[Littlepchan]

I haven't been in FIRST for very long and I lack a lot of experience in the program, but I would have to say a way to improve the FIRST experience would be documenting more items.

Our first year was a huge hassle. Why? Simple, we didn't know what could be done. The concept of Flywheels was foreign, Pneumatics was an expensive mystery, Advanced Drive trains were an even bigger mystery, and knowledge that would be common to a team with 3 or more years was unknown to us.

The book "FIRST® ROBOTS: Behind the Design Book" written by Vince Wilczynski and Stephanie Slezycki is definitely a great book to start teams thinking about what they can do. The pictures included also help visualize some important concepts that are hard to explain in words. However, it glazes over the concepts and mathematics that make everything work. I can't currently quote the book, pages, or sections because I do not have it with me but this is a problem.

After going through our first year, we decided that if we had a rookie team come under our wing we would make sure they had the tools and information to do amazing things. At the same time, to make sure they were creatively thinking an innovating we didn't tell them everything just our thoughts and ideas. Team 6171 this year made it to Semifinals at the Dallas Regional and received the Rookie All-Star award to take them to Championships. Also, in their robot they had things that we could only dreamed of having in our rookie bot, probably because they had 5431 10 minutes away that could give them the information they had learned the year prior.

This is a problem when you consider teams that have been around for over 18 years. No wonder we see robots from low number teams make it to the finals and Einstien so often. They have the knowledge that no one else has and the documentation that our team has personally found has been garbage. I was able to find something about flywheel launching with great documentation, but that has been it. As such, what I would do if I had the time and the money is take everything about FIRST and document it with extreme detail. If the students do not have access to knowledge, how are they expected to learn anything?