Two comments:
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Originally Posted by jonathan lall
Like I noted before, all the great skills and virtues associated with the FIRST competition are a natural by-product, but FIRST increasingly makes the process of acquiring these skills unnatural and artificial by rewarding values like team spirit with an award. FIRST is a lot of things, but when it comes down to its roots, it's a robotics competition, that should reach its societal goals passively. Ultimately, something like Engineering Inspiration and Chairman's Awards reward teams for exemplifying these ideals with a resounding "You get it!"
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A society gets what it celebrates. The goal of FIRST is not to have cool robots; that's just a means to the true end of making science and technology cool. If your position is "FIRST is about robots", then you have valid arguments. The problem is that your position does not match FIRST's position, so it's no wonder that you disagree with the way things are done to further the position.
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Originally Posted by jonathan lall
FIRST defines arbitrarily what it wants Chairman’s teams to exemplify, and arbitrarily makes it the most prestigious award. Recently, FIRST has done well to introduce a Hall of Fame and revise Championship eligibility rules around this award. This legitimizes it, but it was also recently decided that submissions be small four-page essays because the judges no longer have time to go through all the submissions thoroughly. It is in fact very difficult to argue that as much time is spend by judges on the most prestigious award as was once the case. Indeed, when my team won at the inaugural Canadian Regional, we had a committee to talk about us and our submission in detail, in addition to our pits advertising our exploits, in addition to our submission being a professional-looking video. We put in a lot of effort because we were supposed to, and were rewarded accordingly.
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It seems to me that the submission format was changed to emphasize one simple point: the award recognizes teams that best act in accordance with the desired behavior, not teams that best produce submissions. Rewarding professional-looking videos would promote professional-looking videos, whereas the goal is to promote school-industry partnerships, community outreach, graciousness, professionalism, and the general growth of FIRST's mission.