[jman4747]

Originally Posted by EricH

You weren't around for 2008, so I'll give you a pass on that. What you missed: In 2008, the GDC gave us a game in which the objective was to go around and around a track, pushing and/or throwing large balls (bigger than last year's, and arguably one of the biggest game pieces FRC has ever seen) as you went. The more laps, the more points. Some teams built robots for speed and maneuverability rather than attempting to handle the large balls. BTW, this was NASCAR style: direction of travel was a left-hand turn.

Incidentally, 2008, like 2014, was a heavily-penalized year. Teams would get penalties for turning in place if they weren't careful, on occasion. (They'd violate some rule about position/crossing a line, or be seen to be doing that even though they weren't.) The next year, we got Lunacy with very few interaction rules. This time through the cycle, it was Aerial Assist followed by Recycle Rush. 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 oughtta be good years for spectator involvement if we are in fact on a roughly 6-year cycle of increasing penalties, followed by a year of very few penalties in reaction to massive penalties the previous year.

Ask someone if they want world champion FRC robot or a BMW M3...

We are here in huge part because STEM related things are under appreciated. Building that appreciation means nothing if it isn't based on what it really takes to do what we do. Most of our work is not to be on the field in front of the crowd. That's the goal, to do our best out there. What we do to get there is what we want people to appreciate. Would we say we are promoting stem if 10,000 spectators came to a regional because the games were so amazing to watch but participation never rose again?