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Originally Posted by chakorules
I for one totally agree with the above statments.
In the REAL WORLD, I program servos and industrial robots everyday. Every vendor now a days is coming out with their own scripting or I call it "Mnemonics". It totally follows the path of what the industrial automation theme is leaning toward. Because of my job, time is critical to complete a task within a required time. Design time is critical to make a profit on a job. The easier it is to program the servo or industrial robot, the more money I make for the company I work for and the less stress on me. There is nothing wrong with a "CAN" package software in my opinion. It what you do with it.
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Yes, this is more like real life, BUT WHAT ARE YOU LEARNING. I'm basically going to rephrase my paragraphs above here. OK, is the FRC challenge completely based on real life problems that have not been done before? Are there robots already out there that can pick up tetrahedral shape objects. I'm sure there is, but does FIRST give you them and then tell you to just control it better then everyone else? FIRST is not entirely about real life, IMO, its about the experience along the way. I may sound like I'm raining on everyones parade by maybe limiting what "cool" things the robots can do, but I don't think this is about making it do "cool" and impressive things, it's about challenging yourself to make the robot work to the best that you possibly can and being proud about the fact that you did it on your own. Let's say you are a rookie team and you get dead reckoning to work and you know that you put all of your problem solving efforts into making it work, I believe it is just as gratifying as a veteran team putting all of their efforts into making an automatically shifting transmission that maximizes the torque and uses PID control. The rookie team may not win the regional, but is that what FIRST is really about?
I think that this is taking away from the learning and putting more of a focus on real life things. Sure you can still learn C, just because you don't need it doesn't stop someone from going out and learning about it, but people seem to learn what they need to learn. Maybe this is my Social Studies teachers fault. We have to read 8-15 pages a night and the next day we get a quiz on it that makes up for your grade. I read because I know I will be tested on it the next day. Last year I could get away with not reading because I would just cram the day before the test and do fine, but I really didn't learn (enough with the wild tangents). The point is (and I can't speak for everyone) is that some people learn what they need to. If you don't NEED to learn C, then you might not bother learning it, and you might not discover that programming may be your true passion.
Also, I sort of briefly mentioned this in my last post. Where does the code that they give you come from. SOMEONE HAD TO WRITE IT. Lets go on another tangent adventure. Say you work for a computer game company, and you are creating a game, you will usually use a game engine already written and this is fine. But what if you work for the company that writes that engine from scratch?
I don't really know why I feel this way, but I've been like this all my life. I NEED to re-invent something, I want to learn the true inner workings of things and I just believe this is taking the chance away from people in order to do that. Maybe it comes down to the fact that I believe that FIRST should not just be an opportunity for engineers to find their true passion, but computer scientists and PR people and everyone involved as well.