Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Anderson
You might be trying to fight the phrase "STEM is too hard", but I don't think I've ever heard anyone else give that as a motivation. To the contrary, FIRST is explicitly advertised as "the hardest fun you'll ever have."
I also don't think a team that "fails" is going to make people think that the problem is how difficult STEM is. I only have more than cursory knowledge of a few lapsed teams, but the overwhelming reasons for their "failure" as a team were a lack of funds or mentoring, not a lack of easy tasks.
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I don't think anyone would disagree that doing STEM in general or robotics specifically is difficult. The issue isn't with people realizing robotics is hard, it's with using the phrase "STEM is too hard (for me)" to never even try the program. One of the biggest benefits a FIRST team has for participants (in my humble opinion) is giving students with technical aptitude an impetus to grow interpersonal skills and giving students with high interpersonal aptitudes a better understanding of STEm fields and why they're important.
Now feel free to ignore this last part, but my first day of courses was today and my algorithms and data structures professor had a fantastic thought that I think is relevant here (I'm slightly paraphrasing). She said: "I used to be of the opinion that education could be fun and exciting. Now I realize that education is hard. Education isn't easy, but it can be engaging and rewarding." Replace education with STEM (or add it to the front) and I think this is highly relevant to robotics. One of the greatest things I learned from this program is that learning technical skills is almost always very difficult, but that that was not a reason not to try.
FIRST is about creating a world where scientists and engineers are as celebrated as athletes and pop stars-- part of this is helping the world realize that while yes, STEM is hard, it is not "too hard" to understand the applications and benefits.