The Lazy Mentor System

Team 2823 - The AutomatonsHighland Park Senior High School

St. Paul, MN

Executive SummaryDuring the 2013 build season, the mentors of Team 2823 found themselves doing more work onthe robot than they felt was appropriate or ideal.

In the off season, the mentors of 2823 devised and implemented a training curriculum designedto teach students to successfully build a robot on their own. We put it into practice in the fall of2013, culminating in the building of a ‘beverage fetching robot’ ­ something that the laziestmentor of all could use to fetch a beverage from a fridge without having to leave his chair.

This white paper provides an overview of that system, and shares the results of our experiment.The full lazy mentor system is shared with the broader FRC community with two hopes:

1. That it may help teams similar to ours2. That we may encourage other mentors to collaborate with us on building the next lessons

The full system can be viewed at this url:http://tinyurl.com/lazymentor

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IntroductionTeam 2823 is effectively a third year team. Although it is six years old, it’s first 3 years weredisjointed, and our current head coach did not begin working with the team until the middle of the2012 season. We currently have a young group of students; mostly sophomores and freshmen.We are lucky to have a great group of mentors, but during the off season, our mentor to studentratio plummets, so we have a struggle to manage our students outside of build season.

We work out of the wood shop of the senior high school. Our students have no classes inmachining, or robots, or any building instruction available to them. While wood shop is offered atthe school, none of the current team members have taken it. Basically, our student teamconsists of young students who love videogames and the idea of robots, but who have littlepractical training in the construction of robots.

The Lazy Mentor System was designed to provide: A self directed training mechanism that provides all the skills required to build a robot Self confidence ­ kickoff day comes with every student knowing they can build a robot Something constructive to do during down time

Basic StructureThe Lazy Mentor System hinges around a set of about 15 lessons. Taken together, the lessonsteach a student how to build a full robot. Each individual lesson is relatively short (2 hours orless), and is designed to be completed entirely by the student.

Lessons are grouped into categories. Basic lessons include things like Safety 101, GraciousProfessionalism 101, Tools 101, and so on. Building lessons include things like Chassis 101and Wheels 101. Electrical lessons include Electricity 101, Wiring 101, and Crimping 101. Thefull list and the lessons themselves are available at http://tinyurl.com/lazymentor.

Our requirements for each lesson are as follows: Complete and clear. Even the most untrained student should be able to get through the

lesson without feeling stupid or lost. The ideal is as little mentor involvement as possible. Require less than two hours, so it can be done in one session after school. As much as possible, lessons should be fun, challenging, and light hearted.

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We track student progress on a chart, and use the coveted purple pen to mark completion. Hereis a picture of our LM Chart as it stood on January 15th, 2014:

We have thus far set a high standard; requiring students to genuinely master a lesson beforechecking them off on it.

ResultsThe results in 2014 have been very promising.

Our pre­season was fantastic. Students were active and engaged. We had many productivemeetings, and our students learned a great number of skills. Independence and initiative werevisible at every meeting.

Even better, the final project of the pre season was to build a complete robot to fetch beveragesfor the laziest mentor. This worked brilliantly; with students finishing it with just one hour left inthe pre season.

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Here is a picture of the robot they built:

You can see a video of the beverage fetching robot at this url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZcLL8jC3Ds

To this point in the 2014 season, the students have remained engaged, and highly motivated.They have also proven to be much more energetic about building and participating. In fact, wehave enough skilled workers that we believe we will be able to build a shadow robot for the firsttime.

ChallengesHowever, we have learned that teaching simpler mechanical skills didn’t magically translate intohigher order skills such as design, troubleshooting and leadership. Our hoped for build seasonof ease and leisure has not fully materialized.

We do have great students, and they are really engaged. But we’ve found that it’s actually hardto go from ‘Chassis 101’ to understanding how to make a four bar linkage that will lift a ball. Sowe, the mentors, have been helping with a lot of the design issues so far this year.

Similarly, troubleshooting a complex encoder problem doesn’t automatically flow from knowinghow to wire it. So, again, we the mentors have been a bit more hands on with some of thetroubleshooting than is perhaps ideal.

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Finally, in the pre­season, our students really enjoyed knowing exactly what to do next. Buildinga robot is more complex than running scripted lessons. Even the smartest mentors rarely knowexactly what should happen next. One of the life skills we hope to teach them is how to takeinitiative and do some more of this planning on their own. We may have to do this the oldfashioned way, but it would be fun if we could make the Lazy Mentor system help encourageinitiative and leadership as well.

Finally, as a note for other teams, we may have had such good results because we had somany new students. Our older and returning students were more resistant to the ‘basic’lessons, so a different mix might have less enthusiastic results.

Next StepsFor next year, we are planning to add a second level of lessons. We want to start adding ‘200’level lessons for items such as design, CAD, and troubleshooting.

We’ve got crazy ideas about buckets of legos and a design lesson. We also think the MinnesotaGo First ‘Mock Kick Off’ model makes a really good model for ‘Design 101’ and ‘Design 102’ typelessons.

We are also fortunate, as a team, to have a group of strong programmers. As a result, we didnot need to do a lot of teaching for programming. However, programming remains one of themost fun parts of the process, and it would be really nice to enable all of our students toparticipate. But at this point, we were unable to think of any way to break the programming downinto nice, neat lessons. That is still a challenge (hint, hint).

We are sharing our system with the broad FRC world in the hope that other, similarly lazy,mentors will find it useful. We would particularly love it if others would reach out to us andcollaborate, so we can jointly build a great system for everyone to use.

ContactTo collaborate with us, you can follow the contact links at our web site: www.highland­2823.comYou are also free to email the author of this paper, Jeremy White, directly, atjwhite@codeweavers.com.

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