[qscgy]

Reform safety awards, and pit safety in general. The teams that go around giving out mostly useless safety giveaways (Easter eggs with 2 Band-Aids and a hair tie, for example) are not actually trying to improve other teams' safety. Every team I've seen has those supplies already. They just want an award. In my experience, the best way to be safe is to make sure everyone in the pit knows how to safely use their tools and has some common sense. I don't know how you give an award for that , though.

OK, that rant's over. On to the next thing, which is doing something about teams where the mentors build the robot. I know that this is often thrown around unfairly, but at least where I am (CHS), at almost every event I have been to, I've seen at least one team where the mentors are fixing the robot with no students around. This indicates that the mentors understand the robot better than the students, which means that they likely designed it. I understand that the mentors take an active role on many teams, and some teams do need a lot of help, but when the mentors are working without any students around to help or at least observe, the students don't learn anything and in many cases, get to play with one of the best robots at the event. This is not only unfair to the students on the team (always veteran teams, I might add), since they get little out of FRC, but to the other teams where students were heavily involved in the build process, only to get beaten by professional engineers. It has gotten to the point where, on my team, any winning robot is dismissed as "mentor-built". This is often untrue, and is especially unfair to the teams who win without needing a mentor-built robot. My point is, FIRST should be about learning, not just about getting a winning robot.