[colt527]

I personally disagree with the decision to hand people the complex code in easy to use pieces. This might be because I am a little biased because I spent countless hours working on my own PID drive systems, and now it all seems useless. But, as for people saying that it mirrors real life in the fact that you are never going to make something from scratch, then you are right. But the fact is if you tried to mirror real life in every aspect, IMO, you would be drowning out one of the key factors that makes FIRST fun. In real life, they already have designs for articulation arms, or drive trains, but does FIRST give u them. No. So you can not apply the argument of saying it mirrors real life because you would run in to that problem.

I also think the argument that this mirrors real life can be discredited in another way also. Programming is a large part of engineering, if it was not they would not do it in FIRST. The idea is that you take some things that are already made and you build on it to complete the task. The code it takes to accompish the task does not just magically fall out of the sky, someone had to write it. I think a better approach would be to maybe have some very basic code to start rookie teams off and some really hard code that would be impossible for the average High School kid to figure out. This still allows room for complex problem solving that the programmers have to deal with. You want to be pushing the limits of technology by figuring out these problems.

There are more reasons I think this code library was not the best idea. Lets say last year a freshman joined the robotics team and fell in love with the programming aspect. Using C, a language used in real life all of the time will give the kid a better understanding of what the career of being a computer scientist would be life. He gets to walk in the realm of real life programming scenarios. Now with this new competition, a freshman can come into the team, and they may get a false sense of what programming really is. They may get an overly simplified look of what really is programming. All they see is the beginning instructions (Go forward, go backward, turn pi radians) and the end result. They have no idea what goes on in between.

I guess my feels can all be summed up in the fact that I think that though you are helping out rookie teams and leveling the playing field and that is great, but isn't this putting more focus on the competition itself and not what you learn on the way. This gives rookies a chance to compete against veterans, but will they ever really learn the insides of a PID loop or what interrupts are. If it was not for having to figure all of the code out for myself, I know I wouldn't have a clue either.

These are just my opinions, I don't know the outcome, or how this will work out, and I don't claim to.