First is that I’m a person with more than everything. I have a basement that rivals the warehouse in Greenville. I have Ham radio stuff. I have a full woodshop. I have stuff that has stuff (and some of that has its own stuff) . So rather than getting more stuff, I donate items / money to teams that need things. Today I sent money to guy that will canoe about 6K miles, Sent 10 Lego Technics kits and 5 VIQ kits to some home teams. And donated to college rocket team trying to make 100 miles up. Support a dream.
But the hard thing of today is go through my “Institutional Memory” This is the memory that your group has about things that work. I have memories on how to write a 100 byte program that works with CP/M to give you a second terminal. I am fluent in the Forth programming language. I can build a double sided choo choo drive from memory. But for you, only one of these is useful. So I’ll keep it and pass it on. The rest I have to decide, remember or not?
But, what are you doing to keep the great AhHa moments alive. Elementary robotics is two years, Middle School is two years, High School is 4. How do you keep the hard fought knowledge passed down from team to team. Presently people think that the mentor / coach should be it. Sadly they age out. I’m here since 2006, I’m an outlier.
We post here, but we know that people don’t search. @CodyS presented the first Holonomic drive code that was simple to use a decade ago (2014). Every year is “Need holomic code” How do you pass that on? How do you capture the “Flying Cheese” info? Or from my starting era “Team 44”? So much brain work, and it flys off and dies?? That makes me sad.
Are you reinventing “the wheel” every season? Last week I got asked “What makes awesome teams awesome”. “Hard work and a huge knowledge base” Start a way to capture this info. People think the best teams have all the parts, the truth is the best teams have all the past info.
I have a personal wiki that I keep all the cool things All the info about “screw axles” in one place. Photos of the worlds smallest Choo Cho, etc.
Where is your knowledge store? How do you pass on things you designed?
For V5, there is the Purdue Wiki which is an amazing resource. For IQ, there is discord primarily. My robots between the period of getting discord and prior to having it is absurd, and I have learned so much from being in a space with people smarter than me.
I’ll check out the Purdue Wiki. I didn’t know that you can put long term info in Discord, the ones I’m on get info purged off in a year. How are you storing the IQ info.
Yes! If I got a free omni for every time I did that, I would turn into a motorized millipede.
In the years to come they will offer a digital Artifical Intelligence gizmo that will follow you everywhere, look at the world though your new and fancy augmented reality glasses, listen to your every word, and ask sometims thoughtful and sometimes silly questions to resolve any ambiguities within its virtual FosterWorld .
It is unlikely to get excited looking into a bin with your collection of random pink colored IQ pieces and will still lack the hands with fine motor skills and dexterity of a third-grader to manipulate Vex IQ pins.
In any case that will take a long time to get fully developed and debugged…
So my proposed solution to this problem is a set of organic grandchildren!
Placed in an environment rich in colorful nutrients IQ pieces to stimulate their mind and natural curiosity, they may some day grow the white beards and turn into mini Fosters, equipped with quirky forum posting vocabulary and sense of humor.
I think Vex Forum is the best way to “keep the great AhHa moments alive”. It’s both question-and-answer/conversation between users and a knowledge base. The ability to link outside info and other posts is also helpful.
The search feature is good enough at finding relevant topics.
A reply to one of those “Need holomic code” topics actually helped me understand how to code an X-drive, although I’ll probably never build an X-drive anyways. (Was the typo on purpose?)
!
.