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Originally Posted by phrontist
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.
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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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FIRST has grown from an initial 32 teams to over a thousand, has thrived for over a decade, and you are telling us the person who founded this program, and put his life-force behind it for all these years got it wrong?
Seriously?
If FIRST was primarilly a robot building contest, then the major funding for it would evaporate overnight. Turn FIRST into battlebots, where winning is the thing, then what is the point?
I could not possibly care less which high school or which company can build the best robot in the US, or in the world. I do care about my profession: engineering. I do want to see more students take up the challenge of completing an engineering degree and helping to do what the rest of my profession does: making peoples lives better.
If a team has to win to be successful, then at the end of each year you will have 3 successful teams and 997 losers.