My advisors on the 8114 cherry and steel team are forcing the team to make blueprints/sketches of their robot before they can start on making their bot, does this violate the student centered policy?
Welcome to the Forum!
As a teacher, it sounds like all they’re trying to do is have you create a plan of implementation before you begin building your solution. This is a natural step for students following the Engineering Design Process (step 3 in the resource I’ve linked), which I would assume is what your advisors are using to guide your procedure.
Unless they intend on using your blueprints/sketches to the build for other teams (which I highly doubt to be the case), there is no violation here.
Best of luck this season!
Oh no!!! They want you to do a bit of the engineering design process instead of just building a tinkerbot…
If you are going to accuse someone of breaking rules, please site what, specifically, in the student centered policy do you accuse your advisor of breaking.
Perhaps you should also review the student centered policy: https://kb.roboticseducation.org/hc/en-us/articles/5449868745367-Student-Centered-Policy#mechanical-design-physical-construction-and-inspection-sBNAL
Welcome to the forum!
This is a first, calling out your advisor within an hour of your creating an account.
I had a rule for my teams that they needed a scale drawing before they were allowed to cut metal. It accomplished two things - developed new skills for my students and reduced the amount of wasted metal (and lost funds).
Given your team is in a school settings, seems pretty legit. He does not tell you how to design your robot, strategies to use, give you code, or solutions - he wants you to develop legit skills as a team. Sounds pretty legit to me, and a good coach.
Read the Student-centered Policy documents, it is pretty clear about what is ok or not ok.
Seems like a reasonable requirement. The advisors are making the students do the designs, so that is clearly “student-centered”. The effect seems to be students complaining about being “made” to do something and create a bad look for themselves and their organizations.
Student-centered does not mean “students can do whatever they want”. Parts are expensive. The earlier that problems are identified, the cheaper they are to fix. Seems like the advisors are giving reasonable life lessons to the students.
No, I don’t think so. Mine grade notebooks on how much we get done in a week.
Yes. While it is wise to make a cad before building, G2 outlaws adults making team decisions. They are not allowed to do that.
G2 states,
Adults should not make decisions about the Robot’s build, design, or gameplay
Even though everyone (including me) will highly recommend using cad, your mentors cannot force you to use it. It seems to me that making your students use cad when they wouldn’t otherwise is a decision made by an adult about a robot’s design/build.
Problem is that our team has a plan and are ready to implement it but our advisors want to know whats going on. He wants every plate and c channel documented down. Our team rarely wastes material and hasent even started yet due to the same advisor
Their adult leadership wants to see drawings. You said CAD.
When I was running V5 teams the rule was “You can’t cut a component without a drawing of the robot” That brings the build pretty much to a halt unless they are building a herobot. As pointed out elsewhere, the adults are kind of pointing to step 3 of the design process.
Yep, People really need to read the document and look for the nuance in it. I’m not going to let teams set themselves up to fail.
I’ve been here a long time and I’ve never heard this term and now it’s my word of the day!
You’re right, I was mistaken. I can understand wanting a model so that no metal is wasted, but I do feel that it technically breaks G2. Obviously it really isn’t that big of a deal and not really in the spirit of the rule. It is certainly nowhere near the level of actual G2 issues.
“Wanting” is not the same is “Forcing” as OP suggested. I loved your rule about cutting metal, but that isn’t quite the same as what it sounds like they are describing.
If an advisor is intentionally stopping a team from building/learning learning due to their opinion then it’s going too far. By this, I mean making hurdles that the team needs to jump through rather than having them actually learn. My biggest pet peeve is when mentors/advisors want x, y, and z when the moment comes up, but haven’t actually helped the students understand its importance or how to do it. If your idea of teaching kids is forcing your ideas onto their processes instead of teaching them why your process works better than their process, there’s a disconnect that’s holding back the team.
