Quote:
Originally Posted by Thad House
This will only be my 6th year in FRC, but this post really hits home for me.
I come from a region that has never even reached Einstein, and its one of the major goals many mentors from the PNW share. Being able to go to worlds, view all the INCREDIBLE robots, and see Einstein finals usually being the best matches played in FRC inspires us to push even harder. Only getting to see half the teams, and having to Einsteins is going to make the finals be basically the semi finals. The best of the best now will not happen in regular competition, which to me is basically unacceptable. Seeing the best of the best is what inspires me and my students to work harder each year to hit that goal.
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This is year 4 for me, but PNW's goals sound oh so much like MO's goals right now. There's a lot of teams around here absolutely clawing for any chance to allow a World Champions trophy to stay in Missouri after it's presented in St. Louis.
If the motivation is to inspire more people, I'm firmly of the opinion that lowering the bar with 2 championships is the wrong way to go about it. On the contrary, it would be more inspiring if more robots were able to effectively play the game at district and regional levels, and it might help with potential sponsors' perception of FIRST and FIRST teams. IMO this is why instead of lowering the bar, FIRST as an organization and we as a community should renew our focus on making sure that everyone in FIRST knows about the extensive intellectual resources available to them (CD, Simbotics.org, team358.org for labview, old robot footage, etc.).
While some find emulating other teams to be uninspiring or even taboo, the idea is to use team X's design/process/corn dog dispenser once and then being engineers, scientists, mathematicians, programmers, etc. find ways to improve upon it, and then report your findings back to the community.
While I know this post is long and a bit non-sequitur, it's my opinion (read: Not team 1806 or any of it's sponsors' opinions) that dividing the championship in 2, and having the "everyone gets a medal" mentality is harmful to the end goals of FIRST. However, maybe that's just because I fail to accept that such a high number of teams are completely incapable of building a robot that can put up more than say 20 points a match by themselves, with the caveat being that would have to be made aware of all the resources they have, and also be able to meet a reasonable time commitment.