Quote:
Originally Posted by jman4747
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I'm not going to tell my students they have to stop at a kit bot when there are other ways to solve this problem. This isn't just about maintaining competitiveness, forcing a limit on a team hurts their own ability to inspire their students. "Sorry but we need to artificially take away you'r ability to try to do better so we can level the playing field." The team I spent the most time helping is another 35min - 50min (varies by traffic) away. Even if I took more time away from my team my net work load in hrs per week would go up! I imagine many of us would be helping teams who are farther away than our primary team.
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I'm glad we have some overlap in our ideas, but I think you misinterpreted something.
I didn't say that a dictator-mentor should hurt the students that that mentor advises. What you wrote opposing the notion that someone might do that is interesting, but off-target from the thought experiment I wanted to pose. That's not what I wanted to suggest.
My extreme example was supposed to be about illustrating that maximizing the help one team might give others is
dominated by factors other than the length of the build season. It wasn't about forcing anyone to do anything.
Through more than one channel, FIRST tells us that it's not about the robot. Another way to say that is that it's not about *our* robot. If a team full of students, confident in their own abilities, decided to adopt an extreme, outward, service-before-self focus (to change a larger community than their own) for one or more seasons, they wouldn't be limiting their success, they would be a shining example of community-changers.
About the distances, Skype and similar tools shorten commutes dramatically in places where modest communication bandwidth exists.
About the other good ideas - We all should keep them coming.