[Barry Bonzack]

Originally Posted by PhilBot

In several FRC kickoffs, Woodie has said that FRC Teams that insist that the students do everything without working closely with industry partners "aren't getting it".

Where as in FTC (and FLL) the students are meant to do all the work. That's why they have much more time to do it, and everything is scaled down. So unless the teams break the spirit of this difference, FTC won't turn into FRC.

Originally Posted by SuperNerd256

This just makes it look like a small FRC, and will give an advantage to those with the capabilities to abuse these new rules. I hope this doesn't turn FTC into the small FRC I see it to be.

Focusing in on these two comments because these point to just a few of the misconceptions of what FRC participants believe FTC is and what it is not. Here are some others.

FTC is not:

• FRC's little brother
• The minor league to FRC major League (this analogy was once used near the creation of FTC to explain what it could be, but is no longer the case)
• The JV to FRC's Varsity
• A Student design and build competition like FLL

When explaining the levels of FIRST to the general public we need to be careful how choose to describe FTC. FTC IS modeled after FRC, not FLL, the purpose is to reach more high schools that can not afford an FRC team. FTC Today and its competitions are more advanced than what the original USFIRST competitions were in the early 90's.

Students should work along side professional engineering mentors, and the Connect award rewards teams that seek engineering help. The Innovate Award and Design Award do not punish robots that clearly had professional mentors aiding students in their inspiration of the design process.

Will teams this year still use Tetrix only parts? Yes. Will some teams fabricate their entire robot in machine shops? Yes. Will some teams choose to have 100% student designs, and others have mentor's CADding their teams robots before a single part is fabricated? Yes. Will this create a larger gap between the top tier and lower tier teams? Yes. Is this fair? Of course not, and it isn't supposed to be, just like FRC.