Sorry to throw the thread off, and back to it's originating discussion.. however, I got thinking this weekend while I was away......

PBS? I'm sure it is a nation wide station. It would be a wonderful place to start. This was sparked after I read an article that there is going to be a series done on Little League. PBS is both educational and family oriented. It would deff. spread the word, and put a spark in a child's mind.

/end rant

I'll just say one thing with little (read: no) explanation.. I honestly don't like the way many individuals in this thread are explaining the goal of FIRST. Perhaps their view (like in Dean's speech, for example, since he founded FIRST) is correct; however, it is VERY different from the messages put across some schools and sponsors in an effort to start or maintain current teams; it is also very different from the "idea of FIRST" told some high school students/college students/engineers to allow them to become part of this organization; it is very different from what I was told coming into this program. In watching the last four kickoffs, and being part of this organization for a little while, I have come to see and understand the true purpose of FIRST, or so I thought. Elite organization? Never saw or believed that would be coming....

Dave didn't say that it IS an elite organization, just that when it started it was INTENDED to be. All he did was point out that the statement:

Ackkk that was never the original intent of the program. It's intention was to get the people who would have never really had a chance to participate and get interested in science and technology.

is incorrect. Maybe thats the the situation now, but apparently that wasn't how it started.

I thought this thread was supposed to be about putting FIRST on TV. I think it would be challenging to broadcast the competition and make it interesting. Plus then you'll get the BotBall and RoboCup teams wanting their airtime too. Getting a segment on one of the news magazines would be a good way to get some exposure without overdoing it.

But people started to compete just to get on TV, not for the fun of it. But only the great were on TV. That's how it then fell.

FIRST doesn't need to be on TV, but it would be a benefit if it was. Why do we need more teams?? Because we want this amazing experience known as the FIRST Robotics Competition to continue to grow!! Why wouldn't we want others to be exposed to one of if not the greatest thing we have ever been invovled in?? In my opinion, FIRST should be there to inspire ALL, not the chosen few, not the "elite".

My 2 cents

On the day when the "Andy Baker Rookie Season FIRST Trading Card" sells for $10,000 on eBay, FIRST will have achieved its objective.

When Dave Lavery becomes wealthy through his official line of FIRST Hawaiian shirts, FIRST will have achieved its objective.

When the nation stops what it is doing on a Saturday in mid-April to watch the FIRST National Championships, FIRST will have achieved its objective. (How's that for getting this back on topic?)

When little Johnny's parents complain to the school board that the mathematics education in their middle school is inadequate and preventing Johnny from making the robotics team when he reaches high school, FIRST will have achieved its objective.

You don't have to be academically brilliant to become an engineer. You just have to work really hard from an early age developing your mind and your imagination. It is far easier to become a good engineer and contribute to the development of society than to become a great baseball player and contribute to society's decline.

It is far easier for an inner city youth to climb out of his situation through education than through developing the uncanny ability to hurl a spherical object through a hoop from 20 feet away.

Why don't more people do this?

Because the culture:
1. doesn't communicate that it is an option
2. doesn't obviously value this option
3. does adulate the very few (ie the elite) men who can hit rocks with sticks

FIRST's mechanism to change this is to invest an elite of engineering talent with a "sports-like" reward, to involve these people with the younger generation who will supercede them, and to disseminate this message as widely as possible.

If FIRST rewarded mediocrity, where would we be? [The answer is "Nowheresville, man."]

That having been said, I don't think any one of the luminaries who have advocated for an elite are trying to say limit who you try to reach. Most of the elite teams will give anyone a chance. That chance may take a variety of forms and there may be a standard that you have to reach before you are given that chance.

However, few teams have the resources to carry a lot of dead weight. Chances are, if you are not moving towards the team's objectives, you're going to get cut. Better luck next year.

There are other teams who are in it for the fun and comaraderie. Who just want to put together a little robot, get to competition, and have a good time. THAT's OK, TOO. Just don't expect to win big Cupie Doll.

Perhaps I could have explained my point of view better. Some people seem to have read things in my previous post that I did not intend. Probably because it made certain assumptions about the future that were not really made clear. Let's try a real life current example.

How many people do you know who ever played sandlot football or baseball or pickup basketball games in the park or at school? Virtually everybody right? Call it 99%

Now how many of those people played in an organized league like a recreation league or Pop Warner football or AYSO soccer? The numbers are a bit smaller but still pretty large. These days I'd say 75% is conservative.

But let's take it further. How many of those continued to play in high school on their school's sports teams. Big drop in numbers right? I drop out here myself. Maybe 10%

When you take the next steps to college and the professional ranks (let's include top level amatures like Olympians in this bunch) the drop is huge, at each step. Just to throw out numbers and to account for obscure sports call it 2% and 0.01%

Personally I know exactly two people who played football at big name colleges, and two others who are retired professional football players. One of those was a teacher at my high school, I think he played for two seasons. That is probably more than most of you know.

