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you don't have to wrench on bolts to be excited or 'inspired' to go into engineering.
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From a different angle, the topic "A competition of Sponsors or High Schools?" could also be about what you brought up. Students should be the one building this because it's their project. Too many teams show up just to drive what their engineers built.
The competition is for High Schools not their sponsors. FIRST isn't a competition of sponsors, the intention I won't believe is to have all teams with big name sponsors that can build a robot for the kids. Note "for the kids," not by the kids. I don't think who goes first in announcement matters at all, I assume that is up to the team and sponsor, they submit the information that gets read off before matches.
Sponsors getting top billing in just their name isn't a bad thing, but building a robot for the kids when they do little or no work on it is bad. You can't learn by osmosis in something like FIRST.
Yes, Matt Reiland, it's true not all engineers need to machine things, but the build process is a mechanical engineering program and I'm pretty sure Mech. Eng's need to machine and assemble things.