Timelordwho wrote:
Hypothetically, high school students build robots to compete in a competition to get them interested in STEM. In reality bored engineer parents build robots for their kids instead. According to my spies It's even more egregious out on the west coast: here's how a real conversation with one of the students went: "Congratulations on winning the [local event], can I take a look at the robot?" "No, they are taking it back to NASA" "Oh, well what did you help build on it?" "We aren't allowed to touch it".
There have been a few teams that do that, but the vast majority do actually involve the kids in building and designing their robots. I have a friend who co-runs a robotics team (both first and vex), and runs events regionally. Teams that obviously didn't build their robots may do well in the competition itself, but most of the awards aren't about the points won in said competition. And the judges are pretty savvy about noodling out which teams actually engaged in the activities themselves, and which ones just showed up with a pre-built robot.
Remember that these are high school kids. The objective is to get them interested in STEM fields, not to discourage them by requiring that they already be proficient before they can start. So yes, parents and mentors help out. But I know for a fact that at least on my friend's team, the kids make the final decisions about the design and operation of the robot. Sometimes in ways that the parents know aren't the best approach (although sometimes the kids are right). Because the old adage about learning more from mistakes is very very true. Trying a particular method for scooping up a ball and then tossing it will often force design changes on other parts of the robot that the kids might not have thought about at first.
Trust me. If you actually went to an event and looked at the number of Franken-robots present, you'd quickly realize that these were designed ad-hoc, by committee, often while hopped up on jolt and mt dew, and adjusted along the build process. In other words, exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of teenagers.
There are people who cheat, but they're really only cheating their own kids.