Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

The awards should be one entity, and the robots should be another entity. Both important, but they should not overlap.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

The key question is: "What is a winner?"

If you define being a winner in terms of walking away from a competition with a medal or a trophy, then I thoroughly agree that not every team is, nor should be, a winner. The C in FRC is Competition, and the competition contributes to both inspiration and recognition.

On the other hand, when I compare the members of an FRC team who dedicated dozens or even hundreds of hours learning, building, iterating, writing, practicing, and generally being inspired to their classmates who stayed at home playing video games, watching the tube, or smoking dope, then YES! Every one who really participates in FRC is a winner. For many, this is at least as inspirational a message as the medal or trophy. It is a point we emphasize at our awards ceremony -- everyone who went the distance is a winner, though a minority of the team members received a specific award.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

Building and competing are tremendously important. Nobody is pretending that this isn't about the robots. The experiences gained by designing, fabricating, modelling, iterating, programming, and testing a robot are incredible. Getting to function in a high paced, high energy environment like the competition is a crucial experience. All of that is important. The build season is important. The competition is important. However, collecting a banner is not.

Five years down the line, nobody is going to care about what trophies you won as a high school student. However, the experiences you gained and the connections you made are going to be tremendously important throughout your life. Learning the value of STEM and empowering those around you to celebrate STEM is important. Being able to communicate those values is important. And Chairman's caliber teams are better at those aspects than anyone else. Chairman's caliber programs pump out tremendous alumni and create environments in their community that value STEM.

Case in point, I have a FIRST Vex Challenge world championship on my resume. When going through job interviews during and after college, that was discussed for maybe 30 seconds total. Explaining FIRST and FRC in general was discussed far more, and there was far more interest in discussion in the types of mechanisms created and the impact of the program than about the fact I had won a trophy in FVC.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

I guess you literally didnt read what he said.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

If FIRST was a basketball tournament, then winning is everything. The best players will be on the teams that perform the best. the best players are the ones that have a chance a being a professional basketball player. But FIRST is not about who wins the competition.

FIRST stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology".

"FIRST is More Than Robots. FIRST participation is proven to encourage students to pursue education and careers in STEM-related fields, inspire them to become leaders and innovators, and enhance their 21 st century work-life skills" - FIRST's website

The competition is a way to channel the efforts of the students. If we can help kids by inspiring them to become innovators and leaders - those are the true "winners". Our team is fortunate that in the past 4 years, 2 of our team members have gone to MIT, and countless others have gone onto other colleges and universities. Did FIRST make a difference? Who knows? FIRST certainly did not hurt.

By being at the competition, the students have learned something. When they interview for college, the mere fact that they were on a FIRST team and what they got out of it is what is important, not how the team did. If FIRST helps kids into their Reach college/university, that gives the kid a tangible benefit of the years of participation.

In that respect, every participant is a "winner" for being inspired by participating in the competition. Some kids will get more from that inspiration than others. Hopefully every kid is inspired to do more than they would have otherwise. For the less able kids, if that means they become a Manager at McDonalds vs a hamburger flipper, that is still "winning" for that kid. And for the kid, on a team that didn't make it to Worlds, that makes it into a top tier engineering school - they "won" more than a kid on an Einstein winning team that did not.

Broaden your view of what FIRST is, and you can see that mostly everyone is a winner for participating.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

I think everybody is missing the point. Everything on the robotics team is important. But there is nothing wrong with having a real winner in the robotics competition. When Apple puts out a new product, they want it to be the best, and they want to win. That is the real world. A real robotics competition with a true winner based on performance of the robot only would bring more people to STEM because the competitions would be much more exciting. You can still have all the other stuff. Everybody gains from being on a team.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

[2 cents]

In FRC, there are winners, but there certainly aren't losers.

[/2 cents]

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

Under 12 years of age...

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

I said winning wasn't important. I didn't say the robot wasn't important. Your counter (the strawman) was that I should have my team not build a robot.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

Winning has been important to us.

If we didn't win Curie 2013, we would not be where we are now.

50 Students on 1678
24 FLL Teams started in the past 2 years
5 Robotics Engineering classes started at the high school this past year

Winning has been, and continues to be, one of the driving/motivating forces behind our team's growth, both on and off the field.

Being a world-class, competitive team that wins events is one of the three pillars of 1678.

-Mike

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

You're using your winning as a means to become a Chairman's caliber program. You've made winning important in your team culture, and your team culture is one worthy of celebration as its clearly impactful. You've made winning productive.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

Takes off my FRC11 hat...

I wonder sometimes:

What it must be like for people motivated by winning: when they realize that out in the real world there are few clear winners if you really look.

Eventually many will join teams magnitudes larger than anything that exists in FIRST.

I mean we win because we finally get the schools to acknowledge the value of the work, but so many only value it because they want to win, not because they want to make their kids win in life. The goal of schools, IMHO is to make the students successful that's the only metric that matters to me. I spent my time in school watching the goal of school being about: tuition, attendance, grades, style and reputation...but in the end too many of the students were lost once they left that nest.

I often feel like I am bottle size cork in a drainage pipe the size of a lake.

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

I totally agree with this. Winning has been a means to an end, not simply the end.

Though winning is not the end, that doesn't mean it's not important. (sorry for the triple negative!)

-Mike

Re: Everyone's A Winner?
 

I think your absolutely right. This is a program where no matter where your ranked at the end of the competition you will have gained a lot from the experience. Also you can't take the word winner to just mean that you showed up and learned, winning means that you went above and beyond the standard of and FRC team, whether that is in competing well or making an amazing chairman's submission, and you deserve to be recognized by all for your achievements. Obviously being in the competition and working hard deserves recognition from your coaches and mentors but that doesn't mean that you should get a standing ovation like the victors of the competition get. Please don't take this as me saying that any of the students in FRC don't matter, I myself am "just another teammate" and being in the FRC is the best part of my life and would be regardless of well my team did but I wouldn't want to get a big award for something everyone did.