Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake
OP, I'm curious.
A) It appears you were focused on building a great on-the-field robot, and on getting far down the path to Einstein? Is that true? If I'm wrong, ignore the next question.
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My team is not focused entirely on competitive success, but we do work really hard towards it. We also work really hard on outreach programs to help students learn, and spread the culture of FIRST that we love. We believe that competitive success grants us a larger platform with which to accomplish this. If we were a less competitive team, for instance, we would not have been invited to participate in the China Robotics Challenge, which has been an incredible experience for our team, and a huge benefit to FRC in China.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake
B) How do you think you would feel (then and now) if instead your last year/season had focused on getting as many non-STEM students as possible to try STEM things that they hadn't done before, while also helping build a fun, adequate, middle-of-the-road robot? If you did do that, along with everything else you described, my advice is to stop volunteering for too much bad stress. If you didn't, I'm sure that FIRST wants participants to use the FRC program to place a greater emphasis those non-STEM students than participants place on the robot.
Blake
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While there are positive sides to my teams competitive culture, as a team with ~100 members, there is a huge organizational responsibility that is given to our leaders. It's just hard to lead the team effectively without taking on some amount of stress. My school is also (by some measures) the top STEM school in the city, so it's hard for me to reach non-stem students, furthermore, our team is pushing the limits of reasonable size, and it would be difficult to reach more students within our team.