Team 250: Robot Mock-ups

In a previous blog JEgan alluded to Team 250's design process, including the mock-ups we do. I thought you might be interested in how we arrived at pink foam.

Back in the "dark ages" of FIRST, Team 250 just used paper drawings for conceptualization. The students had trouble working with 2D sketches, so we shifted to having them make small models cut from tag board models. We really had too much risk to fingers from that, so we moved on to cardboard boxes that could yield full size models. We had lovely forts that year… and some good mock-ups. We also had much greater engagement from students. You know, cardboard boxes are not easy to find anymore. We can all find the photocopy paper size, but the bigger ones we used to get at the grocery market all get immediately crushed and recycled now. So on we moved to foam core, which worked very well, but was too costly.

The pink foam has been our best choice so far. It is reasonably priced, and is thick enough to accommodate the use of dowel rods as connectors and axles. The mock-ups are robust, yet light and portable. Its a great material for the kids to work with as they can easily cut it with a hacksaw, rather than cutting with razor knives. And my favorite feature is that the kids have fun breaking them up after we are done with them, leaving only three big bags of pink pieces for the garbage man. Too bad its not recyclable.

We do use CAD to work on our designs after we settle on the gross design concepts. You might ask why we don't just start right off in CAD. We could do that, but the students' knowledge and experience varies from none to fairly high level skill. When working with 14-17 year olds it is important to maintain a high level of involvement. The pink foam does that. Did you see our mock-up pix?

Hey engineers...I bet most of you aren't using pink foam for mock-ups. How do you do it? Our kids are reading your comments, so enlighten them and the rest of us. If you do, by chance, use pink foam, please send us your vote of confidence!