Because dumping $400 (or $1500 for VRC) in parts on a table and walking away isn’t helpful.
We’ve been around this every year. The program is around inspiring roboteers.
Your head judge should read the rules and guidelines ( as posted above) and follow them, rather than off-roading and making stuff up.
This entire “student lead” nonsense at this full level of can’t touch is just crazy talk. If you have parents that really want to do this, put them in a room, dump a kit on the table and go “Figure it out, when I come back in two hours, have a working robot running”. Oh, nope, no instructions, since we all know they were created by professionals, we don’t want that. I bet they don’t last an hour.
Let’s take something that’s hard, make it super frustrating and even more difficult and see how many kids you inspire. /sigh.
As a 1st year robotics volunteer helper, I completely see your point, especially for brand new teams!
I’m very surprised at the lack of accessible training for this, especially since it’s such a huge program. I know our school’s coaches basically had to jump into this with that exact “dump it on the table and figure it out” approach because they had no training.
But this is the exact problem with sweeping rules like " If an adult is touching the robot, you’re doing something wrong" Or “or adults should not do anything, let the roboteers do it”. I’ve had parents complain to me about parents and wanting zero parent involvement. No adults? Fine, no instructions. After all do where do you draw the line? If I take a picture of my 1/2 intake and post it here does it count that “everyone has access” to it?
So rather than making sweeping statements, RECF has come up with a pretty balanced guideline to follow. Lisa Schultz worked very hard on the document. We should use it and follow it and see how it works out for a few years.
I can also see this the other way around. There are different types of YouTube videos out there. Some are of people explaining what they’re done, and then there are the reveals. How’s this any different than your coach telling you “if you want more speed you will have to gear it higher, but you will lose torque.”.
How’s watching a robot reveal and say “yeah, we want to build that robot” and then hole count it? Just watching a video and building it based on what the student saw on the video may mean the student never went through the prototyping, building, testing, redesign, etc. process and may never understood why it was built the way it way, an what problems had to be solved.
If the students built a robot just by watching a video and never went through the design and engineering process, I would say that’s just as bad as an adult building the robot for the student. The student never learned much.
One thing that I did to help mentor one of the iq teams that I know (I don’t know how effective this is) was that I helped them build an intake for the balls. It was this really basic design that helped them understand the idea of what they needed to make and then I broke it leaving them to make it from scratch.
Id like to start with saying vex is hard for a reason. No, students are not gonna figure out how to build the perfect robot or have flawless professional code in their rookie seasons and nor should they. As a senior in high school actively participating in this years game, I’m pretty well equipped to be competitive, but that’s because I spent my first five years struggling and learning and improving. Nobody built a side of my robot so I could mirror the other. Nobody wrote my code. I started with a 5 wide steel base just like the rest of us, and I struggled accordingly. That being said, I wouldn’t have it any other way. If a hard challenge is presented in life, there aren’t gonna be people around to give me answers and fill in the blanks. Nobody hands out tests with half the solutions already penciled in. As a parent or coach (I am neither so this is merely an assumption), there is an inherent vested interest in your child or teams success, and I can see why it would be difficult to sit back and let the kids suffer through a losing season, but solving someone else’s problems for them simply isn’t in the best interest of the children.
Comparing robotics to football is like comparing fishing to skydiving. Football coaches can throw and catch the ball in practice all they want, but those actions don’t directly effect the game. The Players are still the ones making plays on game day. However, coaches building robots directly correlate with better match results. A more accurate (albeit slightly dramatic) comparison would be football coaches injecting players with PED’s which is of course against the rules.
Vex is a tool for teaching robotics, but it’s much more than that. Vex is also a platform for competition, and that will not change. As a student I am motivated not by the possibility of learning to become a “roboteer”, but because of my competitive nature to do better than other teams. In the due process of competing, roboteering is picked up organically.
I won’t be naive and claim that all adult involvement should be eliminated. There are plenty of instances where coaches can provide concepts or ideas to guide their students, but this can be done drawing basic diagrams. If your students cannot grasp a concept without you building one side of it, they should not have that concept implemented on their robots.
Regarding removing pegs, I hear you… peg removers (now available 3D printed from a third party) should be standard in all Vex kits. Not sure why this problem hasn’t been officially solved.
Even LEGO has a special lever for removing stuck bricks, and Kosmos kits (which are crap compared to vex) come with a rivet removing lever.
I don’t think that adults helping to remove pins is a problem. The rule could be, “Adults may not physically participate in the assembly process.” Removing pins is not assembly.
And yes, the “touching the robot” thing doesn’t deal with design issues. I’m not sure how “thought policing” can really be done. Where did the kids learn their ideas? Mentor? Book? YouTube?
This is engineering, not art. Anyone who ignores a superior design in a (patent-free environment) because of “not invented here” is a fool. Good luck with that unique pine hammer handle. I’ll happily clone a hickory hammer any day.
As soon as the October video bomb drops from China, any team that at least doesn’t take a look is doing themselves a major disservice. Real engineers don’t discriminate against idea sources.
Our high school FIRST team has the motto, “Steal from the best, invent the rest.”
That said, VEX IQ should be about learning how to do that. If the adult does “the stealing,” it’s not helping the kids, and it’s also not fair.
My point is that adults touching the robot and code is a very bright line. Did you touch it or not? That’s a black-and-white question.
(Though an adult building a separate robot that the students copy would obviously not involve the adult touching the finished robot…)
I don’t think the issue here is policing, because this stuff is impossible to police. That responsibility falls on the coaches and mentors to be honest about their level of participation. The responsibility of the community however is to discourage parents and coaches who somehow find a way to justify building their child’s robot. The idea that building half and having your kid copy the other half has any educational merit is flawed at its core.
