[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by FarmerJohn

I could write a book about why VIQ/VRC are superior to FLL/FTC. Alongside the reasons listed above, teams get to compete more for less money. If we make the assumption that time involved in the program is related to inspiration (a very safe assumption, since FIRST is always promoting spending more and more time in their programs), VIQ and VRC provide more inspiration per dollar due to the greater amount of time invested into the program by the students through increased match count and number of competitions and the decreased cost of competing. Then you get to the quality of competitions. In the VEX programs, the focus of the competition is the experience of the teams and students, and they spare no expense when it comes to making things easy and accessible to teams. FLL/FTC, on the other hand, are a little less team focused. It seems that FLL/FTC care more about the quantity of teams competing ($) than the quality of each team's experience. Then you can look at the games. FLL is a mess of missions that relies on perfect programming (or perfect parents) to succeed. All age groups compete together so the younger students rarely come out on top of the older ones. VIQ, on the other hand, is less software intensive, which not only makes it more accessible to younger students, but also makes it more difficult for someone other than students to do a majority of the work. Elementary and middle schoolers are separated so that nobody is competing against someone with years of experience that they do not have. The games are simpler and involve more practice and iteration and less lining up in base carefully. FTC games are, as I've experienced, unorganized and imbalanced, and it doesn't seem like the game design committee has ever competed in an a enjoyable game before. VRC games are straightforward, easy to explain, and easy to watch, plus they're designed by a group of people who know competitive robotics inside and out. VRC is also separate by age groups so that high schoolers and middle schoolers don't compete together. I'm sure other people have examples as well, but these are my experiences.

It seems most of your areas of concern center around the competition aspects. How would you compare the non-competition aspects of the programs? The Core Values and research projects are a central aspect of FIRST Lego League, and you are seemingly not considering them here.