My club advisors have only recently taken over. They’re pretty good, but are adamant about not letting us take home our robots. This cuts into build time greatly, even if somewhat remedied with more frequent and longer meetings. What are your advisors’ positions in this topic?
Using this to maybe convince them to let us take home the bots
My coach lets me take home the bot as long as it is brought back to practices for the rest of the team. He’s also letting me take home a programming robot for the summer to work with.
Our coach encourages us to bring our bots home because our school meetings are relatively short. A vast majority of the work we do is at home.
My advisor does not let robots be taken home, I have just recently sent her a email asking for next season if it was possible.
My advisor usually lets us take our robot home, but he insists that we send him a photo of what we are taking (to insure we bring everything back), and that the bot may only used for programming, and no building shall be done (this is in case something happens while building at home, he is liable for it). But yea only programming and no building.
My teacher is reluctant to allow us to take the robot or parts home. Now that we are out-competing our sister teams by a long shot, he is more open to the idea, but still prefers we take less. For the quarantine, he has allowed me to take home parts to build a code bot to experiment with.
Edit: Its mainly a school property issue as he gets limited funding from the school and only so much grant money. One of our sister teams abusing the privilege in our first year didn’t help our case too much.
Nope. At my old school, a lot of the ppl were close to other ppl who were rly good at robotics (like worlds round robin good) so our coaches always thought that we would have them build the robot for us (which none of us would do). It was mainly just a lack of trust in students.
My teacher let’s us take home our bots if you are behind or you know what you need to take home as long as you bring them back after the break or weekend. Since you will need for the next competition or meeting.
You know, I’m not really sure if he does or doesn’t. Imo, I’m sure that he would, but as I have never asked, I honestly don’t know.
our coach lets us. It allows a team to get together and work from home, we took ours home and we still hve our robot. and 16 motors since we took another teams robot home too.
My mentor encourages us to take home robots. Our club only meets once a week from 5:00 to 7:30, so the bulk of build and programming is done at home. The team member(s) with the bots can also take home sections of the field corresponding to what they’ll be working on (auton programming: quarter field, drive practice: half field, skills practice: half to full field).
I would strongly recommend this system as it has allowed our team to grow and newer teams to become much more competitive.
There comes the issue of liability in the case of an injury or something similar while working on the robot at home. If this is the issue do not try to convince your mentors to do this; they are just doing their job.
If that is not the issue, explain to them that building and programming at home will give you the chance to accomplish more, and also improve your teamwork skills (deciding who takes the robot and who takes the notebook is a big team skill).
As a teacher, this is kinda fascinating to me. In middle school it’s not a big deal for the kids to take home their bot and even an entire field if they would like. My kids don’t do it often enough.
I’m not worried about losing parts, especially during the competition season, they will come back for the next competition. I have to exercise some judgement, but the kids that do ask are a self selecting group and I rarely have to tell anyone no.
For our State’s rebuild, we kind of had to take it home. But we usually don’t take it home. But if you don’t meet for enough time during the week, then U would suggest doing it.
We’re always encouraged to take home parts and stuff, especially over breaks. We do almost all our building at home, early season over summer, mid season over fall, and late season over winter.
Tbh if students are motivated enough to want to work from home, they can be trusted with the parts.
I personally am really glad I have this ability, I wouldn’t be half the roboteer I am now if I could only work at school.
You said exactly what I was thinking.
I would love to take home our robots, and I think we could be about 100 times better if allowed, but our coach doesn’t let us
then talk to him and explain that if you are allowed, your school can grow their robotics classes.
We are allowed to take home the robot/parts/tools over breaks. Because our teams are able to meet very often and we have long lab hours I am the only one who ever takes our robot home but before worlds was cancelled our coaches did let us take a field and all 3 of our worlds bots plus parts into someone’s basement. However that is unusual for them and I doubt it will happen again.
We take home our bots because most of the parts and electronics are bought by us, the teams individually. We meet up at school to use the school field, help each other, or work on our bots.
Had we not had the ability to take our robot home in Feburary, we would have not had a robot for states. I think this is one of the biggest mistakes Advisors can make. Give us the ability to take it home, leave it to our parents on weather or not they are fine with you using power tools in the house