[TD912]

A few years ago, our team went to a competition. While waiting in the queue for the next match, a person from another team on our alliance looked at a NASA sticker on the side of the robot, and said something like "Hmm, you guys are sponsored by NASA? Must be lucky to be have those guys on your team..."

I didn't think anything of it at the time, until a few days later when a teammate was watching a video on YouTube of another team and said "Look at that, this team is sponsored by (some company), they probably don't even build their own robot..."

This is when I realized there is a lot of assumptions being made, and a lot of misinformation being spread around.

No, we don't have a bunch of genius NASA engineers secretly building a robot for us. We only received some grant money from them to help keep our team alive. We do have some very helpful adult mentors that help out when the team gets stuck, though.

While our robot that year looked slick and well-built on the outside, it performed horribly on the field, and the actual wiring and software was a mess. It could barely score any points. Sure, there was fancy-looking bumper fabric embroidered with our team numbers on it, but that was donated to us. Sure, there were some sponsor logos on the side panels, but they weren't there because our sponsors made the robot for us, it's because they are helping to keep our team alive.

When I'm in the pits, I generally see the students working on their robots. If they are tinkering around, adjusting or repairing things, I would think they would know how their own robot works. Even if a bunch of "genius NASA engineers" built the robot, I wouldn't mind it as long as the students are actually learning something from it.

While I might feel disappointed (and yes, even somewhat jealous) after losing to an "elite" team with a slick-looking robot and seemingly endless resources at their disposal, I don't like jumping to conclusions and make rash assumptions about why certain teams are "better" than others.