Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto
Ike,
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Unfortunately, any additional in-season events within the Regional model HAS to cost $4k. Maybe FIRST would be willing to relax some of the A/V and other requirements for the event style you proposed, but FIRST will not charge less than $4k to Regional teams. Unless something big changes in FIRST HQ, they will not sacrifice any FRC second play revenue opportunities by offering Regional teams a cheaper alternative to get more matches in-season.
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-Mike
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You are probably correct, but if you change the model to be something that is not a regional... and does not have 6 championship slots... maybe they would consider the price reduction. Especially if you could show it in a manner that would not hurt their overall revenue stream. IE showing that you could engage 4X as many teams at $1K than $4K would be potentially revenue neutral, but I would imagine it would be more than 2X the inspirational value.
*I think, if you really want to get some movement, a case study for the importance and inspiration of iterative development needs to be made, and needs to get backing by the decision makers at FIRST.
There are enough teams that I am sure someone puts together a robot and it works relatively well on its first try. Most of the really good teams, I know, iterate on pretty much every system and piece of software. I would venture that no engineering or technical advancement comes out the box in its ideal configuration on the first go. Watching Slingshot, for me was seeing the improvements and the lessons and the iterations the team made. Fighting through issues is one of the biggest keys to success. Failure doesn't build GRIT. Finding success after a failure builds GRIT. The heavily limited format of FRC, especially the Regional format, is an incredibly difficult to get very many cycles of improvement.
Being an LRI, I get the opportunity to talk with a lot of teams dealing with problems with their robots. There are few moments more inspiring to a team then finding the fix, and getting their robot working (even if it is just for the last qualifying match). I have also been witness to teams that never get their failures fixed... Watching a team give up because they no longer have anything to look forward to is pretty depressing.