Thank you Eric for starting the more fundamental discussion about the how does FIRST best achieve its goals through the FRC program. The history is very helpful for context. At the heart of this discussion is the question "how important is the competitive structure for FRC to this goal?"
I think some of the conflict over who favors Championsplit depends on which method one believes will spread the FIRST message through the culture: at the grassroots level by increasing individual team size and existing teams adding new teams, or at the higher culture level through various forms of media that inspire creation of new teams and students joining existing teams. Bringing more teams to a large event and increasing the likelihood of competitive success for a team fits with the first belief; creating a more competitive event that might attract more public attention fits with the latter. These two ideas need not conflict, but there are trade offs. I've seen success of both types, but from my professional experience I've seen that the most rapid social changes have been top down simply because adoption can spring from multiple sources simultaneously, not just one or a few.
To start the discussion of my rationale, I'm adding my own understanding of the FIRST origin story. I've seen Kamen say twice (once in "The New Cool" and again in "Slingshot") that he came up with the idea of creating a program based on a sporting metaphor when he was in a science museum store and the kids were much more excited about sports team gear than science gizmos. I think this has been a brilliant idea. The program's success speaks for itself.
To what extent is the fascination with due to be engaged with the sporting activity, i.e., playing, and how much with the success of the team, i.e., being a fan? Of course there is cross over between these two, but I believe the excitement that Kamen witnessed was more of the latter. I played touch football as a kid, but I continue to be a college football fan and attend games time to time. The Super Bowl is the most watched event each year and very few watching have ever played serious football. And fans are most interested in following winning teams, even championship teams. Except for the Cubs, the most notable teams are those that rack up championships. Dallas became "America's Team" because of they continually challenged for and won the Super Bowl. The Yankees from the 1920s to 1950s were the most popular team in US, and the winningest. On this basis I believe the popularity of sports teams is highly correlated with competitive success tied to winning championships.
I believe the goal of FIRST is cultural engineering to bring recognition of STEM
in the same manner as sports (and entertainment) icons. FIRST is trying to reach beyond the "usual suspects" of students to recruit into STEM using this strategy. Much more of the student population is engaged passionately in sports (or even video games). Attracting students to FIRST programs is one important step, but if students joined other STEM programs after watching an FRC competition, that would be an equal success. So to achieve that goal, FIRST must promote FRC in a way that attracts the attention of a broader segment of the population.
In large part promoting FRC requires more than just creating a competition; it also means developing a strong marketing message to promote that competition. A simple "field of dreams" vision of "if we build it they will come" is not realistic. (This reminds me of the attitude toward the economic transformation in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many said "markets will just happen" but that wasn't the case--creating functional markets requires lots of institutional groundwork.) There a number of things the FIRST still needs to better develop its "retail" product for wider consumption, some of which I've posted in the Einstein experience thread. But I believe delivering a better retail product hinges on a key principle: that the competition arrive at a single identifiable champion in a competition in front of the largest possible audience. Television wants 20,000 people in the stands, not what can fit in a high school gym. And they also want to be able to easily tell a story, including low production costs for following a story--that means competition at a single venue. That is the single best way to generate the buzz needed to spread the message through our culture.
Note where there are multiple championships, e.g., state high school sports, there are classification differences, e.g., larger vs small school divisions. No sport immediately comes to mind where there are true "dual" or "multiple" championships for equally qualified participants. The closest counterexample I can think of is NCAA Division 1A football that had multiple bowl games and the year end champion was voted on in polls. (Bowl games didn't even count in the polls until the 1950s.) But even that effectively came to an end in 1998 with the BCS and was even further unified this year. The only other one might be the boxing/ultimate fighting federations that have rival championships, but even those have their biggest events when they unify these championships.
With the objective of a unified championship, a number of ideas have been proposed as an alternative to the SW/NE geographic championsplit that FIRST has implicitly offered so far.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=137096
These all meet the general objective of 800 teams at two events, but they don't all reduce travel costs, but some do almost as well as FIRST's proposal. Here's a brief summary of what has been proposed:
1) Two-tiered championships, with the first 400 and second 400 teams based on one of the following 3 criteria:
- Using the status quo system with all finalists qualifying plus additional metrics
- Using quasi-district points to rank teams
- Using previous championship or season rankings to determine event eligibility
2) Two tiered championship in which the first and second 100 teams are ranked by district points and assigned to separate events; the other 300 are assigned geographically and qualified in the manner that FIRST is proposing for championsplit. (This probably best meets the travel cost goal.)
3) Ending the first event at the division titles and bring those winners to the second event to play on the Einstein field.
4) World Champs/World Festival in which the former is competitive and the latter open to a wider set of teams.
5) Create two types of qualifying, the first based on on-field competition success ("Recognition") and the second on awards success ("Inspiration").
I think anyone of these ideas will work better to raise the profile of FRC in the general public than a dual championship. Last night our team was recognized by our school board for winning the World Championship. It as an easy concept to explain to them. We hadn't gotten the same recognition for winning our division the last two years even though they were probably equivalent to winning a sports section title. And now we've been invited to meet with the state senator representing our town. I doubt we could leverage that kind of access unless we are World Champs (singular). (And we hope we can benefit all California teams in that meeting.)