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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
As for "FIRST being broken", and not following the engineering process, I'd have to object to that. The fact is, it is MUCH harder to design a game, field, scoring system, kit bot, organize 33 regional events, work with corporate sponsors, work on obtaining collegiate scholarships, and the rest of the things that FIRST does, than it is to build a robot.
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No one doubts that managind FIRST is more difficult than being in FIRST. