[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

Well, let's look at this empirically. If the best way to inspire someone is to have robots be built by people much more skilled than him/her, then wouldn't it make sense to have the most skilled people build the robots? And by that extension, wouldn't it make most sense to have demonstrations of robots built by top NASA engineers instead of competitions?

A competition implies that there is some form of fairness involved. If every team is mentor-built and mentor-ran, FRC might as well be renamed First Robotics Demonstration. The best way to examine this is to apply the categorical imperative: If you think X is okay, then you should apply it universally; is X okay if everyone does it?




What gives me the right to criticize? Criticism is the basis of improvement. If anyone on another team comes to me and says "your teams' mentors aren't doing enough to help your team", then I would be happy to have a conversation about it with them.

And you really don't see the advantage of having a robot completely built by people with at least 10+ more years of experience than you?

Improve what exactly?