Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon Stratis
1. Simply put, I don't see this happening. The best we can hope for is a couple of years in a row of this style game, such that coopertition becomes expected by teams, and not something they complain about.
2. You can already do this. As soon as a team registers for a regional, they're listed on the regional webpage. You can also search for teams in your area, and list them by team number to find both the oldest and the youngest.
3. Many teams already do this. My team has mentored several FRC teams through their first season, we regularly have teams over to our build space or go to theirs to help them improve their programs, and we present every year at a local rookie-centric 1-day conference (I believe we had 6 presentations this year, on a wide variety of topics).
You won't see FIRST assigning specific teams other teams to mentor. That sort of mentorship is part of what Chairman's is all about, and it's expected that the best teams out there will be actively going out and doing it. Further, FIRST has no way of ranking teams in order to determine which ones would provide good mentorship for a rookie team and which ones wouldn't.
FIRST has a steep learning curve. A very steep one. Until we start getting rookies signed up in September so they have 3+ months to train and learn, they'll always struggle a bit. You simply can't get all that knowledge into a rookie team that doesn't sign up until December.
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You're making the same mistake that many people make--assume that individuals will somehow decide to do the right thing voluntarily including taking the effort to gather information and to then process it. As a professional economist, I see many studies that show that this is a false assumption. To make a policy work effectively, you need to provide people with information and give them default choices that drive them toward the preferred choice. In fact, taking an opposite tack can drive them toward the opposite decision (and is just as much external decision making as the first case.)
So this includes actively sending a list of new teams, not waiting on existing teams to take the added effort of looking up what new teams are registered. In addition, there's a lag between when a team is actually formed and going and when it shows up on registration--a lag that can be critical. Also, the regional director can inform existing teams about informal new teams to help accelerate the process.
While some teams do reach out and they are rewarded through Chairman's, relying on volunteer charity is not a good policy. As I mentioned earlier, Hal Varian, Chief CIO at Google, wrote a paper in 1986 showing this is not a socially optimal or preferred policy and such support is underprovided by relying solely on voluntary action. The point is that "many" teams is still not "enough" teams. We know that many more teams could be helping, and giving them stronger incentives to do so can boost this. Relying solely on Chairman's isn't enough due to the low probability of winning for most teams and great effort for submission.
BTW, a ranking system isn't too difficult to create. Use regional winners and finalist plus award winners.