Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake
FIRST's goal/role isn't converting students into already-trained STEM professionals during grade school, and is instead inspiring the on-the-fence and non-STEM students to switch to choosing to try a STEM field for their future.
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I absolutely agree with you on this point, and I would suggest it could be argued that FRC does a better job at inspiring students due to it's scale. Building an FTC robot is a great engineering challenge for kids, but it's not nearly as impressive as watching 120lb machines that you helped make driving around a playing field in a sports arena.
I would also point out that another way FIRST has worked to inspire students is to pair them with mentors from STEM fields, while I personally have no experience on an FTC team, I would venture to guess that there is not nearly as much need for professional mentors on an FTC team where kids can build most things by hand, compared to an FRC team where various manufacturing techniques are employed to design and build machines.
You're right that FTC is more cost effective, but it remains to be proven to be equally or more inspiring than FRC.
Again, these thoughts are based on the impressions I've gotten of FiM activities over the years. It's not my intention to say that this is the best solution everywhere, or even that it necessarily works great here in Michigan (time will tell). Either way, essentially what we're doing is hypothesizing about the motives of an organization that no one yet to post in this thread is directly part of. The question that remains to be asked is this: has anyone bothered to actually send an email to FiM and ask them what their rational is for their policy?