+1
Those are magik words to the engineers ears’ ![]()
I agree with many of @sazrocks’ and @Barin’s points about forums being more structured than discord which, while being noisy, has a quick access to very good subject matter experts…
You really need to have multiple levels, from a fast paced chat, to more structured topic threads, all the way to the more permanent wiki-style persistent knowledge repository.
What is killing me about current system is the high level of fragmentation and very poor discoverability of information. There are tons of closed discord vex related servers, there are closed coach facebook groups, there are individual teams’ and clubs’ blogs, …
(See this thread: Great Resources for VEX)
It is not easy googling anything vex specific as it is. And, although new built-in vexforum search is a big improvement, it doesn’t have google auto-complete / search-as-you-type wizardry.
We live in the era of the knowledge economy and the world is flooded with terabytes of newly generated information everyday.
Students who do VEX today may dream of building robots when they grow up, but I am pretty certain that many of them will have to tackle the problems associated with overproduction of information in the future.
There will, probably, be as many jobs in trying to harness the power of AI to make sense of all the chaotic information being generated and stored worldwide, as in all the industrial manufacturing combined.
We might just as well start learning about this problem now, using VEX online ecosystem as an relatively easy to understand example…