Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
I imagine it must really wear on teams without fancy machine shops and corporate sponsors that slug it out and come back year after year on sheer determination.
|
There are quite a number of teams* which lack machine shops and big sponsors who really enjoy "slugging it out" year after year. I'm pretty certain one of the reasons they do it is for the chance to take home one of the many awards - not necessarily for the award itself, but for the juice it puts back in the team when they get one.
Maybe I haven't been watching closely enough, but it seems to me that those that put the effort into it generally get rewarded eventually. Granted, there is a degree of luck, or of being in the right place at the right time with the right presentation given by the right presenters for some of these judged awards.
There are some problem areas, like giving a regional Volunteer of the Year award to an institution, rather than an individual volunteer, and there are a number of very deserved teams which keep coming up just short of the Chairman's, but I don't think that limiting the number of awards, or the number a team can receive will change that.
* Going off on a tangent: Cybersonics has a machine shop - vintage 1950 or 1960 for the most part (though I suspect the drill press dates from the Civil War). We do not have any big corporate sponsors. Even so, this rural team has earned a large number of awards over the years, and though we did grab the brass ring in 2003, we still bust our tails to earn little ones - it's what we do.
FWIW, in robot manufacturing we have five mentors who are there most of the time - one BSEE and one ASEE - the rest do not have engineering degrees. Even so, we were able to build a very competitive robot this year. I guess it would be nice to have six-figure sponsorship and work with a corporate engineering mentor base, I'm not convinced that it would make 103 a better place for our students to realize FIRST's vision.