[vtrehan]

I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit. As far as I understand, the purpose of FIRST is to give students experience and education with technology and science and leave them with a sense of pride and accomplishment.

The builders get pride after building the robot with their own hands, and the programmers get pride out of giving life to the robot by using tools that give them experience in problem solving for the real life; however by handing out this new system they have snatched all the glory out of the hands of the programmers. What’s next, they are going to send us pre-built robots, to just play with?

As far as real life is concerned, many of us are aspiring engineers, the ones responsible to develop the technologies of tomorrow, by providing these tools they have taken away the learning process and the experience of real life that FIRST should supposedly provide.

Well that’s how I see it,
Vivek.