a platform together in the first place.
My high school is in West Allentown (pop. 105,000) and our robot the only thing that wasn't done by students was we had someone else sandblast the frame. Everything else was all designed by students and teachers. We actually did very successfuly, 1st place in Virginia, 2nd in Philly, and made it to the playoffs at the championships. We did get a NASA sponsership (along mostly local small businesses) but I don't think we once talked with someone from NASA, they just give out money to teams that apply for i
Hardly a scam - there's a continuum of how teams arrange things - and spread the work among students, teachers, parents, engineers. Our first year was probably 1/4 each - with the slight hobble that to actually work in the corporate sponsor's machine shop - you had to be 18 for liability reasons. So we came up with a solution - certain fabs got done in the shop, the rest of it at school. Parents brought in tools, jigs, supplies, the kids designed with straws and pins if they had to (ironically, that was
I think your comment about "fanning the fire" is dead on. One of our students was a football player with scholarships waiting in the wings and all that, until he blew out his knee. He came to a team meeting last year (before I joined but I've gotten to know alot of the students since I joined) and decided to persue engineering as a career. And this kid is sharp. A bit of a jokester but quite bright. It will be good to have him in the engineering field.
And as an indirect response to the grandparent, the amo
Did you go out looking for sponsors? Did you learn anything from the engineers that helped you? Did you have any engineers helping you? How much building did YOU actually do?
FIRST isn't about students building a robot. If you want to do that, go build one for Robot Wars or BattleBots. If you don't want to build a robot, look into the Odyssey of the Mind [odysseyofthemind.com] competition.
FIRST is about marketing your team to get sponsorship. It's about getting community involvement in order to find engineers to help y
By the way, I'm watching the NASA-TV coverage of this event. There are at least three teams who attended the Chesapeake regional that I recognize that have made it to at least the quarter finals of the championships. As of right now (2:06PM eastern), one is in the semifinals.
It's going to vary a lot from school to school as other posters have shown. Certainly there is a certain cost associated with the initial kit, but parts are reusable to some degree. Certainly though, I don't think anyone expects schools alone to sponser the costs, and with all things, parents are expected to step in and help with the costs and such.
Regardless of who wins or loses, the entire thing is meant to be an educational program, and certainly those students who do not do any machine work, or any d
I will only agree with you to one extent. Our team has been building our own robots for three years now. This year we have made it to the finals in our regional competition. The only part the students did not completely make was the robot's transmission, which was made by one of our mentors. Other than that, it was six weeks of staying up til 10 o'clock, planning, designing, building.
Don't underestimate the abilities of a young group of people with too much free time on their hands;)
Your full of shit. I was in FIRST for 4 years. Our Sponsor was Motorola (Team 108 - the SigmaC@Ts if you must know). We built our robot side by side with the engineers. Solely engineer built robots are the extreme exception, as are solely student built robots. The whole idea is you work with and learn from professionals. Teams whose students had nothing to do with their bot are not encouraged, they are reviled, and it is easy to tell when you talk to the team members (as a driver for two years, I've had plenty of opportunities to talk to other teams). You picked NASA as an example, which shows your ignorance. NASA has a grant program where they pay the entry fees for you and thats it. You can only qualify for two years, then your on your own. Most of the teams you saw with Nasa on them were probably rookies. It sounds to me like you tried it once, and when you got beaten by the veteran teams, got bitter and didnt come back. US FIRST is a great education oppourtunity, by the time I graduated I was teaching the engineers things about how to build a robot. Also, although it didnt in 1997, the national competition now has qualifications to attend it. You now must win a regional or regional award, earn a "bye" based on last year's performance to qualify for nationals, or be a rookie team to get in to nationals. It's also worth noting that if the companies just wanted the PR opportunity, theres lots of places they could spend it and get a lot more (PR-wise) for their very large sums of money. Also the engineers and other staff at these companies use their own, unpaid time to work with the teams. Also, student run student built teams can be competitive, bit don't expect to do it in 1 year, against teams that have been around since the program started. finally, some other FIRST related links the story should have mentioned.
Soap 108 [soap108.com] A website run by my team that records and digitizes every match for every competition we attend. Go here for video from matches of a real competition.
Chief Delphi forums [chiefdelphi.com] The most popular FIRST related message board, and a good place to learn about the attitudes of the students involved.
