Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

I agree with most of your post, but not necessarily this little section.
Anyone I've talked to on a Hall of Fame or Chairman's team claims that their drive wasn't "to win an award", but more to change the culture of their community, team, and school.
The award for most is just a bonus.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

Anyone that asks me about applying for Chairman's Award has always gotten the same response from me:

To do what we've always done, striving to be better, helping others where we can, and making a difference for our current crop of students/school/community.
One of the most daunting tasks is trying to raise money to compete in FIRST. Most teams dont start their year saying lets plan on going to Hawaii 4-5 times per year while doing Robotics. That's us, just the other way around.
We do what we do, in order to survive and receive the funding support we need in order to compete. This in turn allows us to do what I mentioned above. The bonus is we all enjoy Robotics.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

Your confusing the end results of what is a tremendous program with what lures students to the program and what are the underlying incentives that drive teams. The beauty of FIRST is that students don't realize they are working hard at learning while they are having fun. Why are they having fun? Because they are in a COMPETITION. Yes, there a few students who are just into the engineering and never see the competition, but they are in the minority. But the bottom line is that the students don't know that they are going to gain all of this experience beyond building robots to compete until they've been on a team a while. And it's the maintaining that motivation from competition through the sports metaphor that we're most concerned about.

But I'm interested in what your vision is of finding motivation beyond the competition poke. My biggest question once you articulate that is how you use it to recruit new students from beyond the boundaries of FIRST and those already with inherent interest in STEM? If you can clearly articulate that vision and how it might be implemented then we can discuss that. I will begin, however, "offering more championship slots" is not a vision and has not be adequately linked to a cause and effect that reaches the target audience I've described.

If you want to both promote STEM and take on motivations in Western culture, that's too much to ask of FIRST. I must part ways with you on that. FIRST has a singular mission. Adding a second one muddies that too much.

Let's start with the justification voiced by many in other threads for why the championsplit should have coequal fields rather than tiered qualification (to paraphrase): The top elite teams inspire other teams and should other teams at the 2 events should have an equal chance of interacting with those inspiring teams. Therefore one event should not be allowed to have a concentration of elite teams. Now those same elite teams are in fact NOT more inspiring and therefore deserve no special treatment. If that's the case, then you should have no problem if the championships in fact do have a tiered qualification system so that the top 400 go to one event and the next 400 go to other. Your position is inconsistent if you both opposed tiered events AND argue that elite teams are not anymore inspirational.

Regardless, you are missing my point--this isn't about catering to elite teams. My point is that FIRST needs the celebrity of elite teams in the sports metaphor to attract students from the broader society. No one has yet proposed a workable alternative model that will be as successful as the sports metaphor to reach widely across our society. Remember Kamen's goal is to change the culture so that scientists and engineers gain wider recognition and students aspire to be like them. You may not remember this ad campaign, but in the 1980s there was a hugely successful ad campaign with Michael Jordan who's pitch line was "Be like Mike." And the implication was obvious--emulate a celebrity pro athlete. This is a fundamental truth of marketing. You may not like marketing truths imply about us, but they are what they are.

So it's not about elite teams trying to "trump" HQs decision; it's about the usefulness of elite teams for promoting the mission of FIRST. Every successful sport needs its elite celebrities. In my favorite sport, track & field, this has become a real problem because too many of the celebrity athletes disappear in non-Olympic years. The sport is now heavily dependent on Usain Bolt, and he was gone last year so interest dropped significantly. In 1960, 80,000 spectators showed up for the US-USSR dual meet at Stanford. This year other than the Prefontaine meet in Eugene (about 13,000), no meet will draw more than 10,000 spectators and most less than 5,000. The elite track athletes now avoid meeting each other because the current incentives tell them to do so. I certainly want FIRST to avoid the fate of U.S. track & field.

Finally, I would say that the elite teams have stuck around because there has always been a unified championship to pursue. And the fact is that the other changes have often made the competition better. But now we're looking at a truly fundamental change. How will elite teams respond? And what if FIRST also designs games that have many features of this year's game? If those 2 factors happened in combination, you would start to see the mentors who drive those teams start to drift away.

Your statement shows that you may be misunderstanding what's the mission of FIRST. It's not to appeal to members of already existing teams. Your attitudes about the attractiveness of STEM are already changed. As I've said many times, FIRST is aiming to reach well beyond your team. It wants to attract students who aren't inherently builders. That's great if that's your motivation, but why stymie the ability to attract others to the program because you have a specific preference? Why should your preference trump everyone else?

