Quote:
Originally Posted by mathking
I think the doing things the hard way vs. doing things the easy way is a false dichotomy. Again, it is about how you use the resources available to you.
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This I entirely agree with. COTS can be used or it can be abused. I can see a team fielding an entire COTS robot bolted together still be successful at teaching the base skills for their team of that year. Maybe they are an engineering school and the FIRST robot was just a passing milestone.
The thing is: there's not much in FIRST that interlocks the concepts of 'how you use the resources available to you' for education versus to simply produce the robot. Obviously if you don't 'use the resources available to you' to build a robot you won't be able to compete. However there is no assurance that anyone used those resources to more widely educate. I am not even sure there's a prize for it and I think maybe there should be something more there.
I can see, MathKing because you have tangible results, that you are delivering on the educational side of this and I'd like to see that rewarded. It should not just be about delivering the robot and that is even a FIRST slogan.