Nobody thinks there is anything wrong about this. That there should be this winnowing process selecting for skills that are rarely, if ever, needed in real life. Like hitting a rock with a stick or throwing an odd shaped object while somebody is trying to knock you down.

Why should there be a problem with having an elite team of technologists to play robotic sports using skills that are actually useful in the real world? If FIRST is truly successful in changing the culture that is probably what will happen. FIRST may not be the best competition at that point in terms of technology. It will almost certainly not be the only one. In fact there will probably be little city and county leagues all over rather than a single large entity.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, VIRTUALLY EVERYBODY WILL BE ABLE TO PARTICIPATE AT SOME LEVEL, IF THEY WISH. Because if we accomplish our goal, we will be pervasive and so commonplace that we will be like AYSO and everyone will play.

But there will obviously be some who are better than others, and people being what they are, some will attempt to bring together teams of "the best of the best". That is where the elite part comes in.

It was only in the 1880's that sports became a big part of American life. Sure people played games outdoors before that, but it was all pretty casual. Over time it got to be a bigger and bigger deal. Now it's hard to find stuff that doesn't have a sports logo on it. I think it will take the same sort of 20-50 year time frame for this to develop. Maybe, when you students have kids of your own in high school we will have this sort of scenario. But even then I think that time frame is optomistic, more likely your grandchildren.


Just an odd thought. FIRST competitions tend to distort odd corners of the hardware market. For example two years ago we cleaned out the national supply of 1 1/4" pipe flanges. When one of the guys on our team called a major West Coast plumbing distributor, the distributor told him that "The flanges aren't available anywhere, and what the heck was going on anyway? They'd never seen so much demand for that part" In one week FIRST had demand for 50,000 (estimated based on two goals per team for 800 teams) of a part that would typically sit in inventory for years at your average plumbing store. In previous years it was KeeKlamps. I think somebody tipped off Sterlite or last year might have been pretty ugly too. I can't imagine that the sales of Sterlite containers that just happened to be Kickoff weekend were a coincidence.

Can you imagine the logistical nightmare if as many high schools had FIRST teams as have football teams? If we get that big we will NEED to break up into smaller leagues. Otherwise just getting the parts might be a real nightmare.

Sorry, but I'm going to follow Ashley's lead...
Sorry to throw the thread off, and back to its originating discussion...

...PBS?...

I think PBS is a great idea! They have the right demographical vewer base to enjoy this, work as a non-profit orginization so they don't need to show shows only to make money, and its the Public Broadcast Station, or in other words the one basic station that operates almost anywhere. What would we do without people like Ashley...Thanks again!

Mike

...hmmm...I pased my 1440 minutes. oh,well.

Chris H.

I did misread your comments b4, I agree in the future there will be a need for something like local competitions break off and the like. But that does not make FIRST in itself elite, its still available to all.

You can have more teams depending on skill level and this may in the future be essential. Only the best teams move on to regionals and nationals.. just as in a varsity sport style. But as for right now.. I don't see that elitism has its place in FIRST, In the future, well thats another case.

In the future it may be almost nesc. other wise your going to have some of the choas that you described.

Dan

Thank you! It is nice to know that someone actually read my post before firing off a response!

Before anyone quickly jumps on the "Dave's wrong" or the "I agree with Dave" bandwagons, they should probably make sure that they know what my position is. I have been very careful not to articulate whether I agreed or disagreed with the past FIRST intent, or whether I agree or disagree with the current approach. When composing that post, I was very careful to make sure that it did only two things: provide a little history on some of the philosophies that FIRST used to have, and ask a few pointed questions about the implications of those philosophies.

Those questions are asked for a very simple reason - to see if you have thought about the "why" and "how" of what we and FIRST are doing. These are hard questions - they are supposed to be, and they are supposed to make you think.

Have you really thought about who this program is intended to reach? Are you satisfied with what you perceive to be the answer to that question? If you agree with it, have you actively supported the growth of that target audience? If you disagree, have you actively tried to change it? In other words, have you become a participant in defining what FIRST is about? Or are you just going with the flow, and accepting the baseline philosophies of your team, your school, or FIRST, without really thinking about how well they match/don't match what YOU believe?

Can you provide a well thought out answer to these questions, without resorting to a politically correct, knee-jerk reaction:
Note that I am NOT saying which answer is "right" or "wrong" - that is not my role, nor is it within my authority. But I do know that if you haven't really thought about this question, then you are unprepared to really understand and defend - or understand and change - this program that you all profess to support so much.

