Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake
Jim,
This post by me contains a lot of snippets from your two long posts, not because your arguments are the only ones I disagreed with, but because you did a good job of presenting the strong case for the side of this discussion that I disagree with.
Everyone,
In this thread what I see over, and over again is: Robot, Robot, Robot, Robot, Win, Win, Compete, Compete, Robot, Robot Compete, Win, Win, Robot, Compete, Win, ...
Sprinkled among those sentiments are the occasional mentions of the reasons Dean, and the other folks we respect founded the program.
Additionally, while I can't see into the hearts of anyone else, I get a sense that most of the folks who want a longer build season, want it because it strengthens only the on-the-field, crown-a-game-winner part of the program; and that their main motivation isn't using that part of the program to strengthen the entire program.
Blake
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So clearly there are differences of opinion in the room. Good.
I think we are all after the same ultimate goal, but some of us seem to think that there are vastly different ways to inspire young people. Perhaps this is true. I have spent decades of my life working with young people, and while this does not give me all the answers, it does provide a lot of insight into what works and what does not.
The accusation above by Blake seems to indicate that wanting to run a fun and exciting robotics competition is somehow not in the spirit of FIRST, and that somehow prioritizing a few operational things like enabling a better environment for continuous improvement is somehow not inspirational. Meh.
The mission of FIRST is stated to be:
"to transform our culture by creating a world where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders."
Great. We all agree on this goal.
So as a "technology leader" myself, I guess I should internalize this goal a bit and turn it into:
"How can I get lots of young people to want to be like me?" As leaders and mentors, this is really the question isn't it?
The key point of the mission statement are the words
"transform our culture". This implies something huge. Not big, huge. Not the small potatoes stuff of impacting merely thousands of people that we have all been carefully doing for the past 20+ years, but impacting MILLIONS of people. Cultural transformation will not happen at anything less than this kind of scale.
We all know that other organizations have been able to pull off major cultural changes in the past: Sports leagues, political campaigns, consumer groups, religions, and many more. It can be done, but we in FIRST haven't actually pulled it off yet.
My personal view of how to do this is to follow the sports model. Dean himself spoke of exactly this on the recent RoboLeague program, so this is nothing new. Why do sports work to attract and inspire? Three big hooks that sports have going for them is that sports are fun to play, fun to watch, and excellence in sports is very inspiring to the young. The hallmark of a truly successful sport that has transformative ability is if the population of fans and spectators is larger than the population of participants. We are certainly not there yet in Robotics......not even close.
So this is the heart of the matter. If we are following a sports model (and we most certainly are at FIRSTinMichigan), and we want to reach a transformative level of impact, then we must put some much needed attention on "fun to watch" and "inspiring the pursuit of excellence". These two things go hand in hand. Better performing robots are more fun to watch, and better performing robots are more inspiring to the public. Allowing more of this will only help all of us better reach outsiders.
Blake you corrupt my message. It is certainly not all about win, win, win, robot, robot, robot. It is about inspiring more success by allowing more success.
My students are inspired by teams like 1114, 254, 971, 148 and their kind. These are the rock stars of robotics. Our team meets all year round, not because of me, but because my students beg me to allow them the chance to try to be as good as those they are inspired by. My students will never stop working while there is still a chance to improve. To me, this is the essence of inspiration, and for them excellence is a way of life. Their passion is what inspires me to keep doing this year after year. If there were millions like them, then we would really have the cultural transformation Dean speaks of. But this will never happen if we tell everyone to stop after 45 days.