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Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
I think the Michigan district system would be entirely new since 2007.
Summary:
Instead of regionals, Michigan events are called "district events". They're smaller-scale than regionals, held in smaller areas, and only last two day (generally the friday and saturday of the week). A michigan team's entry fee gets them entered into 2 district events, and they can buy a 3rd one cheaply.
In order to qualify for championships, a michigan team must first earn enough points (via awards or competition successes) to qualify for the michigan state championships, and then some amount of teams (I don't know how many) go from the state champs to championships. In general you'll see a smaller percentage of MI teams at championships than you used to, but they'll be very, very good. I'm not actually in Michigan, so some or all of this summary may be incorrect.
FIRST decisions seem to have become a little more politicized. For an example of that, search for the many threads about the minibot and FTC parts, starting with the mid-January team updates of this year.
Excepting Lunacy, the games have been pretty excellent from 2008 onwards. Overdrive, Breakaway, and Logomotion were pretty fun to play and watch.
There is a trend towards build season effectively being continuous from kickoff until your last competition. At first with "fix-it windows" and then with withholding limits, you're now allowed you to keep a substantial fraction of your robot at home and bring it to competition, meaning that build meetings don't just stop when [most of] the robot ships, they just keep on going. This has positives and negatives:
Positives: It acknowledges that rules against continuing to build/upgrade are pretty much unenforceable, and so you might as well allow all the teams to keep working. Plus it levels the field between teams who have early competitions and get 2-3 days of robot access at their event, and teams who don't.
Negatives: If it is a late championships and you qualify, 4 months is a very long time to be at the school every day.
The last few years, FIRST has made a big effort towards having more matches per team at each event. Events like GTR where 7-8 matches per team were common are now 10-match affairs.
Championships is now in St Louis, rather than Atlanta.
The control system is bigger, heavier, and harder to set up, but also far more powerful than the old one. And since it is connected via ethernet to your control computer, it makes possible some really cool offseason projects.
That's all I can think of for now.
Last edited by Bongle : 22-08-2011 at 19:52.
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