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FIRST needs to be a competition. That was one of the reasons why I started. So what will be the purpose of the whole thing if you don't "win"?!?! "Hey, here is my robot. It can pick-up balls." Then they test it and they all fail! Thats why we need compatition, in order to create new ideas. Dean said that FIRST was "life with traning wheels"? So, do you go to work and share your secrets with your competitior? Do you? Or if you work at GM and you then tell everything to Ford because it is "gracious professionalism"?!?! FIRST has evolved from a science fair in a high school gym to a full fleged explosion of fun, entertainment, and learning. There is no way with the size of it to do a small exhibiton like yesteryear. We have over 600 teams, not 30. FIRST's goal is to spread science and math, and would you like to spread it to a scicence fair level or "on a major network" level? I have learned more in FIRST than anything else, but this would have never happened without the competiton! We can't live in the past when things were different and then compare them today.
I will get hit major her. My defense is this; whould you like to see FIRST become a rejected science fair, or a fullfleged competition that would make kids thing and ejoy the angony of defeat and happenes of winning?
Now I'm going to step down from my soap box and hand the floor over.
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