Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
I'll second this. And further, I'll expand it to VEX.
It is the JV to the FRC Varsity. It is slower, less exciting, less of a spectacle. From my perspective it is an excellent tool to use to feed students into the Varsity program which we can use to actually change the culture.
|
I think saying that exclusively FRC students, and not FTC students, are going to end up being good engineers and culture changers would be an huge misstatement.
You have to take into account that FTC might actually be helping more then FRC, because FTC can reach way more schools and teams, due to its much lower cost. FTC teams might not be as impressive to an outsider as a FRC team, but FTC helps pull in more students into the ideas of engineering because of that much wider reach.
I personally attend a school where we just can't afford a FRC team because of all the costs that go with it, so we have FTC, and we still get all the lessons we would of gotten from FRC.
Sure, FRC robots are huge compared to FTC robots, however, if FTC outdoes FRC in anything, its competitiveness. Unlike FRC where you see 'regulars', who almost always make it to the world championships, in FTC, due to the amount of teams, it's extremely hard to make it to worlds for one year, let alone several years in a row.
I didn't know elitism was an issue in FIRST, and its definitely surprising to find, as the whole centerpiece of FIRST is gracious professionalism.