FIRST competition

I’ve recently become a Mentor (along with Ethan) for FIRST Robotics competition team 345 (NORSTAR). I used to be a NORSTAR student, but never competed in the FIRST competition, so helping out is pretty interesting. It’s really fun getting into that different mindset again; thinking about engineering and design problems, as well as game strategy, rather than just programming and Internet stuff. Being involved in the robotics/engineering stuff really stresses a different part of your brain than software design, as you have a much less discrete problem - a give input won’t necessarily produce a given output The particular game this year is full of little variances and gotchas in the game play - we sat for 2 hours just picking those out.

It’s also kind of eye opening for me, that the vast majority of the involved people didn’t even think about any kind of digital collaboration. My first instinct with a new project involving a bunch of people is either a mailing list, IRC, or a wiki. When I mentioned a wiki or mailing list to the students and mentors, they kind of shrugged and said ‘ok’. Definitely not the reaction I was expecting. Everyone seemed to want their hard copies of the rules and information as well, rather than easily searchable digital PDFs. Different strokes for different folks, I guess; I had just always figured engineering and technically oriented people would jump on a more efficient way of managing data and communicating. Maybe they just lack exposure to these technologies that I simply take for granted (although they all seemed to know what Wikipedia is…). Time will tell!

Add comment January 12th, 2007