There's that word again - fair.
Is it fair it's not a student only built robot, is it fair they have more money, more mentors...

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but the fact stand it shouldn't be allowed to compete.

Like a robot built with a lot of mentor input?

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but it's merely to say that if you can't put the effort in and learn enough on your own to make the website advanced and pretty, why should you be allowed to compensate with someone else's knowledge and work? The spirit of the award is to inspire you to learn and expand your web design knowledge and skills and apply those in a real world environment, and I think allowing people to use pre-fab stuff is defeating the entire spirit and purpose behind this competition.

IMO however you learn, whatever prefab you use, how ever many mentors are involved, if progress/learning is happening, that's great! If we can get more webs up, and more effectively spread the FIRST message, that's the point.


Dean Kamen, "It’s rare to see students from Middle School, High School, College, working at something very intense along with parents, teachers, engineers, mentors, professionals, from a whole community, because I think it’s an unintended consequence of the culture of America, but we’re really good at efficiently separating all those people which is why I think so many kids never think about science or engineering students are separated very early in life, they go to school engineers are in laboratories or companies, manufacturing floors. students rarely get to see what real scientists, engineers and professionals do.

This is extraordinary, that’s why it’s important. When kids get out of school at the end of the day, their interaction with adults: maybe it’s television; seeing what we call superstars, or superheroes; not realistic representations. They have parents that are working hard these days, probably both of them working; maybe two jobs. For all sorts of reasons that I can’t explain, it’s pretty clear to me that it’s a rare event that students get to really interact with the real heroes, the real professionals, that build this country; that provide our standard of living, that are working toward your own and their own futures; it’s perhaps good news and bad news about FIRST. The fact that we can uniquely put all these people in a room, and allow all these students to interface and interact with all these very real people, it seems to me is what makes FIRST so special and it is why every year I ask you to what I’m going to ask you to do again.

But it’s for the first time this year that I realize that while our board struggles with how we can grow bigger, faster, it’s the good new and the bad news of FIRST. The most unique and important characteristic is it tears town the separations that are so efficiently put in our society to keep all these groups separated. Which means then that the only way that FIRST will work is if we keep all of these engineers and mentors and teachers and parents and students together. That’s a very labor intensive exercise. It requires enormous effort by individual people. It doesn’t scale up unless every time we get more students, we get more mentors, so that the constant is the ability to put real, important heroes of our culture in direct contact with the students and have them all working hand in hand on a project; all figuring out what’s really possible; all with gracious professionalism. Well, if that’s the nub of it, and it’s gonna continue in my mind to take this extraordinary effort by all of the people that have made this possible for all of the students; this personally individual effort I will ask you what I ask you by tradition every year: all the students, stand up and look right at those mentors and professionals and teachers and parents and thank them for what they’re doing for you."
Portions of Speech by Dean Kamen
1998 FIRST Competition Kickoff Workshop, January 10, 1998

Is it just me, or does every thread turn into a discussion about the 'ideals of FIRST'?

hence the reason why i don't read or post as much as i used to.

*shrugs*

Yes.

Indeed. Enough about what's 'fair' and anything else besides for Websited Criticism. What do you think of the website(s) mentioned here?

I must say nice job on the parent of this thread. Nice, solid PHP programming on the main part of the site.

bandchick: I must agree the 'grunge' font really needs to be sharpened up a bit... :( It might be my display, but I find it a little hard to read at times...

you're not alone thinking that, jeff waegelin didn't like it much either. i need to get a monitor that has better than 800 x 600 resolution when i'm designing websites!

My team wants to have two sites a flash and an html version. It'd help if they helped or at least gave me ideas. For the flash version I was wundering what it would look like and how it would work. I've been toying around with an www.ego7.com style look. Desktop fullscreen and pixelly. The other option is a toon-like fun vectorish playground area. The latter would create a whimsical feel which isn't the current feel of our team, but it would challenge me more and have more possibilities. http://www.robyn-productions.co.uk/ is a great example of this. Please give your views on it.

If it is between the two, definitely go with a www.ego7.com style. I would love to see a FIRST robotics team website like that. The other, toonier flash site doesn't look very professional, and is too much work to get to the information that you want readily available.

oh my god! i never thought i'd say this, but i agree with anthony mangia

(anthony, you better quote that, because you will NEVER see it again!)

Your right about the toonier site being hard to navigate through it just looks so cool. I'm probably going to just put flash experements on the site too. Then i can post my studies and stuff. Also Everyone should go and play my game on my website. www.wahsrobotics.com/modules.php?name=Games Post your critiques or even better praises of it. thanx

Also, speaking of flash, Does anyone know why mac users can't play the game? All they get is an error page.

actually you are fine, web standards usually fall along the side that you should never design your sight for a screen above 800 X 600. Keep in mind you can deisgn a site while YOUR screen is higher, i.e.- I design all my work while running at 1600 X 1200, BUT you should alwys design your site for 800 X 600 regardless of the resolution you run.

I'd like to disagree. Nowadays as more and more people are getting MicroSoft XP and more powerful computers. They don't need to set their resolutions at 800*600 unless they're blind. Windows XP also has huge fonts and icons so it is almost necessary to have your res at higher than 800*600, which is the minimum.

WindowsXP has nothing to do with resolution. :P And I'm running WinXP without all the pretty icons. My text is fairly small (really high res, middling-size screen)

I'd rather have sites be usable at lower resolutions than ignoring them altogether because people who have older computers "Should Upgrade".

Coming from a "rawr, webstandards should be the only way to do things" perspective, I tend to hate flash because it makes information hard to access, impossible to bookmark and sometimes held to the whim of a designer who will probably not read his information all that much (and is thus more concerned about "does it look cool animating in" than "is the text actually readable")