[team F.T.C 4240]

Originally Posted by Wing

By recruiting the "best" students, I meant more along the lines of the brightest. I've never really heard of FTC teams having tryouts, but in FRC it's common, especially in states with 100+ teams, to have tryouts for FRC. I'm not about to turn this into an FTC vs FRC argument (Believe me, I had to resolve those way too much in my school), but about time commitment, it's really about the same. FTC has a year round build season, but FRC doesn't just have 6 weeks. A proper FRC team spends all year training, practicing, and prototyping. After 6 weeks of intense building, they need to spend every moment possible practicing driving on a practice bot and developing strategy. It's about the same time commitment as FTC. That all being said, I can see why there are 400 FRC teams at championships. Do I think this is fair? Not really. I think we need more FTC teams. FTC is a great program that is accessible to most everyone in the world and is probably the best way for kids to get started in engineering. FRC is the largest vehicle for culture change, but isn't the most accessible to students around the world.

Ok, our FRC team (1629 GaCO) has roughly 35-40 people from two schools (many of which are on FTC too), so its not a problem for them since we live in a small community. For our FTC teams how ever, we had 10 people on 2818 G-FORCE two year ago, so we made a 2nd team which now is close to maxed out, the way we have people join this year is we get a list of everyone who is interested in joining one of the teams, then during the summer we contact them for help with summer camps and community service. The ones that commit the most and help out the most gets first dibs. For us its not "who's the brightest", it's who works the hardest. To me, if they show up to everything they say, then we don't need to second guess if they will come to the practices and work hard while they are there. I think a hard worker is much more valuable to a team then a bright student (not saying they are invaluable, but for a productive team you need hard workers), but that's just me.