Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesBrown
How many of these refer to what we are actually talking about? The english language is inherently complicated but I think we could knock out a bunch of those definitions pretty quickly.
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I was actually only counting the definitions that pertained to what we are talking about. My point is not that robotics is a sport, or that it isn't. (I tend to come down on the "isn't" side, but don't think the distinction is that important.) My point is that it is
very hard to come up with a definition of sport that includes and excludes everything one thinks should be included or excluded. I have actually used writing a definition of sport to include and exclude certain activities as an exercise in class when teaching about the difficulty you can run into when writing specifications.
To illustrate my point, take the number one Dictionary.com definition:
"an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc."
OK, if you extend "athletic activity" to include hunting and fishing, I think you can make a pretty good argument that operating a robot (and often being a human player) as is done in FRC competition fits the definition.
One of the natural tendencies at this point is to move more toward one of the OED definitions: "an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment" and to argue that say fishing doesn't require much real physical exertion. But a lot of people in this camp argue that something like NASCAR is not a sport, but race car driving involves a lot of physical exertion, more than a lot of activities which seem safely in the "sport" camp.
I loved the discussion in my class last year on this topic. It really engaged my students' critical thinking and argumentation skills.
I think my biggest argument against FRC being a sport is that only a handful of members of the team actually do any of the physical things to operate the robot (or fling the game elements) in competition. On the other hand, I still consider the football players who only practice and never get in a game to be athletes. And at least one person in this thread doesn't believe that one of the sports I coach and played in both HS and college (cross country) is a sport.