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Originally Posted by Jay H 237
The way I see it it's a tough question and different people are going to have different points of view. The way I see it is that some of the teams do better at constucting a robot than others because of the facilities available to them. The fact is a lot of times it depends who's involved with your team and who your sponsors are. Some teams don't have the resources to do certain machining and such and allow the sponsors to do it. I personally don't see an issue with this as long as the students are still able to learn. It just so happened that one of your mentors was involved with DEKA, and if they helped you out during the six weeks so be it, other teams had major corporations backing them too. So far I don't see any issues. Now here's where I don't agree with what you did, having facilities and an advantage available to you at a competition that other teams didn't. Other teams had to wait and possibly miss matches because something broke and they had to wait to get it fixed while you didn't have to worry about that. Personally it just seems that having that advantage at the competition is different than during the six weeks.
That's my two cents, feel free to agree or disagree.
[EDIT] I didn't realize M Krass posted before me and checking she is right...it is against the rules at competition.[EDIT]
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I can see where your mentor is coming from. For a rookie team, you weren't too bad off. It annoys me that some teams are able to simply have their engineer mentors design and build everything if they are sponsored by a big tech corporation like, say BAE. (For the record, our team is sponsored by BAE, but they give us very little money and no tech help).
Sure, he was right to hold it away from your team. It would be nice had he not, but you as a team are not necessarily entitled to anything he might have access to any more than you are entitled to his bank account.
Clearly, you have more to learn about the ways of FIRST, young grasshopper. FIRST is adept in the ways of doublethink--they promote competition while simultaneously advocating "Gracious Professionalism", which can sometimes seem to mean cutting yourself down for the sake of others. Gracious Professionalism is only to be practiced sometimes, however. It is apparently waived in certain situations--such as if you are mildly annoyed by the loud cheering of a certain team. Or if you are a FIRST official, and a team member loses his custom safety goggles in the cheering pit, and he needs to go on and find them, and you respond with "tough". This, of course, is judging from the behavior of certain teams and officials from Manchvegas. And this practice of doublethink in the FIRST arena is something I have yet to master.
*grins*
We're a second year team. We've had some bumps in the road with definining gracious professionalism, with getting along with mentors, etc.
And for the record...as a fellow attendee of Manchester, I hereby absolve you of any guilt in the eyes of Team 1073 for your little jaunt over to DEKA. If FIRST didn't have the tools to fix your robot and they implied that they would...well, it would hardly be graciously professional if they did not allow you to fix it when you could, would it? Being a rookie team and finishing 14th is amazing--we thought we did well last year when we finished 22nd! In my eyes, your illicit trip to DEKA is absolutely fine.
--Petey