I don’t mind @forzapixel’s approach for iq, providing a concept but not a hole count template.
Disclaimer: I’m a high school student at a school with a middle school program which I was a part of. I didn’t do competition in middle school but decided to do VRC and FRC in high school.
What’s the difference between a mentor and an older student? In my organization we plan to have older students mentor newer / younger students as they enter the high school program. I learned to build and program from upperclassmen. How is that so different (on the end of the learning student) than a mentor providing those instructions?
I think that mentors should be allowed to intimately guide their kids at least for the initial entry to robotics. I’ve had a lot of conversations with my mentor about building this and that design, and with his programmer friend about programming solutions like P control or field centric control. I think it’s no different than an upperclassman, but more reliably available. This type of conversation between mentor and student allows programs to survive through droughts of students. For example, last year we lost a good 1/3 of the team. We now have about 3 seniors, no juniors, and majority sophomore with 2 freshmen mixed in. While we will be taking action to ensure generational stability, I think that the strong influence of a mentor can hold together an organization and make it more reliable long term.
This last Saturday we had a unique problem that we were never able to solve. After theyhad replaced cortex, motor controllers, and motor I sat down to try downloading the VexOS utility and hard reset everything. Never solved it - out of 4 controllers only 1 would work and it had problems connecting to the field earlier. In the end another team lent us a controller (all other teams controllers worked fine). If they hadn’t been using the same code and having it work all day, I would have looked at their code - if I found something wrong I would have pointed them in the right direction, not fixed it – But there is no way you could tell any of that without asking me what was up.
The no touch rule doesn’t make sense. Leaving a team (that went on to win tournament champion) in the dust because of a freaky weird problem isn’t in line with inspiring kids. It’s a grey area - on the other hand a parent should never be working without a kid around, and if it looks like that’s happening you should ask questions.
We had an elementary and MS IQ tournament going on in the same gym. A mom managing one of the elementary teams came, with her team to me, obviously flustered, one child crying the other 2 upset. Their robot had been working fine all through skills and in their first couple matches. Now one side wouldn’t work and they were supposed to be queuing for their next match. This mom was just getting them to their matches on time because their regular coach was helping run the tournament.
So yeah, I touched their robot.
Oh and the girl From the team who was their match partner who was breathing down our necks to get to the field looked like she was in 7th grade. I hate the new age rules.
Umm wires not in the right port, not pushed in all the way (listen for the click) or the axle came out of the motor. So I would take the robot, spin the wheels, get a sound, so axle is good, while I spin does the screen light with every turn yes so it’s a port issue, but after that there is the remote possibility the motor has lost its firmware.
Replaced the smart cable first because it looked like it might have been broken/pinched. No joy. Then hooked a new motor to it with removing the one in place. Still no joy. Told my 8th grade daughter to blow out their driver configuration and rebuild a new one for them. That worked. Still not sure how the first one got screwed up.
Here is my scenario: My child is doing VIQ, starting his second year. We have a full VIQ set at home now. The kid loves robotics, but doesn’t know much about building and how everything fully works yet. So at home, we build together, we walk through building half the drivetrain together (with me helping and explaining), he builds the other half. We talk through ideas and building together, here is why you should x and not y, here’s how gears work for speed and torque, lets add some pieces to reinforce here, ect… Then he goes to school and then he and his team can build it on their own knowing why and what they are building.
This is the gray area, yes i’m helping build in some way at home, but it’s really hands on teaching. The idea of robotics is to inspire, yet no one is teaching them anything. It’s dump them in a room at school and let them figure everything out on their own with no helping. Well not every kid can learn that way, think of the turnover of kids because they just didn’t get it or they tried building something and it wouldn’t work and they just needed the right help/teaching and just gave up.
That’s what I don’t like, they aren’t really being taught anything. There should be lesson plans or guide books/videos for them to learn from at the VIQ level so that by the time they get to EDR level they are on their own because they have had several years of real learning/teaching.
On the flip side, I also can understand why some might view this as against the rules, seeing that i’m helping design a robot in a way. But again, I see it as i’m teaching, I’ve seen other Viq robots at meets that you can tell were parent builds involved or more sophisticated, so it’s not like i’m designing a world champion here.
And to the original post, during meets we don’t do anything. I did change the battery once because the kids forgot when they all walked away and pieces came loose on the brain pulling the battery out that I had to put back. Lesson learned, but I would hope if someone were to ever see something like that, they would ask before going off and disqualifying.
Yep. Been in the pits at Worlds when our laptop fritzed out. Totally unrelated to programming the robot. I shouldn’t feel unable to step in when the kids can’t fix the laptop.
Adults only need to ask themselves “Is the action I am taking solving a problem for the students, or teaching them how to solve the problem?” In many cases, particularly with inexperienced teams, very specific instruction and very hands-on interaction with robot building or programming is useful to convey the process of solving a problem. If the students come away from that interaction able to solve that problem in the future, or expand on that solution to similar problems, the interaction was a good one. Conversely, if students are NOT becoming more independent, you need to reassess your interactions.
I’m seeing a lot of talk about the “Hero Bots” being built by professionals, but here’s the thing - they aren’t professional level robots. They are purposely built imperfect so students are forced to improve them. The tires toe-out, the lifts are built awkwardly, the towers on the IQ “hero builds” are built in a way that allows for way too much flex (the beams are mounted with the flat side taking the weight of the lift and manipulator). So no, using a “hero bot” is not the same as a high level robot designed by a mentor/teacher. Here in Hawaii, they are known as “Kumu Bots” (“Kumu” is the Hawaiian word for “Teacher”). Hero bots force innovation while Kumu bots are a way to get students to build a decently performing robot quickly so students can learn how to drive them better. They learn nothing from these robots because they already perform well without improvements. I have seen this myself many times (and had students admit to it).