Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang
How else do you suggest to fix it? Changing people's deep-rooted beliefs on fairness taught since birth is very, very hard.
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Let's take an axiom:
1) Making a rule that bans or reduces mentor involvement in FIRST is never, ever going to happen. Mentor involvement is what makes FIRST FIRST. The powers that be often make the exact opposite proclamation that you are requesting, where they actually say "100% student-built robots are
not what FIRST is about"
So therefore, how could we reduce the snyde comments?
Idea 1: An education campaign, pointing out perennially high-performing teams that do so without any in-built advantages like a single massive sponsor to let teams with less support know that they can do it two
Idea 2: An official "most from the least" award, given to highlight teams that persevere through money/mentor/support shortages and still create excellent robots. Given many of the "we're low budget and we're good" comments in this thread, this award may end up going to regional winners or top seeds, and might make people realize that the "sponsor-built" robot they had been demeaning was actually built by people very much like them using resources not much beyond their own.
Idea 3: Publicize team budgets. This would have a good and a bad effect: since there
are high-performing teams with enormous budgets, they'd get put in the spotlight. But since there are also high-performance teams without enormous budgets, it'd give the other low-budget teams hope that they could do the same.
Idea 4: Maybe you could publicize a team's minimum budget in the last 5 years. Since many teams will have dry years, this would allow everyone to say "oh hey, they had a dry year like ours, and they still became very strong later"
I don't really like idea 3 or 4, but you don't toss out brainstorm ideas because you initially don't like them. My favourite is the most from the least award.
Or you could change your definition of fairness - it doesn't actually take that long. You can find lots of posts by me where I'm making almost identical arguments to you now (look back in 2006, around the Niagara triplets), and I've changed almost 180 degrees in 6 years. Clearly it's not that ingrained. Our kids, despite us being a very low-budget team, appear to actually like and admire 1114/2056, our local powerhouses. They said they sat with them when they went to go watch GTR-east.
Being 100% student-built in FIRST is like an NBA team deciding to play a game with only their left hands. They may do well and it's very impressive if they can do well consistently, but they aren't using all the resources the rules allow them, and so they probably won't consistently do well.