I’m writing about advice on a dilemma as the parent of a middle schooler who is doing V5RC for the first year. We joined a team with parent coaches. Our kid was interested in programming, and worked hard to learn and code the auton (with help from the parent coach) but did only a little on the build.
As the stakes got higher later in the season and kids struggled, parents shifted from coaching and started to make changes to the robot (code and mechanics) without involving the lead builder and coder because they wanted to win at all costs.
We are not ok violating the code of conduct knowingly and are ok if we don’t win but want a fair chance to compete at our skill level. How do we resolve such a dispute? We started building a new robot 3 weeks ago, but its too late to get a functional robot ready in time despite working non-stop.
Could our kid join another team that’s playing fair? What would you do?
One thing you can do is report your team, that way it would be staying fair, and to answer your question of joining another team, I don’t think that is allowed.
According to rule G4, your child would be allowed to join a new team for “non-strategic reasons outside of the Team’s control”, including conflicts within a team. Switching teams so you can be part of a team whose skill level accurately represents the skill level of its students would definitely be allowed, provided all other rules are followed.
However, for state/national/regional championship or Worlds, all of the drive team members and coders need to be members of the team that received the qualification spot. (The only exception, as of this year, is that if only one member of the team is able to attend the event, they can make a single substitution of a Drive Team Mamber or Coder for that Championship event, though if that new student was previously on another team in the same season, they can’t switch back to their original team later in the season.)
To answer your question, in my opinion, it’s the end of the season so it doesn’t matter if you switch teams or stay with this one. The RECF doesn’t want a team to gain an advantage by switching in a ringer but if you were to switch to a different team because of a personal conflict it would be reasonable.
The coaches are breaking the rules and I can quote the student centered and code of conduct documents but there is a deeper issue.
The role of a coach/mentor is to help students learn engineering concepts and develop their character (as is often with sports/competition). Do you think they have done a good job of empowering their students?
The evidence seems that the coach doesn’t have respect for their students and/or doesn’t think they are capable of being a good team. How do you think that impacts the confidence of a developing human being?
Most of the teams are “maybe we’re not the best, but we did the work” teams. Do you think it’s fair when they have to compete against adults?
Often parents think they are helping without realizing the damage they are causing to their students and the robotics community.
Hopefully a conversation will help them realize what they are doing, but regardless it will reveal their intentions. You can then decide what’s best for your student.
Yes they can join another team, however the way the rules are written, they can’t drive/program for a team that has qualified for a championship event (see G4) in the high stakes game manual here: https://content.vexrobotics.com/docs/2024-2025/v5rc-high-stakes/HighStakes-3.0.pdf. However they will be able to build for that new team. The correct course of action would be contracting your Regional Support Manager, which can be found at: Support Map : Robot Events, and filing a G2 violation. Note G1 violations as I understand technically are only for events.
Sorry to hear that this happened, we actually had a similar situation this season. We had four other teammate at the beginning of the season. However, two of them had a mom how repeatedly tried to build the robot and actually did successfully “help” her son build a separate robot before we split. When we realized that, here was already some disagreement on how much parent involvement is allowed. (Coaching and teaching engineering principals, best practices, calculation, are all fine, activity building the robot of course is not). Long story short, we split but luckily for us we were able to regroup and still make state as this was back in December.
