Quote:
Originally Posted by SousVide
As a FIRST team, I think there are a lot of neat challenges in this game, in figuring out the strategy, in building the robot (that's always a challenge in an of itself), in pulling the on-field alliances together...
Here's the thing though, we invite parents, sponsors, and guests to the competition, because the action really is the biggest draw for most of the un-initiated. I can always tell them what great value everything that the students get to learn, the value of team play - learning how to be a professional. The competition and the game is where I really get to draw the visitors in. This game, without some type of offense/defense is really hard to understand for my visitors.
Some of my sponsors all but bit their tongue in resisting the urge to tell me this year's game is "lame" - they said "different" and "not quite the same"... but I know the word they were looking for in trying not to insult me.
I completely get it - so I am ok with this year's game; it's just a hard sell when it comes to attracting parents and sponsors. I use the game to get the sponsors through the door - then I bonk them on the head with the truly inspirational stuff - once they have bought into how cool the game is...
Having watched the past 2 weeks - the field is really cluttered, the action is slow, and it's really difficult to explain to my visitors and get them to understand what the robots are doing and why this game.
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And this points to a bigger problem. Remember that the core notion of FIRST is that we use the sporting game metaphor to reach to a much broader audience of students than just a "science fair." Yes many FIRST members enjoy the engineering/building aspect for itself, but those students would go into STEM majors and careers anyway. They are the core of the teams, but what FIRST wants are the cheerleaders, musicians and actors who have shied away from STEM because it's boring. Adding the readily accessible sporting aspect attracts those students--we should never forget that. In our case, two of our team leaders in the last 3 years joined our team for that reason--they didn't start out wanting to be anything close to an engineer.
This year's game seems to have forgotten the sports aspect (unless maybe if you're a golf fan, but that's a different conversation) and focused too much on the engineering side. The game difficulty is too overwhelming for too many teams and they can't find effective niche strategies that will put them on a potentially winning alliance. (The distribution of the abilities of the teams is going to be very interesting at Champs given this dynamic.)
So I'm sure many of you on CD who are really deeply involved in FRC greatly enjoy the technical challenge of this year's game. You are important members of your teams, but you're not the real target of FRC--it's those kids who start out on the periphery of your team who liked the excitement in the arena who are the real targets.