[Kris Verdeyen]

Dear Concerned FIRST Participant,

Your concerns have echoed those of many of us over the years. FIRST has a reputaion of being a "High school robotics contest", and that can lead to come concerns about engineer involvement. "High school students could never have built that," the naysayers say, and the rub is, they're right. The average high school student knows, if anything, very little about mechanical, electrical, and software design and farication. And it's not the goal of the FIRST program to teach them. As the wise old man of these forums* has said, it's not our job as engineer mentors to teach high school students engineering in six weeks. How could we? It has taken years for we engineers to be able to do what we do.

So what is FIRST all about? As has been pointed out time and time again, the key letter in the acronym is the second - Inspiration. It is our job as engineer mentors to make student want to pursue a career in a scientific or engineering field. That's it. The teams you see with really cool robots, like the one you described, have really cool robots because a really cool robot is more inspiring than one that you spend six weeks building with your buddies only to find out, when it's all over, it doesn't turn.

Put the question like this - would you be more likely to want to be an engineer when you grow up if you helped a team of engineers spend six weeks building an incredible robot, or if you spent six frustrating weeks banging your head against what turned out to be a pretty simple problem?

*Dr. Joe - sorry, after a search I haven't been able to find the post.