And given that preference, I'm don't see why allowing certain teams to focus on competitive excellence as their motivation conflicts with your preference to be motivated by the engineering challenge? Is there an inherent conflict that I'm not seeing?

And if you don't see how expanding FRC helps your program, then we need to have a separate conversation. Remember that your team was started in 2012 because FRC is expanding, so you have been directly impacted by that outreach. And others will benefit in the future as well.

BTW, I am not using personal anecdotes or statements of personal preferences. Please point to any of my posts that allude to my personal motivations for participating in FIRST other than I think this is a fantastic educational program that has the potential to reach a wide swath of the student population. What I have done is relayed what I have learned in my professional experience as an economist which includes an extensive knowledge of the research into the effect of incentives. I also have been a keen observer of sports action and management for even longer. I have tried to avoid any references to my own personal preferences. (It's something that I've developed in my professional work. In one week a few years ago I was called both a "Gringrich Republican" and a "commie pinko." Quite an accomplishment! ;) )

And most importantly I am NOT making sweeping generalizations that "most everyone is motivated by winning and whatever else." I am saying that many students and mentors are motivated by competition, and based on the postings here and elsewhere on CD, the teams that are referenced as being inspirational (see my passage above) are motivated in a large part by competition. And what those teams do on and off the field is inspirational to other teams, even those not motivated by competition. (And I do have the empirical evidence that almost everyone is motivated by incentives. That premise is the basis of almost all economic research. I'd be interested to know if you have contrary research. Winning competitions is one type of incentive.)

Finally, I respond to your posts because we are having a public debate about the fundamental mission of FIRST and I believe that your opinions are representative of a much larger group than just you. I don't view you as an isolated voice--you're expressing concerns and viewpoints that others have stated elsewhere and probably by many others who haven't said anything. So, yes I will challenge your statements and the sources of your statements because they carry weight.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

You know what, fair.

I still think this won't hinder anything we do for recruitment or demotivate us. If it stops anyone else remember that there are other ways to accomplish many of your goals that have been successful for teams who probably have less resources than you do. We "bottom ~%90" teams have outreach tech too.

Finally I look forward to be playing "East Bound and Down" on the road between GA and TX for however long we compete there. Honestly I hate that I'm even still arguing. No one's going to change their mind here, so no more from me on this subject.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

It's only arguing if you aren't trying to look for the best solution.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

My position isn't inconsistent, because that's not my position. You created a strawman, or minimally posited other people's viewpoint as mine. Stop trying to lump all of the people that you have disagreed with into one hivemind.

Notice how that post (or all but one of mine in this thread) was not in response to you. Consider the posts I was responding to before considering whether or not I'm missing your point.

Show me the proof. So far we concentrate our "celebrity of elite teams" at both Championship and IRI, yet to date we haven't seen the widespread cultural inspiration we're aiming for (funny what happens when you suddenly consider that inspiration might not just be aimed at other teams, which also breaks down your opening paragraph's straw man). Perhaps FIRST's approach of more high profile events spread out might lead to more attention from broader society?

I think two regional championships does just fine as the sports metaphor in terms of reaching across society. The people that the "championsplit" impacts are within our own borders as a community, not without it. Nobody outside of FIRST is going to care if we have one champion alliance or two, or if teams from Michigan aren't playing against teams from Texas. Outsideers will be able to understand North Championship and South Championship perfectly fine.

STEM absolutely needs celebrities. The thing is, as you alluded to earlier, FIRST is about recognizing scientists and engineers as celebrities, not teams. FIRST doesn't replicate sports for the sake of FIRST being a sport. FIRST replicates sport for the sake of changing the larger culture. This isn't about making the Citrus Circuits a household name, this is about making Woodie Flowers a household name. FIRST growing as a sport can help that, but it's not the end-all be-all. Not to mention, but the reality is that the outside public doesn't know the difference between the Citrus Circuits and Dawgma. Neither of our teams is going to attract a significant difference in outside public opinion, regardless of our status within the community as "elite teams." We're not even close the point where people outside our own community track the results and learn about teams they aren't personally invested in. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we reach that point by 2020.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

There are multiple things at play here so its not really a simple solution and growing pains are tough. There are many many ways to grow and expand an organization. Different people see different priorities as growth occurs and it can lead to disagreements.

Everyone knows that FIRST is for Inspiration and Recognition.

To me, inspiration and recognition comes from some cool stuff done by some pretty awesome people. How do you get cool stuff done by awesome people? You get them lured in somehow. How do you do that? With a sports model! This ignites growth in the program.

Like many others have said already, the competition is the vehicle. Slowing down the vehicle can slow down the growth. The championsplit does not completely extinguish the competitive fire, but it does not fuel it. It's a step closer to a science fair.

