http://youtu.be/i1QyM9WTF18?t=1m8s This great video narrated by Morgan Freeman quotes Dean saying that he wanted to inspire high school students to embrace science and technology the way Shaquille O'Neal inspires them to bounce a ball. Well I think this is exactly what these Robot in 3 Days/ Build Blitz teams are doing. Even though JVN, Andy Baker, Dr. Joe, etc. are not not 7 feet tall and have the ability to break a backboard, they all have the knowledge and respect of the FRC community to display a robot that was designed and built in 3 days. Many students probably have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours watching these fantastic mentors in order to better themselves and their teams. Does it reduce creativity? Probably so, but I do not see the letter "C" anywhere in
FIRST. I actually believe that researching as many resources as possible is a major part of engineering. Using prior knowledge and experience is a very important part of successfully completing any task IMO. I know I would have loved to see a roller claw in 2011 because I will admit that our team had no experience to pull from and we didn't start looking at CD until about week 6. Also as far as cheating goes; nowhere in the rules does it say you may not look at others designs in order to help design and build your robot.