Quote:
Originally Posted by Toa Circuit
I'm not too keen on the PR that FIRST is pushing. FIRST drew me in because it wasn't about pop culture, political correctness, and almost everything that was pushed during the closing ceremonies. It was about promoting producerism; getting students involved in the real world. Now it's too much about inspiring. It's a bit like setting gasoline on fire. It makes a nice big pretty fire that a lot of people will notice, but you could be using that gasoline to power your car and get you somewhere. People also notice fast cars. I really don't think we need to make FIRST loud- we need to make it profound and visible. People need to be joining this organization for the right reasons- and I personally think that if your main reason for joining is because a pop star endorses it... you're doing it wrong.
But that's the nice thing about FIRST- ultimately, the teams make up the heft of the organization and are the real face of FIRST.
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I share similar feelings.
I think FIRST is trying to get literally everyone interested in FRC and in an FRC team, which I don't think is necessarily the best move. Pop Warner football is a huge part of our culture, and I sure don't think they literally want everyone to join one of their teams. No, they try to appeal to the kids that like running around, and who's dads like football. AYSO soccer is a much more inclusive organization, but even they don't seem to have endorsements from kids TV shows or musicians in order to get kids that wouldn't be otherwise interested to join. Instead, they try to be open positive, and fun, but not pushy about trying to get every kid to join.
FIRST should aspire to be like a high school sport: something that everyone knows about and generally has positive feelings towards, but that not everyone joins. We should be a niche thing (just like soccer or swimming or chess club or cheerleading...) where kids that are interested in building things or robots (or just want to try it out because it looks cool) do FRC. The rest of the school should have a general idea of what FRC is, but they don't necessarily have to join it in order for FIRST's mission to be accomplished.
The current push seems to revolve around painting FIRST as this huge pop culture phenomenon/cult thing when it really isn't. Using popular musicians to support FIRST is good and all, but I don't think it really gets that many new recruits, and I do know it alienates or appears silly to a good fraction of the FRC population. I think the best endorsers for FRC are people like Elon Musk, Jonny Ive or Dean himself, people who kids that might be interested in FRC look up to as cool leaders who have been successful through science and technology.
Also, keep in mind the smart kids demographic is far from tapped out. There are still tons of smart kids at my school who might be interested in FRC through a "FIRST is an awesome place where you build cool things" or a "FIRST makes what you're learning at school not boring" based marketing push rather than the "Science is rock and roll" thing they seemed to concentrate on so far.