I love working with the kids, but if I had to choose between working with kids to enter a science fair or working with kids to build a robot to compete in a worldwide robotics competition, I'm choosing the later every time. How cool is that, a worldwide robotics competition!

Well, I guess there can be co world champions... that were at different locations... that didn't compete in the same tournament... that's pretty cool...

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

Again, you're taking a narrow "I only care about us" view. And that's fine to do, but don't use it justify how other teams and the overall program should be run. The point of FIRST is not to do outreach team-by-team--it's to do it program wide, top down. That's what publicity is about. It's about having teams at more that just your high school.

As for resources, understand that until this year we worked out of shared math classroom and two outdoor shipping containers. We didn't get any money from our school district until this year. So please don't believe that we have a different set of resources that you have. Yes, we have several more years of experience, but that steadily erodes.

If what I responded to was not your position, then your's is not being stated clearly.

You say that no one outside of FIRST will care if we have one champion or not. And I've given you proof that it does matter. The fact that we were recognized much differently this year vs. the last 2 years is a strong example. That we get to meet with a key state senator comes from having one champion.

I blame the fact that there isn't more recognition society wide (which has been the basis of my posts--I've always talked about inspiring cultural change and my point doesn't break down when we go beyond inspiring FIRST teams) on the lack of a strong media campaign by FIRST HQ. I've posted about those shortcomings else, e.g. on the Championship Event Survey thread. We've tried to coordinate publicizing here with FIRST HQ and have heard almost nothing. If no one hears about it, of course it's not going to inspire the wider culture.

Which brings me to lack of celebrity. Yes, eventually we want Flowers to be the type of celebrity (but in fact I think we really want someone not even connected to FIRST itself, but rather groundbreaking researchers and engineers.) However, the idea is that teams can become celebrities. In California, the De La Salle football team is a celebrity sports program. Many sports fans know about them, but most could not name the coach or any of his athletes. DLS has the advantage of being embedded into a sport that has a whole journalist culture built around it. Our team has worked at extending media outreach in Northern California, but we've gotten little help from the FIRST organization. We have 3 teams in the region that have been on the last 2 world championship alliances but there's no coordinated media campaign to exploit this. Instead our team is going to be carrying the ball alone to promote FIRST locally. If FIRST hasn't even tried to effectively communicate the event to the media, how do you know that no one cares.

And sports/competitions can become suddenly popular with the right packaging. Two examples: poker and ultimate fighting. (OK, not the most wholesome...)

So I don't know why you want to make it even more difficult to reach the wider audience by splitting the champions? Every other sport is moving towards consolidated championships to increase visibility. Why run counter to what seems to be the collective wisdom? Again, I haven't seen how your rationale leads to a wider reach. Why is having 2 diluted champions a stronger draw? (I agree that having more teams at these events is a plus.) Is it simply "it doesn't matter"?

I was with you until the very end. That last sentence doesn't fit with the rest of your reasoning.:confused:

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

I think we've heard from the FRC community, regardless of team membership or type, that they oppose championsplit. By all of the measures posted on that thread, the opponents outnumber supporters 2 to 1. That's a landslide. Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory was only 58.8% to 40.6%.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

I read this quote by Don Bossi at the townhall meeting in the survey thread:

The story for FIRST® LEGO® League, FIRST® Tech Challenge, Junior FIRST® LEGO® League is much worse. FIRST Tech Challenge has the capacity for about 3 percent of their teams at Championship. FIRST LEGO League, it kills me when I talk to a FIRST LEGO League partner for a country and I say, oh we can’t even send a team this year, we don’t have a slot this year."

And I thought about how the Chairman's criteria was changed to emphasize creation of new FLL teams. And I felt a letdown. I realized that what happened with FRC in championsplit is a complete afterthought for FIRST HQ.

I will now be speculating, but I think it's internally consistent.

FIRST HQ is primarily focused on expanding FLL. Given that LEGO is a major supporter of FIRST and the Mindstorm package is credited as an important factor for the turnaround of LEGO, FIRST HQ may be getting pressure from LEGO to continue to expand that market. FIRST recognizes for younger students just going to a "world" event is sufficient incentive, so having more "world" events is good for expanding FLL.

FIRST HQ's second priority is FTC. It fits into a smaller scale so it can be more cost effective in more middle and high schools. And it faces a strong challenge from VEX. FIRST HQ has to find a way to turn around the FTC ship. Right now it's lost in the championship event.