Also, I believe this has two meanings. Are the advisors teaching the kids that you only have limited parts and they should maximize the ones they have, or are they just concerned about their money? Again this is about to sound very strange but, the decision of the value of parts has to be understood by the team. If it isn’t, then parts should not be withheld from a team because that team does not understand why, and you are taking the learning experience of robotics away from them.
TLDR:
Long rant that if you don’t teach kids the importance of what you want them to do beforehand, and instead force it, you are taking away almost every component of the learning factor. Students should teach students to make decisions; your only job is to teach them how to make good decisions. In this case, the team should have made a blueprint while brainstorming and shouldn’t have been forced to make one after they moved on to the next step. Rant over 
It does not break “design” decisions of team - they just have to prove to their coach that they have one.
My opinion, not a G2 - you can ask GDC for clarification on the Official Q&A, which I have been shown to be wrong, and sometimes right with my opinions 
)
Thank you all, i guess im being irrational.
Based on OP’s phrasing, “blueprints/sketches”, they are not forced to use CAD. This is a reasonable requirement imposed by the adult mentors on the team. Much like maybe they “make” the team “clean up after themselves”.
“Student-centered” doesn’t mean the inmates run the asylum.
Much of your habits now will extrapolate as a habit for the next 5-10 years unless you try to change them. It sounds like your teacher has good intentions. Instead of thinking of ways to avoid doing it, think about how to do it most effectively.
The best part of engineering is that we are lazy and will find ways to optimize things. You could download Fusion 360 and CAD, and ask us (or search this forum website) on how we can provide resources to CAD easier, letting the community help guide you to produce quicker results with minimal pen on paper.
Sounds like a good name to use if I am gonna start a new STEM platform for the younger ones
Honestly, I feel sorry for all your mentors.
It seems to me, for this specific situation, the mentor was just trying to teach the team proper engineering design process and how things are like out in the real world. eg. As mentors, the schools don’t just pass us the budget to use in the name of staff empowerment - we do need to show them the plan and how the budget will be used and justifications for every items.
Like what the rest of the mentors have said - student-centredness doesn’t mean passing the ownership of the club to the students.
And I don’t see how is getting the students to present their design as a violation or seemed as making decision about a robot’s design.
A parallel that I can draw from the OP is - the student doesn’t want to submit a piece of my Physics assignment and I got accused of violating student-centreness policy.
And even if the mentor insisted on the team to use CAD, it is still a good piece of skills to pick up. So I do hope students will see it as an opportunity to learn something new or picking up a new skills (which is definitely one big part of the objective of VEX) and not a violation of their “rights”.
It won’t be a popular view among the students here - but the way G2 is being interpreted (to the extreme) by some of you here, are just making teaching or mentoring some of you a near-impossible task.
All of us don’t know what exactly transpired between the mentor and the team. Don’t think we can say too much about it.
And I will also take this opportunity to apologise to all my students that I have forced my idea of how Newton’s Laws work into them. I shouldn’t have asked them to submit their homework for me to check on their understandings (Yes!!! lesser grading to do!!)
I understand that I made a mistake. I read OP’s question wrong and I gave an incorrect response, then corrected myself and apologized. I will do better next time, but this was uncalled for. I don’t know if you meant this that way, but it came off as extremely rude. If it was unclear at all, I am completely aware that my previous posts were incorrect, and I am sorry for spreading misinformation. You don’t get to (incorrectly and rudely) judge other people because they make an inconsequential mistake.
I sincerely apologise if it comes across as rude to you.
But I am not judging anyone or even you.
I am just feeling sad (as a mentor) for my fellow mentors on all the current issues that we, teachers/mentors that need to deal with nowadays. (I do hope this is allowed?)
So I am sorry if this particular statement come across as offensive and offended you in any way.
But if you looked at the rest of my post, there was zero judging (on anyone), just presenting my view and interpretation of the mentor’s action and about student-centreness.
Oh well… guess it is time for oldies like me to just duck my head and keep quiet.