Inventor Dean Kamen’s Big Ideas

I do fundraising for a team that is 13 or 14 years old. We raise a lot of money each year and it is always hard. Plus the parents put in a lot of money. Or at least some do. The less affluent schools have a harder time. That said I have seem some great robots come out off underserved schools.

I do have to say that after 6 years of mentoring this FRC team (my last child is aging out), I am looking forward to going back to being a FLL, FTC and FRC volunteer and no longer doing team mentoring. I started volunteering 11 years ago.

WOW have things grown and changed. Some for the better but some were... disappointing. The biggest issues are always about money and team size. The program constantly reemphasizes that it's not about winning or the trophies. But that's kind of hard to do when so much attention is placed on aggressive competition and it's the same well-endorsed teams winning every year. Especially with this year's challenge. I've also discovered this questionable practice of teams flying in from far away to participate in a regional where they think they have a better chance.

Our team won it's first regional EVER this year. It took us 15 years. We just never had the funds or man hours to build any of the amazing ideas the students had. I'm proud of our students. But I wish there was a way to even the playing field and let students focus on the innovation rather than if their bot will literally fall apart on the field.

I think FIRST should stick to full cooperative game modes and ones that don't require lots of refs to determine points. This year is a mess and full of people complaining about points that the refs completely failed to give. For a organization that encourages automation there sure are a lot of things handled by error-prone humans. :)

Participating in FRC has many benefits, which has been discussed and pushed at great length. What's not usually discussed is the huge opportunity cost, especially for poorer schools with severely limited resources, like the school I mentored at. Here are a few observations from four years of FRC mentoring with Team 1850:

1) MONEY. Participation is $5k. To this, add the extra money teachers get for their mentorship, travel costs to the competition, pizza, etc. for the kids during the days of competition. For our school I think this added up to approximately $10k conservatively. For larger teams, the cost could be many times this amount.

2) TIME. Due to the very tight schedule (why the schedule is so tight is a whole another discussion) the teachers who oversee team development have to relentless focus on pushing the build further, rather than teach kids good practices, foster teamworks, etc. At our school a typical season was meeting for 1-1.5 hrs off season (~September - December) then 3-4 hours during the day plus 6-7 hours on Saturdays during build season. Adding in the competition, conservatively that is 70-80 hours of team time. Our team was about 10 regulars (a small team, good teams, e.g. 101 Wildstang has more than 50 students actively working). That's conservatively 700-800 hours of student time alone. Adding teacher time (2 teachers generally present), this was near 1000 hours for one season.

3) MENTOR TIME. For schools like the one I worked with mentors are a very precious resource, because no one wants to drive from the city or suburbs 45mins to the school on Saturdays. That's why almost all good FRC Teams I observed are in from the suburbs. Again due to the cut throat schedule, I wasn't able to interact much with the students but just worked on the C++ code.

Now, you have to ask yourself if the the benefits from FRC, which are substantial, are worth the immense costs associated with it, or if these can be diverted to other efforts instead. For example, I had the school but 10 rPis and started to teach kids programming using Python and pygame, they loved it! Unfortunately, most of the students that came were also on the robotics team so we had to stop when FRC work started.

Our team didn't make it to the finals in the 4 years I mentored. The cause was the same: A poorly designed hardware component failing. Pitted against us were teams that had retired aerospace and mechanical engineers from Boeing and other such companies who developed their designs using CAD and sometimes tested their designs using their old company resources. We had NO CHANCE! This was the "torture of hope": each year we started with great motivation and told the students that if they worked hard they can get a good standing, where in reality they had nearly zero chance of that happening.

I'm aware of another local team which is setup as a 501c3 and physically runs out of a public school. This particular team is heavily supported by a local mechanical engineering firm with both money and a team of mechanical engineering mentors.

Also, for the younger kids, VEX IQ Challenge is a great alternative to FIRST Lego League. It's even less expensive than VEX and the kids actually get to drive the robot (unlike FLL) - which is a huge plus for many kids.

Coincidentally, the VEX World Championships are coming up next week. Anyone thinking about getting into robotics competitions should check it out. They do a great live webcast of the events. Friday and Saturday (April 22-23) are the best days to watch. Webcasts and other details should be available here: http://www.robotevents.com/championship/

FRC was fun because of the people. Not because of FRC.

- http://www.popsci.com/article/science/pure-genius-how-dean-k...

I think they are slowly getting out there, but they're still very expensive.

I wouldn't hold my breath on that. A Segway scooter still costs over six thousand dollars.

Edit: corrected typo

This is a pretty incredible quote.