-dave

p.s. KenLeung - whether you recognize it or not, I do consider you part of the "special group of students that embody the intellectual capital that will define the future of this country." Being part of this group has almost nothing to do with how many times "A+" shows up on a report card. It has an enormous amount to do with how hard you are willing to work, how well you can take lessons learned and apply them to new problems, how long you will chew at a problem until it is solved, whether you are self-motivated enough to do a job without hand-holding, your leadership skills, perseverance, ability to decompose a problem back to first principles, and a lot of other poorly-quantified attributes. These are abilities that I have seen you - and many, many other people in FIRST - demonstrate. And I would posit that the people that can do this ARE part of an "elite" group.

But, while I agree that it's hard work that makes the person, it's the sad fact that grades will end up being a factor along with if your in the correct classes (advanced, CAD, etc.) When FIRST becomes the new soccer-mom crazed (negative term), bad sportsmanship sport, it won't matter if Dean's speech is 48 hours long, people will act with disrespect once they discover the 'virtues' of FIRST.

I'd hate to see the day where FIRST is a try out sport where kids are ridiculed for not making it a la Football and parents get into fist fights. It's happened at innocent sports such as football, soccer, baseball, etc, so why not at FIRST? This is what I fear the most, a hijacking of FIRST by our current culture, not to change the culture, but to spread it's influences like a virus, killing off the Andy Bakers, Ken's, and Dave Lavery's of FIRST, leaving it hollow, shallow, and based on money.

*end rant*

Since this post was right after mine, I just want to point out that I didn't say Dave referred to FIRST as an elite organization. In fact, I referred to the general mood of the posts in this thread and did not mention any names. This post may or may not have been pointed at me, but I thought I should just make that clear :rolleyes:.

Sorry to " jump on that wagon " however when presenting an argument where your argument is one sided its kinda hard to understand that you were not displaying your oppinions. Usually its good to present 2 sides in an argument like that.

I do not mean to be disrespectful to anyone, I just care about FIRST so much as a program. If I didn't I don't believe I would put so many hours into it year after year. Thus my defending my position so strongly.

I've never agreed with anything that was " elite " so its kind of like something It makes me automatically rebel against the idea. I've always been about equal opportunity, and not towards the social darwinistic servival of the fittest Ideals.

Hrmm.. someone should just email dean and woody and get this debate over with

I'm officially done.. Its pointless to argue, the fact of the matter is, we are actively involved with FIRST and care about it dearly. We don't want to see it be damaged in any way, and we want it to see it grow in the best ways possible, and we only argue cuz we care, and no matter which way it becomes it the future, I believe it will all work out for the best.

I'm sorry if I've offended anyone in I'm Irish I get heated, and express my views, and sometimes they come off angry

Dan

Thanks for the compliment, Dave :-). I’ve always had problems with confidence, because I feel so little standing among myriad of greatness (Andy, Jason, you, Ken Krieger, etc). Little did I realize that reaction is not as uncommon as I thought.

Anyway… Notice I didn't say what's right or wrong, only my point of view on the concept of "elite". And what I was saying was, looking back at 5 years ago, I wouldn't have tried so hard when I first started with the team. It is hard to get students to understand what FIRST is about if they've never experienced the competition before. Which is why I think it is hard to pick out the elite students, and because it is so hard to define what an elite is. I believe it is much easier when every student is exposed to a similar experience before they join FIRST.


Before I go any further, I ask that the moderators (Brandon ;-) ) split these posts into its own thread. The original topic is about FIRST on TV, and I think it's a worthwhile discussion of its own.

And also, I want to point out how much I enjoy the direction this discussion is going. People are reading what was being said by others, take their time to think it out, absorb the material, figure out what they think, and clearly express those thoughts to others elegantly (well, except my essays :-P). That's about the best way to have a constructive discussion. You see, there is no need to say who is right or wrong in a discussion ;-). Just take the time to understand what others are saying, and discussions are so much better!

Mike et. al.,
Yes PBS would be ideal for this type of show but one thing jumps in to block any hope and that is funding. PBS has so little money for show development that even if they threw all of it (the annual budget for show development) into this show, it would not be enough. I work for a PBS station in Chicago, the most watched PBS station in the country, and I had to beat down doors to get a news crew out to the Midwest regional for a two minute piece. What was more surprising is that the reporter had spent hours on this competition when he worked for FOXthing In The Morning. Even with local teams coming home with an International Championship (Hammond/Beatty and now Wildstang) over several years, there has been little to no coverage in this market. If we were to find an underwriter for the show, I am sure it could be ported to PBS national for distribution. Back in the dark ages (1970's and 1980's) a young(er) mechanical engineering prof at MIT held an annual competition that was broadcast from Boston to PBS stations around the country and it got audience!