Quote:
Originally Posted by Galaxy Knuckles
You know....except money too. Which is a huge issue for the poorer teams who can get no funding and whose parents aren't rich enough to supply them with money either meaning that to even compete or get tools they have to spend almost as much time fundraising as building.... It changes nothing as far as the time spent a majority of the time just the cost. Fairness was never the issue here I (outdatted logistics? maybe fairness...no)
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Every team has equal abilities to fundraise.
There are many teams in poor areas of the country with big sponsors, and many teams in wealthy areas with very limited sponsorship.
Sponsorship dollars on most teams generally has little to do with the wealthiness of the team's location.
In my experience: The teams with little sponsorship tend to treat FIRST as "that thing we do for 6-12 weeks in the winter/spring", and the teams with big budgets tend to treat it as "a year round thing with off-season competitions and learning in the fall, and constantly fundraising and approaching companies"
Most of those big-budget teams? They worked hard for those dollars, during the off-season, so that when it comes time for build season, they don't have to worry so much about money.
Back to the original topic of this thread:
I agree with an earlier poster that because of how bag+tag is run, there is literally nothing but my honour saying that the robot was in the bag on stop build day and hasn't left its bag until competition. I'm certain that there are at least a few teams who cheat, and bag it the night before competition and lie about it. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I don't really care if teams do this. They cheapen the experience for themselves, but they don't really affect other teams by doing so, since big-budget teams just build a practice robot and achieve essentially the same result: more time to work.
The bags make robots unwieldy to move, and achieve nothing (plus add a whole bunch of headaches for inspection when transporting the robot tore a hole in the bag, etc). The same thing could be achieved by still having stop build day, and just making a mentor sign off that they've been hands-off since stop build day.
For that reason, I would be in support of abolishing the bag, but keeping a stop build day.