Takes a deep breath and blows the dust off this article
That article is older than a lot of you students.
No - COTS won't stop anyone from teaching shop skills if they want to teach them and if the students want to learn them.
However if your shop skills education is only being supported because you can't get everything you need for FIRST without it - then eventually COTS on the scale of whole professionally engineered systems and robots will make that not necessary and support for those shops will be lost.
We are not at that point but when we get there (notice I didn't write -if- we get there) it is very likely we will level out more than the dynamics of the field.
So in a world where your schools don't have shops <- where do your students get inspired to work with their hands?
Read the article and remember Dean doesn't have that stuff in his house because he runs a mere museum.
This is kind of dusty as well:
https://web.archive.org/web/19961125...ws/960905.html