[EricH]

Originally Posted by Basel A

Reserving judgement for a moment, I'm curious as to how they'll handle the fact that this is 3 months after the two Championships. Do they allow teams to continue making robot changes, potentially having final matches with completely different robots? Or are the robots to be kept in bags (nevermind that this would suck, plus the teams would just use practise bots at home).

Agreed...

Known unknown issues: Handling of robots post-2Champs (bag 'em, "confiscate" 'em, or unrestricted use of 'em), transport of teams and/or robots to NH (particularly if international), alternates if 1+ teams can't make it, and the whole "3-month gap".


What I think FIRST failed to see in the first place is that bringing more teams to the "Championship Experience" is not the same as bringing the "Championship Experience" to more teams...
And that like it or not, the vehicle they chose to use for culture change is a COMPETITION and there was no clear winner (which clear winner you'd expect to see from a COMPETITION). Their failure to properly account for that is what is essentially forcing them to deal with a method for finding a single clear winner, and THAT is causing some interesting discussion.


That being said, it will be very interesting to see which route they go for the Festival. If properly hyped up, and teams participate like they mean it, it could do wonders for promotion of FIRST (and STEM). But if something goes wrong--the brighter the spotlight, the easier it is to fail--including if one or more teams declines to attend and no replacement is found, then what you end up with is a big mess.