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Originally Posted by plutonium83
Perhaps if I had my parents do my homework for me, that is certainly a different way to do my schoolwork, but does it make me more knowledgeable?
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Except your goal with homework is to learn that material. FIRST is not about teaching you how to build a robot - Dean, Woodie, and others have made that quite clear. FIRST is about giving you a chance to interact with engineers and see what the engineering and technology world is all about so that hopefully you'll be interested enough to pursue a career in one of those fields.
Believe me, I know where you are coming from. I spent 3 years as a student on a smaller team. I had the same opinions as you of large teams that "appear" to have everything done by the adults. I heard the rumors (and, sadly, I probably contributed to their spread) that some teams' robots were built "behind the scenes" by the engineers and ship-day was the first day that the students even saw the robot and were then just trained to drive it by the adults. I noticed that the big-name teams tended to win more awards and I "knew" there was some sort of conspiracy there causing it.
The irony is that now I am a member of one of the teams which I used to dislike because I thought it was a team where only adults did the building and the kids didn't get to do anything. Of course I now know that my opinion was misguided. In reality, my current team which I thought was so different from my old team really isn't that different at all. Students on both teams get plenty of opportunity to do hands-on work. The primary exception in raw part fabrication - we use Motorola's shop and because of that there's legal reasons why we can't let students use certain equipment.
Trust me, my team is aware of what some people think about the way our team is run. Even though they don't really know, it's still disappointing that that's what some others think of us (no, you did not say anything about my team, but if we had been at Finger Lakes then you probably would have been just as likely to say "Motorola" instead of "GM").