[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by samanthaa

Also the school is trying to transition from FIRST to RoboBots which is a battle bots program because it is cheaper.

I'd never heard of RoboBots¹ before, so I looked it up. It's not cheaper. It's an arms race.

Although the cost constraints in FRC do stifle some forms of innovation, they enable teams of modest means to compete on a similar level. Not so with that event. With sufficiently generous sponsors, you can straightforwardly outspend your way to victory. Another thing that makes it an arms race is the rather wide latitude teams are given to construct the robots.² The thing keeping it from getting out of control seems to be the modest means/aspirations of the participants—and there's no guarantee the opponents will be that way for long.

Perhaps maybe an avenue worth exploring is a quick cost-benefit analysis of what it takes to participate in competitive robotics. I think you could make a fair case that to achieve competitive success, FRC is cheaper overall, and that per unit of educational success FRC is cheaper too. Then again, you should probably consider VRC too—measured in outcomes per dollar, it makes a compelling case against FRC, albeit with a lower ceiling.

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

How is the workspace being cut though? Are teachers at the school being laid off from shop classes or whoever mentors the team? Does the school have a workshop that they are shutting down/selling off machines from?

Why do they need a new workspace is what I'm getting at.

Money is easy, especially if they just cut their 2nd event from their budget (but they should be able to raise enough for two events still). Workspaces are much harder to come by and entail a lot more effort IMO.

Layoffs and cuts aren't the only impetus for shutting down a program; it could come down to the perceived value of the program versus alternatives.

Although I don't know about 306's school district (and its debt), some school districts are financially incompetent, and have placed themselves in a desperate situation. (That's actually a discussion I'd like to have—the merits of various school funding mechanisms, the rate of return of the improvements/programs they enable, and the risks of underperforming and saddling the next generation of taxpayers with a disproportionate burden.)

Or perhaps it's the opposite: they're competent despite the debt, and they've done the math and realized that 306 is not benefiting the community enough. (I'd be skeptical of that—based on my experience, you'd be hard-pressed to beat the rate of return of a well-established FRC team in a district lacking in similar extracurricular opportunities. But admittedly, I'm estimating based on anecdote, rather than systematically studying the problem.)

¹ Is that redundant?
² Rules are here and here. It's hard to have a credible ban on hazardous materials when you allow rotating weapons with no kinetic energy limit, pressurized gas at 853 lb/in², and unlimited battery capacity and chemical energy storage. (As long as it doesn't use them as a weapon or in an internal combustion engine. I'd like to see a team employ some sort of external combustion engine, perhaps out of spite. And a hydrazine-powered turbine would be even more fun, but despite the lax regulation, that would be hard to justify on account of safety....)