FiM is dictating to all FLL teams in their "territory" what the rules will be and that they are re-aligning the age group boundaries to suit a school-based bureaucracy. This may be a good thing or it may be a bad thing. Unfortunately, or fortunately, they have no jurisdiction in other territories. Their change will create more disparity in the age ranges seen when teams from their territory go to the World Festival or any of the Invitationals not under their control. My understanding of why FIRST allows 16 year-olds outside of North America to participate in FLL because, until recently, they did not offer FTC and FRC events in most of the Rest of the World.
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Originally Posted by Gregor
I'm saving a longer post for later, but anyone who thinks that 13 and 14 year olds are beyond FLL at this point are not approaching FLL from a competative angle. There are so many things still to learn, and every year I'm floored with the new stuff the kids on my team come up with. I'm even more floored when I dare to go on Youtube and see what some of the top teams have done.
Remember that 14 is only the age cap in North America due to the prevalence of FTC and FRC teams, it's 16 globally. If I had the choice I would have absolutely continued with FLL for another two years (in addition to FRC mind you), and I like to think of myself as a fairly competent mechanical student.
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I feel that the lower age cap on FLL (and FTC) will lead to participants getting less out of the programs in terms of learning, growth and inspiration and work against the vision of FIRST of getting more students to pursue STEM. Most of the FLL teams build fairly rudimentary robots compared to the more competitive teams that Gregor is referring to. This is either due to a lack of training (coaching/mentoring) and/or the participants do not yet have the maturity necessary to work with more complex mechanisms and software. If they did, you would see calculus taught in elementary school. Many of those teams that did the inspiring stuff that Gregor refers to have competed in FLL for many years, probably more time than the age range FiM would allow. I believe that this will lead to a situation where the "rich get richer". The kids who are already "mechanical geniuses" will do well but the majority of the participants will not be able to struggle long enough to achieve the personal growth possible and FLL will become something that "they did once or twice and didn't get much out of it" so they went to do something else.
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Originally Posted by Gregor
FLL events are very much run by how their organizers want, unlike FRC.
In the Toronto region, there are 3 events only open to Toronto District School Board teams. Community teams ect. have to go to other events, even though they payed to be a team and follow all the same rules as the TDSB teams.
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For many years, one of the FLL Qualifying Tournaments in South Texas Region was only open to teams from that school District.
Historically, about 60-70% of the teams in the South Texas Region are affiliated with a school in some way. The balance were community teams, Girl/Boy Scout teams, church group teams, homeschool group teams, family based teams and teams based at for-profit robotics education companies. Would all these other teams be excluded from participating in FiM run FLL events? Would these teams be able to participate in FLL events outside of FiM's territory? I believe that in Texas, teams are only allowed to register for events in their geographic region. I somehow don't think that it is in FIRST's interest to exclude so many participants.