Talk Like a Robot | 25 NE Mentors Conference

Last weekend, a few of us mentors from team 2064 attended the New England Mentors conference, and I had signed up to give a 'mini presentation'. When I first read through the Chief Delphi post about the mentor conference and saw the signup for the mini presentations, I wanted to do one. I am not much of a public speaker and very much an introvert with bursts of extroverted tendencies. I thought it would be a good way for me to get some practice speaking in front of a large group, and I like talking about education, specifically through the vessel of FRC.

Turning an idea into a Presentation is weird

'Talk Like a Robot' went through many iterations, all based around the idea of this exaggerated way of describing subsystems. It's something that I have felt has been useful when talking to programmers, specifically when we might not be in sync with the way that we think the robot should be moving or performing certain actions. This presentation really started out more of a 'How To: talking to programmers' than anything, and was going to be a lot more technical. We program in state machines at 2064, so I was going to focus more on the translation of what we say to code. After running through that, I really didn't like it. It felt way to specific to how we manage our code, I stumbled through the explanations because they didn't make a ton of sense to begin with, and the pacing was way off for a 5 minute presentation. So I rewrote the whole talk a few days before. The focus of the presentation was wrong. Instead of talking about code, I needed something that was more universally applicable. So I pivoted. The base wasn't terrible, I had some foundation to build off of. I really wanted to talk about how we communicate in FRC because I know, from my own shortcomings, that it is extremely difficult, especially for those of us who have been in this environment for a while. I built up the talk around the premise of what to focus on when talking about communication. Yes, terminology is important, but students are going to pick that up through exposure, I don't see a huge benefit of giving them a list of words to memorize. Focusing on the way we talk, particularly about subsystems that us as mentors, and even the senior students, can picture in our heads without many words, was more important to me. It's so easy to alienate newer students when talking about subsystems particularly because most of them have never had any engineering experience at all.

Who needs a script?

I was super nervous for this talk. The concept is one that I've talked to my fellow mentors about quite a bit, but I've never shared my ideas to a group in this way before. I had originally planned to write a script. Fun fact, I did not. When making the presentation, I had the mindset of 'I'll figure out how I'll talk about this later', which I then procrastinated until the last minute. Saturday night, after the bowling social, I walked around WPI with my presentation. I talked through it 4 or 5 times, never getting to the end without some awkward mistakes. I knew what I wanted to talk about, but struggled to find the words, or when I did, say them. I did not feel ready at all.

Nerves have stage fright

Even though I didn't feel super prepared, my nerves seemed to go away as soon as I started talking. I think coming into the presentation with a script and over preparing would have hurt me more. If I had a script, I believe I would've been way too focused on saying what's on that page rather than actually getting my message and ideas across. Although far from perfect, there were many instances in which I stumbled on words, it was a good experience and introduction into presenting for me. I definitely would love to do more in the future, if I get the chance.

The conference

We learned so much from the speakers and I felt so inspired to be a better mentor. I 6328, mechanical advantage, really have an amazing program that I would love to replicate. Learning that our approach to vision was flawed was both a little embarrassing, due to it seeming so obvious now, but also it feels great to have a pretty clear direction of what our next steps should be. Focusing on the new member experience is something that is going to fall into my lap. It seems that I am going to have a busy fall writing curriculum for code and a lot of team culture talk. Lots of new projects, not a ton of time.