Quote:
Originally Posted by Oblarg
I will admit, I used to think along these lines, back when I was a student on 449; I'd walk down the "rookie row" at competitions and wonder, "how could you only come up with this?" It's not such a mystery to me, anymore.
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My first year in FIRST I was the only mentor of brand-new team 827, and my college education (particle physics and Deaf education) left me extremely lacking in practical know-how--so much so that I went back to my undergraduate physics department and gave a presentation on the many things I left there (as a B+ student) not knowing. My students knew nothing. We were in way over our heads, and had no idea what we were getting into.
We didn't know where to look to get ideas, we didn't know where to look to get help, and we didn't know what we didn't know. Were it not for the mentorship of a nearby team, we would not have fielded a functional robot. As it was, we fielded a robot that could score some points and do okay.
FIRST is hard, and FIRST is particularly hard on rookies, who are trying to learn everything from the ground up. This is why I believe that the single best thing a team can provide to rookies is mentorship and training.
Switching gears for a moment, Ri3D shows that a dedicated group with some decent tools and general know-how can make a robot much more functional than your average rookies tend to make; I think the program is awesome as "you can do it!" inspiration and a crash-course on prototyping.
Where this applies to game difficulty is, IMO, reflected in a post of mine much earlier in this thread that somebody spotlighted: this game wasn't too difficult, but many teams (including ours) made it too difficult by biting off more than they could chew.
A rookie team without the resources to build a pyramid probably shouldn't be attempting anything more than a 10-point climb anyway.
That said, it would be nice to not have field elements that are so huge and that can't be assembled/disassembled (because let's be honest, the bolt-together pyramids weren't stable enough for real use); most teams don't have dedicated build space with room for a field, and it's hard to share space with a 1000-square-foot pyramid.