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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
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.
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Yes, it does increase the chances of winning. That cannot be argued. I've said this before, and I'll say it again, that's not why we did this. The reason we collaborated was to give 3 times as many students a chance to have direct ownership over a robot. We could have had one large multi high school team, and I know many teams are successful that way. We felt that this route was better utilization of our resources, to maximize the inspiration process.
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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
2. Competition. People keep saying winning is better for a team. This is a 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.
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Yes we are competing against each other. If you saw 1114 tip over 1503 in the semis of the 2005 Waterloo Regional, you might understand this. If you saw 1680 & 1114 pushing each other in the finals of the 2006 GTR, you might understand this. Yes the teams collaborate during the season, but on the field it is a direct competition and nothing else.
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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
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.
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Okay, I'm getting sick of this line of logic. Collaboration is fully permitted within the rules. We understand that many people do not like this, or accept it. Many teams feel we are cheating. Just like many student-only teams feel like mentor driven teams are cheating as well. Does that mean the mentor driven teams should stop what they're doing? No!!! You can't please all the people all the time. The rationale of "lots of people don't like it" is not a reason to stop doing it. FIRST has publicly come out and condoned collaboration. It is 100% legal. I'm all for a discussion of the pros and cons of collaboration. I want to hear why other teams don't think it's right. But saying that we should stop something that has enriched the lives of students and spread the word of FIRST because it's upsetting a vocal minority is ludicrous. There will always be people who don't like how certain teams operate. This is a certainty. It's up to the teams to look within themselves, and make sure they're okay with the way they run. As long as that standard is met, then proceed as planned.