Re: College level First!
 

I am not sure Bill knew too much about it. He is the director of FRC, as I see it, this is not FRC.

Re: College level First!
 

I was at the meeting in Atlanta last year on behalf of Purdue University and Purdue FIRST Programs. Dean was there as were some other big hitters in FIRST so I definitely feel this is legitimate.

What the video mentions with the games and ideas are pretty much exactly what was presented. I gave our contact information because we were interested in being a part of this but no one ever contacted us and I figured the project had died down.

I would have expected a press release on usfirst.org or some other more official announcement. However I get the feeling that the committee was acting outside of FIRST but with the approval to design something (similar to how FIRST in Michigan began).

The timing is a bit late and I wish they had announced the intent to hold this sooner. It is likely too late to form a Purdue team (at least one from Purdue FIRST Programs) given our structure and budget is essentially set in August.

Here is another vote for cautious optimism.

Re: College level First!
 

Do other people have an weird feeling about how this might be connected to the penn tennis ball and the number 4?

Re: College level First!
 

some of the who, why, and how discussion took place in the following thread.

Re: College level First!
 

The problem being you're naming leas than 10 robots, not half the FRC. You can't spotlight 10 robots across the country without regular national television. You can, however, spotlight 900 robots across the country.

The idea of collegiate FIRST being that without as much of a learning experience, the teams could focus on, or even wouldn't have to focus more on, the building of the robot. This would presumably lead to robots that are more impressive for public demonstration to draw students into STEM, if not FIRST programs themselves.

Re: College level First!
 

Seems like a good way to keep people involved so they don't 'drop out of FIRST' when they graduate high school. This way they'd be more inclined to come back as mentors and donors when they enter the real world.

Re: College level First!
 

I also agree that it does not seem legitimate. They consistently use FIRST without italics in the document.
However, the website seems real.
This is rather confusing.

Re: College level First!
 

I'll be pretty blunt here. This sounds pretty stupid at first glance?

Why should college students not mentor FRC teams? Because they have far too much of a workload for that, right? So... they should have another competition instead? Wouldn't that just be the same giant time sink?

How could this competition inspire anyone in college? Trying to get people to change their major is just silly. When you consider how hard it is to get into most school engineering programs, and when you consider you basically have to change major by the end of freshman year to stay on the engineering track, there's no way this of all things is going to inspire someone, who happened to enroll in an engineering intensive school but opted out of an engineering major (meaning they probably already thought about it) to suddenly jump ship. The odds are overwhelming that they're already in a different STEM-related major.

Will this help retain engineering majors? I don't see how it would help more than the several dozen other robotics, aerospace, and engineering competitions out there. And really, the main reason I see people fail engineering is because of the work load, which this would certainly not help with.

When FTC teams still pay twice as much as VRC teams for a similar experience and FRC teams are as unsustainable as ever, still struggling to survive unless they happen to be a rookie team, it seems just stupid that this is what FIRST chooses to spend money on.

Re: College level First!
 

This is FIRST folks and why it's not in Bill's Blog, or Ken's Blog or the equivilant FLL blog is that it is not FRC, FTC or FLL. Now why it is not on the FIRST homepage and some official announcement I don't know other than this is coming out on a weekend.

However, this is FIRST folks who are creating this with full knowledge of HQ. Here is a quote from the main organizer who is a FIRST Senior Mentor and has presented several key bits of information already.

Re: College level First!
 

This still seems not entirely well thought out. I don't know why FIRST would waste money drawing their own volunteers away from FRC, FTC, and FLL teams.

Additionally, programs like the SAE collegiate design series and various university level robotics design programs do more or less the same thing. This seems like wasted effort. If the problem is people dropping out due to lack of interest, this is probably the wrong way to attack it, since other similar competitions already exist.

Re: College level First!
 

Are you suggesting that these college teams will have trouble being financially stable? If so your university/college (especially if it's a public university) has a lot more funding options than most people realize and these funding options typically don't have a limit to them.

Re: College level First!
 

Grouse, grouse, grouse, grumble, grumble, grumble.

I'm in the wait and see mode.

There is a lot of opportunity contained within this pilot program. I'd like to see where it takes us.

Jane

Re: College level First!
 

I'm suggesting FRC could use all of the money and resources it will pour into this venture to make their other programs better. This program seems to exist to the detriment of FRC teams.

Re: College level First!
 

It would be interesting to see how much money they are throwing towards this, if that video is any indication I would assume they aren't going broke over it.

Re: College level First!
 

Could it possibly be a WPI-run program that has the blessing from FIRST to use it's logo and terms?
In that way FIRST is not directly responsible for funding and running the program.