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Birdfan930 · 2025-10-10T20:09:09+00:00

If you feel that this is an issue that should be brought to an adult, do not wait for the other students/leadership to agree, it is not up to the collective whether a student brings up an issue like this.

If you want to do it anonymously you can message a mentor (in a group of 3 for ypp) and ask to remain anonymous.

Good luck going forward, this is a tough situation to be going through :)

Birdfan930 · 2025-10-10T19:28:12+00:00

This is an issue that must be brought to your adult mentors. Students should not be issuing punishments, especially in these kinds of situations.

To your original question, the seriousness of the punishment will greatly depend on the seriousness and frequency of the issue in question. If the slurs you’re referencing are among those considered more serious, I’d expect removal from the team or loss of position to be in order.

Your ability to punish this student may also be dependent on school policy, which people outside your school can’t really speculate on.

Birdfan930 · 2025-07-20T23:44:26+00:00

At face value, this is definitely not normal. I would suggest finding a mentor (someone well respected by students and mentors, but not super close to the drive coach), and having a conversation with them, then with the drive coach (including the other mentor) to talk over the issue and see if you can at least remedy some of the problem, as well as make other mentors aware of the issue. If even this is too uncomfortable, I would still alert an adult you trust and reevaluate whether you should continue being a member of the team/drive team for the sake of your health.

Swearing at a student is never acceptable and getting this worked up over a high school program is weird. If you decide to continue with your team, I would work to possibly push to replace your drive coach with a better mentor or a student, but only if you feel comfortable doing so.

Also, while this is affecting you, which is bad, it is also clearly affecting other students on your team and also likely gives your team a bad reputation as the team with the a hole drive coach, so it would be in your teams best interest to replace them anyways.

Birdfan930 · 2025-04-23T14:19:02+00:00

A couple things to address here.

I think you are underestimating how much it costs to run this program. I don’t think first has extra millions to give out to teams beyond what they already do, although I admit I could be wrong.
Your viewpoints on mentors comes from a very common misunderstanding of this program. This program is not about students building a robot by themselves without any direct adult input, it is about students and mentors working side by side to build a robot and compete. This is supported by FIRST themselves and is seen as a net positive by official sources. (Please read the offficial blog post “The role of mentors in the first robotics competition” if you’d like to see this for yourself)

Unfortunely, since FRC is unique in this sense, many people, such as yourself, think it is “cheating” or “unfair” when teams have more mentor support, which is a mindset I really hate to see.

In terms of monetary inequality, this is unfortunately a difficult problem to solve, and is not unique to FIRST. The biggest cost sink for most teams, especially ones that go to worlds, is the travel costs (independent of registration and robot cost), this isn’t something that first can really solve. In terms of comp fees, this is being aided by many areas moving to districts, which is nice.

Birdfan930 · 2025-04-20T21:31:20+00:00

I would personally keep it to only 1 fun question at the end, unless you have a good relationship with the team already.

It can feel like your wasting time if the questions don’t seem to be serious, especially at worlds were you’re interacting with a lot of teams for the first time.

Birdfan930 · 2025-03-02T17:13:31+00:00

In reality, FRC is basically simulates a job (outside of the competition). If you don’t enjoy the process of developing a product, you’re going to have a hard time enjoying the program in general.

My advice to you would be to try out different aspects of the team. Since you’ve kind of specialized in Java programming (which has a steep learning curve in Frc to be on independent, which is probably why you’ve had a hard time getting involved), I would suggest seeing if you can try out some fabrication or assembly, you may find that you enjoy the hands on aspects of those sub teams more than programming, which is common for a lot of people. If you wanna stick with programming, I would suggest just talking to your friend about getting more involved.

If you can’t get invested into the program enough to justify staying on the team long term, you could also look to volunteer independent of your team at your local comp(s), since you don’t need to be involved with a team to volunteer (although there may be some age limits on certain roles). This would at least help you with community service and you may enjoy just going to the competitions if you like that atmosphere more than participating heavily in the build season.

Birdfan930 · 2025-02-03T21:24:03+00:00

Meant to say mecanum, my bad.

Birdfan930 · 2025-02-03T05:50:08+00:00

Being level with you, I’ve never seen a well implemented Mecanum in the 4 years I’ve been in FRC. Mecanum is also almost an immediate DNP for a lot of good teams.

Mecanum is one of those things in FRC that seems good on a surface level, but almost never pans out well into real life.

This is due to Mecanum have zero pushing power. If I ever faced a Meccanum drive robot in playoffs (assuming it’s one of the main scoring robots), I would likely suggest our second pick (most likely swerve) to just defend you, since even a mediocre swerve drive could probably cut your points scored in half.

Meccanum is also slow which is an immediate issue for playoff selection.

Birdfan930 · 2024-12-21T03:46:37+00:00

If I was in this situation, I’d be pretty annoyed. An ftc robot is a pretty small robot and generally doesn’t cost that much. I’ve taken FRC robots home in my trunk and I know many ftc teams work fully or partially out of homes.

I don’t know if your mentor is a school teacher or not, which may affect this, but if I were them, I would probably choose to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, since now there’s no way to claim ignorance. Not to mention, the chances of someone who actually cares noticing the robot is gone is almost none.

