You've probably heard of FIRST Robotics, the annual robotics competition which brings lots of geeky young people together to design, build and test robots.
Oh, you have? Good, because I don't want to try and explain it.
It all started twenty-odd years ago when Someone with Good Intentions decided that geeky kids shouldn't be left to their own devices, building robots in their basement and taking them out to empty parking lots in the middle of abandoned Detroit and having Robot Wars to satisfy an internal need to blow things up. No, no; this Particular Well-Intentioned Busybody was worried that all those geeky kids might become antisocial, and it was high-time that they were brought into the fold of polite society and Organized. So he (and a bunch of other "concerned" adults) came together and created an Organization which took all the fun out of something the kids were already on their own, devising Teams and Logos and Trophies and Saturday Practice Sessions and Cheerleading Squads and other things that are not only incredibly stupid but also Cost Lots of Money.
So instead of kids going through the scrapyards and fix-it shops (and their dad's garage) to find wires and motors and gears and aluminum frames, and building bizarre contraptions which are not only icredibly creative but also mind-stretching in their complexity and artistry, they are forced to do lots of Fundraising so they can come up with enough money to order actual Parts from real Corporations and then put all these expensive parts together into some semblance of a robot that meets the Rules and Specifications of this year's "game"; and then they when they are ready to take their amazing invention to the competition, they must do a bit more FundRaising to come up with the huge Entry Fee so they will be allowed to compete against other Teams at these big Events held at huge Universities where every "sponsor" gets to plaster the robots with stickers denoting their sponsorship.
American capitalism at its best.
The Company sponsors several of these robots at several different schools scattered across the country. I'm a mentor at one of these schools. I go to the planning meetings and the practice sessions and some of the competitions; I help them with their designs and their wiring and their computer programming as they work on the robot; and I cheer on the team when they are out on the field trying to get the robot to do its thing.
But it still doesn't sit right with me.
The "season" is only six weeks long, from the time the "game" is announced to the time of the first competition. That's barely enough time to get a team to work together, let along enough time to design, build, test and perfect a robot. It puts a lot of pressure on the kids to get a lot of complicated tasks done in a very short amount of time. It tends to lead to a bit of burn-out, especially on those particular students who are prone to go all-out until they have nothing left to give.
One of the kids, a senior, nearly hosed up his GPA because he was spending too much time on the robot and not enough time on his AP classes. Hearing about the trouble he was getting into both at home and at school infuriated me; someone (a mentor, teacher or sponsor) needed to help remind him that it is, after on, only a game. But they were getting wrapped up in the spirit of the competition just as much as he was.
I don't like competition, or confrontation of any kind. If there is any possibility that someone will win and someone will lose, I am uncomfortable. And, inevitably, rather than gaining joy from a successful outcome, I can't help but feel sorry for those who have lost. For me, the greatest joy is in designing something that is really cool, not in making it better than someone else.
This is only the second year for this team. I had tried to help out last year, but never was able to find enough time to do so. This year, there was more time available to help, but it was not very satisfactory an experience. At one point, I asked one of the shop teachers, who was sponsoring the "club", why there were so few students from last year's team. "Burn-out", he replied. Too many late nights. Too much stress and anxiety from trying to put together a complicated mechanism with a minimum number of participants.
And this year?
We had our Wrap-Up meeting tonight, our post-competition What Did We Learn session. The mentors had a lot to say. So did the kids.
Consistency was one of the biggest problems. It was very difficult to get a consistent set of students at each "practice". So it was hard to make assignments and then ensure that things were getting done on schedule.
Organization was another issue. Organization of materials, teams, design, fundraisers, and just about everything else under the sun. There was a constant state of anxiety due to the very short season (six weeks from announcement of this year's game to the first competition) and the ridiculous number of things we had to figure out.
Especially when some things didn't quite work out the way we had expected.
Supposedly, that's part of the fun of this competition, running into issues that cause the team to come up with brilliantly creative fixes. But it really isn't that much fun when it puts people on edge and leads to a lot of delays and late nights and panicky situations during the week before the competition (like when a particularly expensive part suddenly breaks and the team has to scramble to find and order a replacement, only to find that they just aren't available).
It isn't fun, at least not to me. My idea of fun is teaching a group of kids how to build a robot from scraps they've gathered out of their parents' garage, and learning some basic principles of mechanics, electronics, and hydraulics in the process.
(You might notice that I didn't mention "programming". Programming wasn't really critical to to design, and I never really understood the need for such a fancy computer system for the robot. It wasn't necessary. The "robot", in fact, was mostly tele-operated, not really much more complicated than a radio-controlled car you might find in the local toy store. But the big international embedded system sponsor had dictated that everyone had to use their computer, and the FIRST people bought into that vision, and so every team had to come up with thousands of dollars to buy the computer.)
My next goal, insofar is the robotics team is concerned, is to find out how many of the kids are willing to get together over the summer to work on some real robotics training; that is, learning how robots really work, and designing them from the ground up, without the assistance of expensive corporate sponsors.
The rest of the evening was spent discussing college finances with Adam.
This is not a comfortable subject with him, nor is it really comfortable for us. The fact remains that we have missed several deadlines for obtaining scholarships, and the possibility of his attending the college of his choice - or any college, for that matter, is rapidly dwindling.
He has already been accepted at one college; unfortunately, it is one of the more expensive colleges in the area. They have offered him a scholarship, but that only manages to bring our overall cost to somewhere in the neighborhood of painful.
If he is to attend that college, there is a quite a bit of money that must be procured; and it cannot be procured merely obtaining gifts from friends and family, and by parents taking out a loan. No, indeed. This is going to require quite a bit of work on his part.
At $7.40 an hour.
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