[davidthefat]

Here's my take on this: I don't care by whom your robot is made by. As long as I put in my best, that is all that matters. Because, at the end of the day, it is about the experience and the lessons learned. It is not about whether or not if your opponent's robot is better than your's, but how much you have progressed over the years. Honestly, looking back at the code I wrote my rookie year and now, it is day and night. Just the level of dedication and attention to detail has been exponentially grown and the growth of my character has shown over the years. I feel that if a student is nitpicking whether or not a robot was student built, that student does not get the point of FIRST. FRC is not about robots, it is much more than that.



Just a quick side note: a lot of this year's robot was mentor built, more than usual. We had a pretty much all rookie team on the hardware side; the programmers had to do a lot of the electronics. It was a pretty software heavy experience team this year. The drive train was pretty much done by mentors. It was due to the fact that we lacked the equipment to safely weld the thick aluminium. However, the rest of the robot was done by students. The students did all the maintenance and construction of the robot.