FRC hasn't caught on fire--it's not a wildly successful marketing tool to promote widespread adoption of robotics programs across the US. (I've talked about how FIRST HQ hasn't adequately pushed this model, but that's a different thought.) So FIRST HQ is trying to figure out how to keep FRC around at these events in sufficient numbers and quality to inspire the FLL and FTC attendees, so that they feel like they are part of a bigger event.

Ultimately, FIRST HQ sees an "AYSO" future which focuses on elementary school participation. Unfortunately AYSO hasn't been particularly successful at changing how the US looks at soccer, and it doesn't seem to have much of an impact on physical activity levels. Increased soccer interest is mostly driven by increased immigration. (The PNW might be an interesting exception worth looking at.)

So I'm afraid this whole discussion about how FRC is affected by championsplit is doomed to fall on deaf ears. We're just not their prime constituency anymore. I believe they have made a serious miscalculation, but at the moment, FIRST HQ isn't ready to hear that.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

I'm interested to see where this is emphasized or stated?
If true, my concern is whether it really matters if creation of new teams for outreach have to be FLL?
There is another competing program we feel more strongly about and we promote that extensively.

One program is in the business of catering to Robotics in elementary schools, the other partners with Lego in bringing Robotics. And it shows.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

I can't stop... I'll just tell myself it's a re-statement.

1. I'm making a simple statement about our position. I made no comment to follow said statement saying that it justifies anything but my position. A takeaway could be "something is obviously still working for them maybe I'll try it once". If I followed your lead I'd be mildly sad and very disappointed at best.

2. All I'm saying is that there are other means of achieving the same goals that aren't hindered by the "championsplit", and that they don't require anymore than any team could come up with (be it money, time, or personnel). Also don't forget the tactics and effectiveness of anyone who you don't consider "top".

3. Find a positive somewhere, get some new inspiration tactics if you still think you need them, and move to Atlanta so you can sing this:

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

Dang it, don't make me pull out the emphatic Dave Lavery quote that chastises any and everyone who isn't focused on making all STEM-education/inspiration programs just as wildly successful as they all possibly can be.

VRC, FTC, BEST, BotBall, FRC, are not (had better not be) in competition with one another. They are all tiny compared to what is needed.

[SOAPBOX]
When talking to someone about STEM programs, graciously and professionally tell them about all of them, and at the end, once they are fully informed, if you want, explain why one program or another is your personal favorite.

When volunteering to make a program more successful than it already is, do it because all should be successful, not to exclude, harm or "beat" a different program.
[/SOAPBOX]

Blake

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

Please fine anything in my posts in this thread that allude to you dual championship proposal. You attempted to frame my position as "inconsistent" based on an entirely different thread and a position I never espoused in any thread. This isn't me making my position unclearly, this is you attempting to twist the words of multiple independent parties to suit your agenda.

You have given no proof. You were one of four champions this year, yet you still met with state senators. You weren't even the only champion from your home state. Do you think your state senators would have refused your visit if you won the championship in Houston and someone else won the championship in Detroit?

The only way that this comment could be connected to this thread is if you brought up the media attention FIRST has received historically. Like, say, the years where FRC was broadcast on ESPN. ;)

I have no clue who De La Salle football is, and I'm a football fan.

The younger of those two sports dates back to the 19th century, and it's TV popularity has faded dramatically in recent years. Neither of them has a singular championship, either. There is both the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour Championship. MMA has numerous organizations, each with numerous weight classes that are awarded their own championships. Multiple different organizations rank each fighter. So both of these aren't exactly helping your singular championship argument.
But the larger point here is that this isn't about promoting FIRST as a sport, it's about promoting science and technology.

For the umpteenth time, I don't support the split championship. If you actually read and considered other people's opinions you might realize that. Stop trying to drag every discussion off course. This is a thread about the FRC championship in a historical perspective, yet you're half responding to posts and half dragging them towards a different direction. It's reached the point where you're cross posting your own posts from other championship split threads (that have been countered there as well). If you actually stopped your campaigning to focus on what other people actually think, you might reach a breakthrough.

In response to your argument there, two championships doesn't make it any harder to reach a larger audience. If anything, it makes it easier since you have two local markets to reach with a free event. A singular championship doesn't matter to anyone outside of our own community.

Re: ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective
 

GENTLEMEN.

Please take your nitpicking discussions to PMs. Y'all are starting to just plain attack each other--at least from my perspective, you are. If you can't agree to disagree, you may want to PM each other, come to an agreement of sorts, and then post a joint conclusion. Thank you.




Mods: If this sort of discussion continues, I will be requesting a lock. The thread has wandered far from its intended purpose and become a 3-way back-and-forth.