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Originally Posted by Ken Patton
well, they reflect some of our views quite well 
Woodie once said he wanted to make our brains hurt. And I *don't* think he was talking about getting beaned by 198 grams of foam.... |
Here, here (or is it hear, hear? - oh well). This is another one of those discussions that occur every year.
I agree that the struggle to solve the problem is part of what is great about FIRST. There are a lot of great designs from past years that the teams can learn from - how to build drive trains, arms, grippers, transmissions, etc. These mechanisms can be modified and tweaked to make a basic shooter for this year - there's no reason to give away detailed shooter designs.
There's a great saying: "you can fight without ever winning, but you can never win without a fight." This doesn't literally mean you actually need to fist-fight - it means that in order to gain something, you need to struggle a bit. Similar to "no pain, no gain". I'm all for letting every team struggle on their own; not because I don't want them to beat me on the field - it's because I want them to maximize their learning process.
If you build something that someone else designed, you learn what that mechanism does. By being forced to come up with the design on your own, you not only learn WHY it works (which is also important), but you also learn how difficult it can be to solve these problems, and why a good problem solving process is needed, and why research is important, and why getting an education is important - these are the major goals of FIRST.