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Originally Posted by Ryan F.
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.
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I have to agree with Ryan. People are always clamoring "it's not about the competition", but frankly, for a huge number of students, and certainly to the public, it is most certainly about the competition. If we don't have a competition, we don't have any vehicle with which to inspire. If we don't have a fair competition, it will quickly degrade into a sham.
One of the more uncomfortable, and seemingly inevitable moments of explaining first to an outsider is the inevitable prompt, "Are all these robots student built?", to which I haven't found a good response. The honest answer would be no, but how do you justify the program in light of that?
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Originally Posted by Cory
FIRST isn't about the competition. Dean has said it isn't, and won't be fair. The competition is a means to an end.
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An unfair competition is no competition at all. The organization is larger than Dean, and if it is to survive, it must, like all organizations, change.
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Originally Posted by Cory
Also, until you've worked with a team, or spent an extensive amount of time around them, do not make ignorant claims about how their team is ran. You have no idea what they have or haven't done, and you have no right to demean their work. It's not up to others to police mentor involvement on a team. It's up to the students. If they feel like they don't have enough involvement, THEY need to fix that, likewise if they feel that they have too much involvement, they need to get mentors into the game.
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Ack! "How their team is
run"! You are right, it is impracticle to police mentor involvement, but we can develop a culture in which it is completely unacceptable, and peer pressure will take over.
In FIRST, entirely Engineer built robots are an abomination. There is significant reason to be proud of the degree to which your robot is student designed (built is less important, I find, because real engineers may never pick up a spanner).