[DougHogg]

In the 2003 season , our team had more engineering resources than we did this past season, and we designed our own shifting system (involving shifting between large and small wheels). For 2004, one of our engineers was away for the whole season on a project and another was up to his neck in a vital project locally. So we used Team 716's 2003 non-shifting gear box design from the Chief Delphi White Papers. We also used a modifed version of Team 25's 6 wheel design that we learned about from the Cheezy Poofs and Team 60. We got gyro code from Team 492 (via Chief Delphi). Our mechanical engineer said we had to keep our robot really simple this year. Well we had an amazing year that wouldn't have happened without the information that we got from other teams. Question: If we were to prevent teams from buying gear boxes, should we then ban getting gear box designs from other teams via Chief Delphi?

The truth is, the FIRST Competition has been evolving all along as teams share their knowledge. And the competition needs to evolve for reasons that dlavery mentioned above and also because the field of robotics inself is evolving and we need to keep pace so that our students are learning at a level that is in keeping with the requirements of jobs in this and other technical fields in the society.

If we were teaching automotive design, it is unlikely that we would make the students build their own generators. It wouldn't be a terrible thing for them to know how to do that, but to be competitive in the future, they will need to know how to find, acquire and integrate such parts into their systems.

I am sure there will be times when I look back fondly at the good old days of FIRST when we shifted by switching the drill motor transmission (my first year), but the future is ahead of us, and we are helping to prepare students for that future.

There will be lots of future challenges to take the place of the challenge of designing a shifting gear box. (I am quite sure that our robots will require more programming in the future, and that is as it should be because more and more of our society will involve computer programmed devices.)

With the number of teams that we have now, it is vital for our competition to become much more audience friendly so that we will get more exposure and thus more sponsors who will benefit from that exposure and thus be able to justify supporting a team or a regional. Otherwise, we will run out of sponsors and many new teams will have a very rough time.

That which doesn't grow, will shrink, and I don't think any of us want a smaller FIRST. In fact, I hope that one day all students will have the option to participate on a FIRST team.

So thanks Andy and Mark for contributing to FIRST's evolution and expansion.