The game:
We had A LOT of discussion about the extent of the minibot's design freedoms this year. There appeared to be conflicting information coming from FIRST (at kickoff) regarding intent with the minibot (showcase FTC) and what actually happened through interpretation of the rules (feed PITSCO money for all of the motors teams bought). It seems to me that if we could have figured out the true manufacturer of the motors, we could have saved ourselves a LOT of money. I'm referring to 2,000 teams overall, not simply my team.
The Championship:
I have no problem listening to a 24:55 speech from Dean Kamen. I DO have a problem listening to a 24:55 blurb of reverberating mumbling with an occasional discernible word here and there. The speakers for the sides of the Einstein field, after the curve of the stadium corners, were TERRIBLE. As a side note, Mr. Lavery should speak a little slower to mitigate the effect of his resonance. I understood him clearly during the mentor breakfast, but I couldn't make out a single thing he said during the closing ceremonies.
This next one is a bit of a rant, but I feel we need get further visibility into these types of things...
A lone Volunteer
There are some volunteers who have their priorities totally out of whack and I wish the other volunteers would take notice to it. Who's the person we can go to with legitimate complaints about volunteers? The guy who was responsible for getting teams off the field of the Galileo/Newton field in the Dome was rude to EVERYONE except those he already had relationships with.
- If you needed an extra 2-3 seconds to properly set your robot down on your 4 cart supports, he'd gladly 'assist' you by pushing your robot down, pushing your cart forward, and telling you to 'get outta here'. Ours almost fell off as a result.
- Is your cart misaligned to the two blue bumps that take you over the power cables? Well obviously since you're "young", you can lift your 200-lb robot+cart any which way he wants you to so you can then "get out of here!".
- It's unfortunate that FIRST celebrates its mentors so much, yet there's no avenue for them to bring to FIRST's attention that ONE GUY is undermining it. Did he pull 14-15 hour days at work on Monday/Tuesday just so he could get Wed-Fri off? Did he tote a trailer full of tools for 15+ hours through mountains, and THEN unload everything in the rain on Wednesday? Is he working 12-15 hours at a time on his feet during competition? Did he walk even half of the 74,447 steps that I did during the overall competition?
Scalability
Lastly, I don't understand how the current FIRST model will scale to 150,000 teams that they joked about in their "top 10" list. I'll split this into robot versus business and scale it to something more pragmatic: 2,500 teams.
Within a region, as more teams are founded, the resources of the region will become thinned. Even if we do all we can to bring up the knowledge of teams to the same level, there will be a great disparity in the competition levels of the teams due to levels of funding. With only 1-2 things to do in a game, the teams with MORE funding will ALWAYS be able to trump the teams with less funding since they can afford to purchase more and do EVERYTHING in a game. Such purchases include COTS parts (like pneumatics not included in the free cylinders), expensive aluminum blocks to mill down for specialized/lightweight parts, and relatively expensive materials (honeycombed fiberglass anyone?) that have high strength/weight ratios. Either a class system similar to stock car racing (not NASCAR only, but think about local racing divisions) will have to be implemented OR we need more things to do in a game such that it's nearly impossible for 1 robot to 'do it all'. Otherwise we're really fooling ourselves when we think we're inspiring low-budget teams by continuously steamrolling them on the fields. I'll note that my team is neither 'low-budget' nor did we really get steamrolled by superior robots except for those matches where we shot ourselves in the foot anyways.
Chairman's Award and Engineering Inspiration continue to get diluted each year. Feedback from a judge at a Regional stated that the only differential between us and another team was that the other team had a more memorable presentation. At the championships (and I don't mean to undermine 1629, I know Phil and their program; they definitely deserve their award), the judges were forced into the same exact situation. We did as much as GaCo did for outreach, yet the TWO differentiators were that they got a building, and presentation. Given the amount of politicking that has to be done in some regions to do anything STEM related, comparing some teams is like comparing a red apple to a green apple -- it's totally subjective. As FIRST expands to more regionals, the CA/EI pool becomes more diluted, and we need even more inane differentiators it seems. At what point will it simply become wrong to only recognize TWO teams at a national level for the year? Maybe it made sense when there were 1250 teams & 35 regionals. But what about when FIRST hits 2500 teams and 70 regionals?