Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Line
The point of FIRST is to inspire. You can inspire with a small budget or a large. You can inspire with a mentor build machine or a student built one.
That is why the founders of FIRST have repeatedly explained that FIRST is not about student built robots and student run teams. I'm not sure why people can't seem to get it over that fact, but there it is.
Teams can 'legitimately' get to the top any way they want, be it big budget, student led, or mentor led.
If they lose, they simply know that they didn't build a good enough robot, or happened to get unlucky.
Perhaps next time a team gets accused of being mentor led, or having a mentor built robot, their response should be "Yes we are, and we're proud of it." I wonder if that would get the message across to some of the haters.
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FIRST might not be all about student built/ran teams, but I thought there was something in there about inspiration. And the maximum way to achieve that is have students do as much as they can. (The more they do, the more they learn, the more they will want to do it. Hence, the definition of inspire.)
Maybe your team has magical methods of inspiration that is more effective when the students don't build the robot (in that case, please do share), but if your response to criticism is simply "yes we do, so what?", would that not be contrary to the values of GP in First?