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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
YIKES!!! do a little checking before you explode. 35 teams at a regional paying $6k each come out to $210,000.
I think you would be shocked how much more than that it costs to put on a regional, and thats not counting the kit of parts, the year round work that has to be done
and the fact that almost every person working for FIRST at a regional is an UNPAID volunteer.
You are not even coming close to paying for what you get at a regional.
FIRST is a program designed to show students what a career in engineering and science is like. The robotics competition is only the platform, the bridge we cross, the project we take on in order to go through a quick engineering design/build/test cycle.
the competition is the 'test' phase - the chance to see how well your team did against the specifications of this years project.
What do you win if you win a regional? a trophy that is about 98¢ worth the plastic! If you goto the nationals and win, what do you win? 10 million dollars? full scholarships for all?
When you start thinking of FIRST as a robot building contest you have left the pavement and you are in deep weeds. That sort of thinking throws your whole perspective out of wack, and you end up in serious trouble.
Thats not what its all about.
That is not why thousands of people volunteer their time and their own money to be a part of FIRST.
That is not why sponsors give millions of dollars each year to host regionals, and to fund the nationals.
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First, team registration fees are obviously paying for something. They wouldn't have jumped 20% if they were a pittance just necessary to pay for the kit of parts. And don't think $6K is all teams are paying either. They have to pay for hotels, travel, other robot building expenses, etc. More than $6K goes into most teams as well.
Second, yes, FIRST is about more than the robot competition. Despite this, the competitions are obviously rather important. Else, why have them? They get kids excited about FIRST. Building a robot is fun, but watching it compete is also fun. Feeling that your team has missed out because of a simple software glitch in a new scoring system that's being beta tested on the field? Not so fun. I wouldn't want to go to my sponsors and tell them that we missed out on winning a regional because FIRST is still dealing with scoring software bugs. I think our team's sponsors would be just a bit upset with FIRST.
The point of this is really that there are quite obviously problems with the scoring system and we haven't heard anything about it from FIRST. A team member from a team that attended a second week regional is the first person to let other teams know that they might want to double check their scores and rankings.
EDIT: Another thought. We always talk about how we want FIRST to be more spectator friendly and be taken seriously as a bowl of smarts and a sport of smart people, etc. How seriously would John Q. Public take one of these regionals with random buzzers going off or announcers having to fill in for the end of match buzzer?