Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence
I see a lot of people shooting down ideas because of less than ideal trade offs. This is an engineering challenge, and in engineering you have to deal with trade offs. The hand we're dealt is two championship events in two different places. While we'd like to have it a different way where there is no downside, that's simply not the case. Sometimes you gotta make some sacrifices to play the best hand. This may involve splitting up a team's FRC and FTC teams, or limiting the reach of inspiration by separating FLL and FRC students (or dare I say it, including less teams in the championship). If you want to build a strong proposal, you need to recognize what trade offs you're going to be making, accept that sacrifices will need to be made, and provide sound and valid justification as to why these sacrifices are the best course of action for the program overall.
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I have heard the FIRST programs called "engineering competitions". Lets do some engineering.
Those of you who are practicing engineers probably have to make difficult choices between several less than ideal solutions in your day job. You probably also have to deal with less than ideal initial conditions, resources, constraints, etc. Sometimes you can turn those less than ideal starting points around and end up with a superior result. Often, putting aside one's emotions to look at the numbers and the facts leads one to arrive at the superior solution, a solution that one's emotions would lead one to reject.
I am not happy with the direction that FIRST seems to be taking but they have said that they are open to dialogue. It is also likely that FIRST is not happy with some of the choices that they have had to make so far.
What is inspiring to me and many students is seeing the many ingenious solutions to the same problem (game) that many of the great teams (and some rookies too) come up with every year, even if we only see them in a video. As a community of some of the brightest and best minds, we should use this opportunity apply the same ingenuity to make these programs better than they were.