I'll bite.
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Originally Posted by Andy Baker
These teams get awards for their student involvement.
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I was told by judges at the Midwest Regional that they were specifically told to not account for amount of student involvement in determining awards.
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Originally Posted by Andy Baker
Are both teams learning? yes.
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NO.
I realize there are no absolutes here, but what I have seen has appalled me. I've witnessed an engineer on a team with an obviously professionally designed robot yelling at one of his pit crew about how he was “stupid" for the way he was trying to fix something, then push him out of the way and do it himself. Witnessing things like this make me VERY thankful I am on a team with high student involvement.
When you see the pits of these teams at regionals, It seems like the kids are standing around when the engineers do all the work. People learn from doing something, not watching someone else do it.
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Originally Posted by Andy Baker
We see teams who are proud about having a "100% designed and built robot". I can respect this. They worked hard. They learned much. However, more likely than not, they performed not so well at a regional.
They may have professional machine designers creating gearboxes or writing code.
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Here’s the big problem. How are high schoolers supposed to compete against professionally designed and built robots? This is where the true conflict is. The teams who believe that FIRST is better when the students actually build and manage the robot get destroyed in competition. FIRST is not supposed to be a professional engineering competition. If the engineering mentors want that, there are other avenues. FIRST is meant to Inspire the STUDENTS. The more we allow for these professionally designed and built robots to dominate the FIRST competitions, the more it encourages student run teams to start letting the engineers design and build the robots.
FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition.