Quote:
Originally Posted by Qbot2640
From an economics perspective, "bang for the buck" if you will...the split reduces the bang. And while it is still a year away, I've already sensed a reduction in the desire to raise funds by our team.
|
Anyone under the illusion that FRC is meant to be the best bang for the buck STEM education initiative needs to have their eyes opened. For raw STEM, maybe 20 kids get continued valuable experience throughout the school year. Another 20-40 get exposure from the shop and robot, another 20-40 from the business side of managing a technical team, then who knows how many other 'passers-by' via outreach. From the flip side, your 'bang' is reduced but perhaps another team's 'bang' skyrockets. Personally, the only anecdotes I've heard are from teams who want a second
competition period, who cares if it's Champs.
Using the same budget as our FRC team, we could start 12 5-person FTC/VEX teams and know that those kids, even though they probably won't make it as far in competition or their robots aren't as good, could possibly holistically get more out of the process of the smaller robot competitions. According to the incoming VRC kids in 7-8th grade, we would get more student inspiration value from the VRC competitions (but maybe that's just Virginia...).
Yet my program has done that for 4 years now. 4 years of 8-11 FTC teams with 6-10 kids each has taught us that there is no equivalent to FRC from a raw STEM perspective (or even a student-led business perspective...). Even in FTC, where the students have creative freedom in custom materials, this is true. The FTC students are far less prepared to make their own puzzle pieces in life than the FRC students. The difference is mentorship (ok ... and kinetic energy...). It is far easier to get 8-11 mentors to guide 80-ish students to ONE goal than it is for them to guide them to 8+ different goals. FTC robots are also less likely to explode. (Kerbal reference...)
At the moment FRC (and more specifically, FIRST's progression of programs JrFLL->FLL->FRC or FTC) has no equivalent. Perhaps that's a problem, or perhaps FIRST needs to vet out the details of the 'crazier' ideas (the best ideas have a little crazy...) before moving on them.
Or, IMO, perhaps they're not reading the tea leaves correctly because their questions are biased to give them the answers they want, rather than the answers that exist. For example, I suspect there is very LITTLE progression from FTC to FRC and yet as the TIMS contact for 8 FTC and 1 FRC team I have never seen a survey question on it.