[KenWittlief]

What is it about collaboration that appears to be unfair?

I think its two things:

1. You could have one big team with students from 3 or 4 schools, 30 or 40 mentors, tons of money. If that is one team then how many robots are they allowed to enter? One! Should we allow one big team to build three or 4 robots, pay 3 or 4 registration fees, and then have 3 or 4 robots at each regional they attend instead of only one per team? Clearly the more robots your 'team' enters into a competition the better the odds of one of them winning. When you have a collaboration across 3 schools from the outside it looks like one big team.

2. Competition. People keep saying winning is better for a team. This is an engineering design competition. When 3 teams collaborate they are not competing with each other. It become us vs them - the collaboration is us, and everyone else is them. No matter the rational used to justify the collaboration, when you compete against those teams it feels like they cheated.

We are emotional beings. We have an ingrained sense of fairness and fair play. You can rationalize all you want but if students from other teams feel like you are cheating or side-stepping the intent of the game, then that is how they feel.

You cant talk someone out of their feelings. A persons feelings are what they are. When three teams work together to compete against you then it feels like its 3 against one.