It's pretty obvious that this and many related questions (such as the Stop Build day thread) divide people into two camps. I've always thought of these two camps in different terms than people have mentioned here. We all, more or less, agree that the mission of FIRST is the I: inspiration. However, we tend to divide on whether to prioritize what I would call "micro-inspiration" or macro-inspiration".
Micro-inspiration is inspiration on a small scale (i.e. individual students). People who prioritize micro-inspiration are focused on a per-student basis. These people for the most part have leaned away from prioritizing competitive success as they believe, at a certain point, the resources required to gain more success on the field could be better utilized in other parts of the team's organization that would yield better returns on inspiring the individual students on their team. Someone posted in one of the Stop Stop Build threads about how they polled their local teams, and nearly all of the professional educators wanted to retain the Stop Build day. This did not surprise me, teachers are obviously going to prioritize micro-inspiration as this is their career and their passion.
Macro-inspiration, on the other hand, is inspiration at a larger scale. This is caused by programs that go out and inspire entire communities or large groups of people across the country. Initiatives such as getting robots on Meet the Fosters or Degrassi, televised events such as VEX Worlds on ESPN or the MSC production and Robozone. Things that cause a pretty significant portion of people in a metropolitan area such as Detroit to at least be aware that interscholastic robotics exists and is a thriving program that they have the option to join. However, if you solely focus on these large-scale initiatives, you forget the heart of the program; the students.
These two are NOT independent. Macro-inspiration depends on micro-inspiration. You cannot inspire communities without inspiring individual people. In addition, you cannot build an organization that could inspire a community unless the members of that organization are inspired themselves to work towards making that difference.
Personally, I think FRC is a pretty poor choice for micro-inspiration. Not because it isn't effective at this, but because the resources required are huge compared to alternative programs. I'm sure people will post individual counterexamples to this, but I believe that for most organizations, you could take the resources required to inspire 30 kids with FRC and inspire more with FTC or VEX. At the same time, I think it is much harder to get marco-inspiration with FTC or VEX, simply because of the scale of the robots. VEX is putting tons of effort into this, evident by getting a spot on ESPN recently, but I'll dare to say that I'm worried they could be getting close to their potential in this regard. It's just easier to impress the general community when you have large robots move with fluid and grace, performing actions that humans couldn't possibly do.
Personally, I think the people who keep trying to change FRC to be more micro-inspiration friendly are just trying to use the wrong tool for the job, and are trying to modify the tool for a purpose it is not suited for.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich Kressly
6. If the overall vision were to be, "Let's make FRC the elite program only for the top end" then I'd be willing to scrap most of my thinking for 1-5 above. Of course, to do that, then FULLY embracing, pushing, and supporting intermediate programs (regardless of logo) like VRC and FTC as the way to engage and create MOST of those future graduates we are trying to create has to be part of the plan.
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I agree with this completely. Google Rich's name, and I think you'll quickly find that he is probably one of the most qualified people to speak on this issue. If you read the rest of the post from which this quote came (which you can get to by clicking on the little blue and white arrow), you can see that him and I probably have differing opinions on this issue (which I fully expect due to his background as an educator), but he acknowledges the viewpoint I hold. The scenario where nearly everyone is happy is when FRC is the elite flagship program that spreads the word and generates macro-inspiration, with FTC/VEX/VEX IQ/FLL teams that follow up and provide micro-inspiration to a much, much larger number of students. These two aspects TOGETHER is what will create a successful robotics inspiration organization.