I was on team 108 as well, but from my experience the engineers practically did everything. I was on the electrical team my last year and I had almost zero interaction with the actual electronics on the robot. Motorola was also very unsupportive in terms of the animation. I don't know if you remember but a couple years back the animation team got pissed off at motorola and bashed them in the credits.
Soap was probable the most student oriented task, but I don't find it fun sitting in front of a computer dur
I was at a low income rural high school and we competed in 1997. There was no qualification to go to nationals, just pay up the $3000 entry fee. We had a local construction company pay for the entry fee and the high school gave a few hundred for parts.
That's changed. Now, you've got to either (a) win a competition or (b) win one of a select few awards to qualify. That doesn't give FIRST 300 teams, though, so you can also qualify based on how long it's been since your team has las
USFirst has become quite sad. If a team doesn't have money, they can't do squat. I'm not talking just not being able to build a robot that doesn't break after some well-engineered (pun inteneded) robot smashes into it and breaks it, but all the other stuff that FIRST claims to be about: learning from engineers, getting out into the community, all that other crap, you can't do without money. We couldn't even get engineers this year, so our robot was entirely student built, and we actually got penalized for
I was involved with FIRST in high school, a couple years after the whole thing starter. At the time, we were sponsored/partnered with a Renssealer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The year I participated, my classmates had very little involvement - it was really our teacher's, and the RPI class's project. The bulk of the work was done at RPI, a 20-minute drive away. Many of us didn't have our own transportation, had after school jobs, etc. so it was very hard for the high school students to be active partic
That's pretty much what I saw (except the GE involvement; it was just us and RPI 10 years ago). Nevermind that managing things the way they were managed made both winning and learning nigh on impossible, but the teacher didn't seem to care much about that, at least in my experience. If you were in 7 years ago, you were probably on the team when my brother was; from what I had heard, things were better then than during my time.
I'm not sure we even made the animations, and as I implied above, even watching
How is it a scam? From day one, Dean Kamen has said that the main goal of FIRST is to inspire students in science and technology. It's not a program that is set up for students to do everything. And FIRST is not responsible for how a team is run. I've been a volunteer on team 116 for over 3 years now. Team 116's main claim to fame is that it is one of the few teams that gets a large grant from NASA and the use of one of their engineers (a lot of other teams get smaller grants to help them get started).
Money smooths the road to FIRST, true. It's certainly nice to be able to afford whatever parts are necessary--and since my team got our NASA sponsorship this year only after the fund-raising was underway, I know about the luxury of not having to beg. Also, I freely admit that there are team members who don't touch the robot, ever, preferring to do administrative or PR jobs.
However. I must strenuously disagree with your perception of FIRST. The engineers helping us lent their time and expertise to the
On our team, there is NO corporate sponsorship. All of the mentors are from college, and we work closely with the kids. There are no professional engineers in it. And the kids have learned a LOT about engineering. They help with designs and run the machine shop.... This is not at all what you are talking about. Oh, and at our regional of 30 teams, only 6 went on to nationals. It had nothing to do with paying and everything to do with winning. And we qualified for nationals, and went, with a bot built and de
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov
USFirst is a Scam (Score:5, Interesting)
I was at a low income rural high school and we competed in 1997. There was no qualification to go to nationals, just pay up the $3000 entry fee. We had a local construction company pay for the entry fee and the high school gave a few hundred for parts.
When we got to the tournament (we all paid our own travel and lodging) we found out the student built robots are an extreme exception. Most literally are built at the labs of GM or NASA or who ever is the sponsor, the engineers do everything, and the students have no clue. This is encouraged. A machine actually built by students in their school doesn't stand a chance
USFirst is a joke in terms of education, it's just a big PR opportunity.
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:3, Informative)
Not true at all. Last year, my team, 212, had no corporate sponsorship, no engineers, no nothing: we built our robot in our school's machine shop with help from parents. Students had to pay their own food and lodging. None of that takes away from all of the knowledge, experience, teamwork, and of course, gracious professionalism that you learn from competing.
And oh yea, as for standing no chace...we won first place at the Central
USFirst is a Scam - Depends on School/Sponsor (Score:5, Informative)
I've been involved on the periphery of a not-so-local high school's (Rick Hansen Secondary School - Team 1241 "Force 6") development project and I'm disappointed in the extremely high cost of entry (ie to be registered and to get a kit), the sophistication of the projects as well as the other costs associated with it. It is essentially impossible to field a team for less than $35k CAN ($25k+ USD) to be successful. This includes money for the kits as well as travel expenses and, amazingly enough, promotional materials that are needed to ask for sponsorship funds.
