[Molten]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Once again, I turn to my previous comments. I'll even define it further to include my own team.

In our second qualification match of Philadelphia, we were with two teams who hoped to be able to play offense and against some capable scoring machines. My team had struggled through practice day on Thursday and didn't exactly come out swinging in our first qualification match, only scoring one tube. Our alliance was probably best off if we dedicated our match to trying to stop 56.
Instead, we played offense. We wanted to see if our robot could execute the functions it was designed for. We wanted to build driver confidence and hope to build off of that match for later in the competition. We were hoping to get to work out some more kinks in our machine by seeing the functions executed on the real field.
1712 only scored one tube and our alliance lost the match 81-15.

By not executing the function that gave us the best chance to win, you could say that we "threw" the match. We didn't do it in order to gain advantage at the expense of another team.

Were we wrong?

I think more information is needed to accurately decide. Did you talk to the other teams first? If you communicated with both partners and explained the situation I think most teams would understand and allow you at least a turn to score. It depends on the agreement with the other teams. If I were one of the other teams I wouldn't have been thrilled about saying "sure take all the time you need" but I would have definitely said something along the lines of "try for the first 30 seconds and if it doesn't go well we'll take over". I've been in that boat. My first year, 1766 had a robot that only scored in one match. It was largely to my fault on missing a rule but the point is we had to completely redesign our robot and wanted to see it score. We were new and didn't discuss strategy with our alliance as much as we should have so I'm not really sure if the alliance would have approved. Given the fact that we didn't check or communicate with our team mates properly, we were wrong. If you tried communicating with your alliance and they said "no, we really don't think its a good idea" and you chose to go ahead with attempting to score, you were probably wrong.

Sean, I like the question. It really does show a bit of the gray line that is sometimes hard to bring into focus. In my opinion you did right by your students but wrong by your alliance. The question now is, which is more important to you? We've all been given a bad draw when it comes to alliances and know what that is like. We've also all been the barely functioning robot that gets stuck doing something other then what we worked so hard for. For me, teaching the students should always be the most important thing we do in FIRST. If this is your goal as well(which it might not be exactly), what is the most important thing to teach them? If you continue to try to score(as you did) you are teaching them to never give up and that their effort wasn't wasted. If you chose to do what was best for your team, you would have taught them that some things are more important then self-satisfaction and perhaps taught them humility. They are both valuable lessons to learn that I hope all teams get a chance to experience for themselves at some point.

Sorry I didn't give a yes or no, but I believe that was kind of the point.
Jason