[Matt Leese]

I saw the reference on Slashdot this morning. And it got me thinking as the response on Slashdot to FIRST is always split. There are those who think it's a great program. And then there are those who think it's worthless because the engineer's do all the work.

Now, my experience in FIRST has been that, in general, (and I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule) the attempt is made such that the students do as much as possible. I've also never heard someone say "our engineers do everything." It always seems to be someone saying that that's how another team operates; usually this is in reference to a team with a single, large corproate sponsor.

Possibly this can be chalked up simply to jealousy. Jealousy over the financial support and possibly simple jealousy over the quality of a robot. If it's not jealousy, I'm not really sure what it is.

My main reason for posting this is I don't know why we, as the FIRST community, are projecting that message. I think we can safely say that we don't want to. How can we work to end this idea?

Matt