Quote:
|
Originally Posted by sburro
With this said, should FRC be moved to the college level and VEX be for high school? I would still say that the FRC should allow high schools participate if they want, but with the money that is needed to operate a FRC team, I think a college could bear the load better than a high school.
|
As much as many people (including myself) would love having a college-level FIRST competition (I swear, I am addicted to FIRST!
), I don't think we should eliminate FRC from the high school level. Yes, FIRST can be very expensive, and yes it can be hard to have a well-funded program. But is this not what really happens in the real world? Are we not always restricted by some means (such as budget, time, and resources) in the real world? Can these restrictions often lead to better ideas? Does FIRST succeed in these areas? Yes, yes, and yes.
FRC, FVC, FLL, and JFLL all serve their roles. Gus Team 228 does have a FVC team, which has turned out to be our "Junior Varsity" team for all the freshmen and new members on the team. The Vex team seems a lot easier to the new members, so a much higher percentage of the new members actually work on at least one of the robots now.
In addition to FVC, team 228 also has connections with the middle school FLL teams in our town. A bunch of the new members on our team this year were participants in the FLL program. (I was an FLL kid way back in the day...) In previous years, our team used to have all the local FLL teams come to our fall team meetings, and we would have students help mentor the FLL kids. We have also been looking at getting some of the elementary schools in our town to start JFLL teams.
So our team pretty much covers the whole FIRST spectrum.