The high cost of entry really bars schools from low-income inner city neighborhoods, which are the ones that would probably benefit the most from the experience. These schools also do not have contacts/parents in industry that could help as mentors and sponsors. This is probably the biggest issue I have with USFIRST right now.
The robot task is such that high school kids cannot work through them without substantial help from experienced engineers and what the kinds get out of the program (as well as put into it) depends primarily on how the sponsor engineers allow the kids to do. The best sponsors are high level advisors and make sure the kids plan out the designs themselves and help them think through the problems that they encounter rather than do the design themselves. I'm sure there are a lot of cases where the kids are barely able to play around with the robots before the competition because of the amount of time the sponsors put into the robots.
There is too much emphasis on the necessary fund raising. The Rick Hansen team had created a promotional DVD along with glossy brochures; there is an irony that these materials can be produced quite cheaply because they give the impression that the team has more money than they know what to do with.
Rather than limiting the kids to the materials supplied in the (incredibly expensive) kits, I would prefer seeing something where the bare minimum was provided by FIRST and the majority of parts were to be found at Home Depot/Digikey by the kids themselves. I think this would limit the price somewhat, would allow the kids to spend more time on design, building and experimenting (which is what FIRST should be all about anyway).
There should also be a restriction on how much the sponsors can do - clearly there are a lot of teams that benefit from corporate tool rooms with trained tool makers and do not rely on industrial arts rooms with the students learning how to machine parts on their own. To help enforce this, I believe that each team, to qualify must provide documentation on the robot to prove that the students were primarily responsible for the design and this documentation could be made available by USFIRST as guides for later teams.
Regardless of the warts, USFIRST is the best opportunity kids have to learn, design and compete with others. The events are amazing, fun and energetic experiences that are barely controlled chaos. The kids have a lot of fun, FIRST is a great way to build school spirit and it gives a few kids an opportunity to see if engineering/computer science is the way they want to go in life.
myke
Re:USFirst is a Scam - Depends on School/Sponsor (Score:1)
If the Rick Hansen SS you speak of is the Rick Hansen SS I'm thinking about, did your team participate in the 2003 Canada FIRST Robotic Games?
Just to inform/add a little shameless self-promotion of my own, last year marked the final year that the Canada FIRST robotic games were played. I was on the team for 3 years (2001-2003), so I just wanted to chime in.
I'm not sure how US FIRST handles things, but the biggest problems with Canada FIRST wasn't that people helped too much, it was that no one (not even
Re:USFirst is a Scam - Depends on School/Sponsor (Score:1)
That was sort of what was done this year. The kits still cost the same amount, b
Re:USFirst is a Scam - Depends on School/Sponsor (Score:1)
Obviously the goal is less about how to get on first base and more about stealing second. Or in other words - what to do WITH a robotic platform - assuming you have a working platform as a given.
Whether you like this or not - a lot of useful applications for robots will be invented by people with this kind of experience - and lacking the detailed understanding of how to put a platform together in the first place.
In reality the application of robotics is t
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:1)
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:3, Informative)
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:2)
And as an indirect response to the grandparent, the amo
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:2, Informative)
FIRST isn't about students building a robot. If you want to do that, go build one for Robot Wars or BattleBots. If you don't want to build a robot, look into the Odyssey of the Mind [odysseyofthemind.com] competition.
FIRST is about marketing your team to get sponsorship. It's about getting community involvement in order to find engineers to help y
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:1)
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:1)
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:1)
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Soap 108 [soap108.com]
A website run by my team that records and digitizes every match for every competition we attend. Go here for video from matches of a real competition.
Chief Delphi forums [chiefdelphi.com]
The most popular FIRST related message board, and a good place to learn about the attitudes of the students involved.
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:3, Interesting)
Soap was probable the most student oriented task, but I don't find it fun sitting in front of a computer dur
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:2)
I was at a low income rural high school and we competed in 1997. There was no qualification to go to nationals, just pay up the $3000 entry fee. We had a local construction company pay for the entry fee and the high school gave a few hundred for parts.
That's changed. Now, you've got to either (a) win a competition or (b) win one of a select few awards to qualify. That doesn't give FIRST 300 teams, though, so you can also qualify based on how long it's been since your team has las
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:1)
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:2)
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:2)
I'm not sure we even made the animations, and as I implied above, even watching
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:1)
PR, yes; scam? naah (Score:1)
Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:2)