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Originally posted by Sean
Theres another issue that Dean Kamen and Woodie both preach. The issue with Gracious professionalism is that is largely a Utopian idea. In the real workforce a company is not going to apply tactics like gracious professionalism. They will do whatever they can to win the contract. The real world does not help there competitor. At the real world level the companies goals are money. The FIRST program has an entirely different goal and thats education. Gracious Professionalism works when the goal of a group is education not when the goal of a group is money. The idea of "gracious professionalism" is mis-phrased and sometimes misused. It should be more of a quote like "Good Sportsmanship" which is an attribute that any competition should support. The real world does not have Gracious Professionalism. But real world competitions do usually have good sportsmanship
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Gracious professionalism is not a utopian idea and it's not a bad one either. On the contrary, it's just a way of saying lets have a good time and learn something rather than lets build something to blast the crap outta someone else's creation. There are instances of gracious professionalism in the real world - and there ought to be more. FIRST is trying to change the world's perceptions, not limit itself to the rest of the world's perceptions.
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Also I'm not saying that FIRST should ditch everything and become a Robot Combat Competition. I'm just saying they should be slightly more lenient on the rules. Doing so because of the path or "commercial robot applications" that Battle bots has created.
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The rules are in place to protect each team's investments of money into their own programs and to make FIRST competitions fun for ALL involved, not just attacker robots...
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If you want to say that FIRST can be self sustaining or that it will grow with out media I have to disagree. It will reach a point where there will be few to no new teams joining. If they don't adapt the program they wont survive. The program as it is can and does only entertain a certain niche. If it does not adapt to be a little more "aggressive" First will be slowly downsized by more adaptive science programs. Programs that allow for a similar experience with a smaller rule set and larger robot capabilities. If the competition fails to "entertain" it will fail to be as large a program as it has the possibility for.
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You fail to account for the number of graduating FIRSTers who will go on to expand the program...as the number of programs grows, so then does the number of graduates who have been in FIRST...
FIRST is obviously not being downsized or anything - it grows at a constant rate, nabs new sponsors every year (even in this crappy economy we have right now, FIRST is growing), and FIRST allows for lots of robot capabilities... much more so than BattleBots could because it allows for lots of INNOVATIVE ideas to come out and be tested in a safer environment for experimentation. FIRST as it is serves to entertain the audience and educate it as well....and of course show off what High School Students can do.
Enough ranting and raving on this, if you have questions about what I wrote PM me.
Aaron Knight
Webmaster and Videographer
Team 891
http://first891.topcities.com