Quote:
Originally Posted by LeelandS
FIRST isn't about the matches. I've said it before, I'll say it again: The matches are a means to an end. The matches are played to give kids a median to get inspired. Playing to win is not what FIRST is about. With or without connection issues, the kids on each team engineered great pieces of machinery. Yeah, we didn't get to see them play the matches to the end, uninterrupted. And yeah, it's reasonable to expect full field functionality for the price we pay in registration. And yeah, maybe precautions should have been taken. But precautions for what? We don't know what happened. I doubt most people at FIRST know what happened. So until then, can we really just rage at FIRST and the people who PUT ON ALL THIS TO BEGIN WITH? We're going to start throwing accusations at the people who allow us to do what we do? I just don't understand how we can act as such without even being sure what the problem was.
|
I'll grant you for the sake of argument that the sole and only purpose of the matches and competition are a means to an end to get kids excited about engineering. Given that, these comms issues are a huge problem for FIRST. If a rookie team runs into this problem and has a non-functional robot for an entire regional, how inspired are the kids? How likely are they to come back? If a potential 2013 rookie is watching Einstein, the pinnacle of our sport, and sees several of our greatest teams with broken, non-working robots, isn't that going to dampen their enthusiasm a bit?
To summarize, many of us aren't upset with FIRST because great teams were brought low by this glitch. We're upset because FIRST is shooting itself in the foot and embarrassing itself on a national level with technical problems that someone there should have known about and solved or mitigated by now. We're upset because we care about FIRST's goals, and FIRST is making it harder for us to achieve those goals.