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Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
And above all, it gives teams a testbed to find problems with new hardware that were not obvious during build. I do not believe FIRST would have advanced as far as it has without this additional time to play and learn. If you take away practice bots, you might as well take away post season events, workshops, white papers and CD.
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Al,
Since your expertise is more electrically oriented and mine is more mechanical, we haven't had a lot of exchanges on CD, so as a precursor I'd like to say that I truly have a lot of respect for you and your experience. That said, I think that the part of your point I highlighted above actually exemplifies the problem I see with the practice robot.
Your statement of:
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Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
it gives teams a testbed to find problems with new hardware that were not obvious during build.
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is essentially saying
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it gives teams with more resources the testbed to make their machines more competitive after the build time is over.
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And I think there's the problem with that.
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Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
If you take away practice bots, you might as well take away post season events, workshops, white papers and CD.
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I'm certainly not proposing this, and for obvious reasons. Though I've never taken a course in logic, this is somewhat of a straw man' type of counter argument. All of the above learning tools are either free or have a much low budget and time commitment than building a second robot. They're in a separate category.
My argument isn't that we should handicap the better teams to make the equal, limit the engineering quality of well designed robots, or limit learning to students. My stance is that FIRST should try to increase the fairness of the competition by giving all teams the same amount of time to build, test and practice with their robots. The current loophole of a practice robot should be addressed and fixed in future competitions.
Matt