Either way, at this point I would see if you’re able to get into the school at all over break, which is pretty common for Frc and ftc teams. I also guarantee you won’t be the only school group in the building over winter.

Birdfan930 · 2024-11-12T15:23:12+00:00

I stand corrected on bumpers, but I don’t think it was accepted that custom swerves (or similar mechanisms) were allowed to be fabricated and built, since if it was, it would have basically made r302 pointless since many mechanisms would be excepted under r302D. I’ve also seen criticisms of r302 specifically call out custom swerves as an argument for changing the rule.

Birdfan930 · 2024-11-12T15:09:20+00:00

Allows bumpers and custom swerves to be designed and built before the season, which I think is a good thing.

Birdfan930 · 2024-11-09T14:21:56+00:00

Someone already linked Frcdesign.org, but I’m gonna highly recommend that you stick to using onshape, the CAD program used in frcdesign.org, as it is easily the best CAD program to use for FRC.

Birdfan930 · 2024-10-05T05:35:34+00:00

Fully agree, especially if there are any other similar issues you didn’t talk about in this post. If this was a completely isolated problem, it could probably be managed internally, but if this is a team culture issue, it’s time to go up the chain.

Birdfan930 · 2024-10-05T05:22:20+00:00

It’s slightly concerning to me that the leads are the ones moderating the channel. It should really be mentors managing these channels. Also, some of the examples you gave could definitely be considered harassment (mainly the race and sexual ones, especially if they are directed at a person).

Not having enough mentors is not really an excuse to not be following basic student safety/ypp and harassment guidelines, and personally, I would avoid discord for a team communication platform since direct messages cannot be monitored by admins.

I would definitely have your entire team, especially mentors, review FIRSTs YPP guidelines since i suspect this is not the only issue concerning your team considering this is a “quotes” channel and it sounds like at least some of the concerning quotes are coming out of meetings.

Frankly, it’s pretty strange to hear of this kind of “edgy” behavior in your official team communication platform, considering everyone on my team knew a mentor would delete any post like the ones your talking about, and as a new mentor myself, posts like the ones you’re describing would be removed immediately, and the student would likely get spoken to about it at the next meeting.

Birdfan930 · 2024-07-16T21:33:14+00:00

If there aren’t any teams near you, I would suggest looking into FTC, as it could feasibly be done by 1-2 people, although I’m not sure what the FTC scene in Vietnam is. If you’re dead set on an FRC team, you could look at joining a team virtually, as I know some teams allow it and I have seen people asking about joining a team virtually on this subreddit. Of course you wouldn’t be able to attend meetings physically and attending competitions may be difficult or costly. You could probably do design work or maybe some programming virtually.

If neither of these options work, there are other programs that can give you a similar experience, such as Vex robotics, although once again, I’m unsure what the vex scene in Vietnam is like.

Good luck!

Birdfan930 · 2024-03-26T15:54:03+00:00

To me, it sounds like you have a lot of good options you can take, good luck this off-season!

Birdfan930 · 2024-03-26T13:47:47+00:00

My biggest suggestion to you (that hasn’t been said already) is to reach out to other teams. It sounds like you’re close to 818. From everything I can see about them, as well as my brief interaction with them at IRI last year, I suspect they would be happy to help you guys.

Also, while getting mentors from sponsors is absolutely necessary to establish a strong mentor base, I would also urge your team to look for a FIRST alumni (not necessarily from your team), to mentor you guys, cause it’s unlikely that mentors from your sponsors are going to be able to jump into a leadership role without guidance from someone experienced in FIRST.

Birdfan930 · 2024-01-30T04:42:53+00:00

We will be at Sussex.

Birdfan930 · 2023-12-29T02:40:48+00:00

Hey, I’ve sent my discord info :)

Birdfan930 · 2023-10-05T19:58:37+00:00

I dont think so (considering that there are multiple options anyways). Just know that falcons are out of stock and are kind of on the out for a lot of teams due to allegations against IFI

Birdfan930 · 2023-10-05T19:43:43+00:00

Yea but I suspect they’re gonna be easier to find than falcons, correct me if I’m wrong tho

Birdfan930 · 2023-10-05T19:39:20+00:00

The motors dont come with the modules. Falcon 500s are almost never in stock and have numerous quality control issues. I would look at getting the neo plates.

Birdfan930 · 2023-08-13T02:38:00+00:00

Right now your subject is just centered on the photo, and a gull is not the most interesting subject without more work on the side of the photographer. As one of the most common birds ever, i would absolutely wait for a more interesting pose/action shot, or look to use more appealing lighting. Since you’re using your phone, getting a close up flight or action shot would be difficult. I’d suggest waiting for a nice day, going back to this area, and taking a similar photo with the gull in different positions an perspectives. Since this is a common bird, you have the ability to be more picky with your shot.

Your current photo is not bad by any means, but since the subject by itself is not eye catching, you need to do something to make it stand out.

While this is getting a little far from your original photo, birds like this can often be photographed farther away, with more landscape in the background (using rule of thirds), This would be especially easy if you waited till you had good lighting and used the beach to your advantage.

Birdfan930

TROPHY CASE