Quote:
Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday
I have a question about FTC teams: If they're meant to be an 'in between' for FLL and FRC, why aren't they aimed at a middle school audience?
EDIT: It's related to this thread because Dean just gave out new homework for every FRC team to help start FTC teams in a speech at Queen City.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Drivencrazy
I noticed that too. It seems as if FTC is a smaller scale and more affordable way for schools to have FIRST teams. Dean pitched it as the step up from FLL and then FTC students can progress on to FRC. But if FTC is made for high school students as well it doesn't make a lot of sense.
.
|
FTC is an extremely important competition. You are both correct in what you have said. FTC is designed to be both 1) a middle man between the competitions, and 2) to serve as a low-budget FRC team.
1) FLL is from elementary through 8th grade, so all of those years are covered. One of FTC's purpose is to make the step from FLL to FRC much easier. This can easily be accomplished by making your FTC team primarily a freshman-sophomore-/new-kid team, where the students are still learning a lot about FRC. This allows them to already be in a leadership, design-focused role and mindset without having to know as much about robotics "dynamics". In other words, they can be the seniors of FRC at an FTC level. This way, they're learning the basics of FRC, this being the more rigid, complex and creative design, while they are in FTC. By the time they take a large role in FRC, they have already learned the leadership and teamwork skills necessary to achieve in FRC through FTC.
2) Many schools cannot afford/have the manpower for an FRC team, so an easy step back (not meant in a negative or critical way) from that is to participate in FTC. FTC obviously saves you a very large amount of money, so schools with budget problems can much more easily afford to run an FTC program. This here is the primary reason that FTC is a 9-12 program, so that high schools that can't afford FRC can still run a higher-learning based program, or FTC. Granted, it's no FRC, but it's much further ahead of FLL, and is basically the best "compromise" between skill level and money. The skill level for the top teams of FTC exceeds the middle school level, and FTC provides a better low-budget replacement for FRC.
If you have any more questions or that was too confusing, please ask.
Hope this helps,
-Duke