First of all, what about the teams with no High School and only a sponsor? Some teams have one common sponsor and five different High Schools.
As to this:
Quote:
Originally posted by rbayer
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The one thing that does bug me is the teams where the the competition itself is run more by the engineers and sponsors than by the students. There is nothing that makes me more angry than walking by a pit area and seeing 5 engineers busily working on the robot while a 15 students sit in the aisle and play cards or sleep. I'm not saying that the engineers should have no role at the competitions, quite the contrary in fact. I believe they should be there to teach students when something goes horribly awry and none of the students know how to fix it. For example, when our arm pivot snapped in half two years ago, we had no idea how to get the broken part of the screw out since the head had snapped completely off! One of the engineers then showed us how to drill a small hole to get it out, but he let us actually do it. Yes, the engineers want to win and they deserve to given the amount of time they put into FIRST. However, they should win by being good teachers, not by being good doers.
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This is something that has come up into debate time and time again...and it's taken my 3 years of participation to really figure out my opinion. Now, I am not trying to start a debate, just sharing an alternative point of view.
First off: I am from a team with very little sponsorship and the bot has been student built every year. So, yes, I do understand the feeling of walking into a competition with a robot built by 10-20 high schoolers and realizing that I'm competing against teams in which the high schoolers just
polish and drive their bots. It took me a while to not be so frustrated about this, but this is the opinion I have come to...
Deep down, you have to look at what FIRST is about
: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. These means, lets get kids pumped up about science and technology. This doesn't say, get kids to build a robot and compete. So looking at the fundamentals of FIRST, what does it matter who built it, as long as the team has worked out a way to excite and inspire the kids?? I think it is up to each team to figure out their system of instilling the spirit of FIRST into each kid, and if they can do it, great!!
Fundamentally the focus of the program is the kids, not the competition. So what does it matter if your robot gets crushed as long as the kids have learned something from it? I say, go to the competition and have fun. Learn everything you can from the other teams …. learn from their mistakes and learn from your own.
My friend Bill said something to me that also helps make my point: “They can't say something like ‘I bled all over that part when I was making it.’ So, it's a lot harder to get the same inspiration when you have no part in actually building the robot, but I believe that I've got no right to rag on teams who build the robots for their kids, as long as the kids are inspired and having a good time.”
I think that’s everything … it’s all good as long as the kids are inspired.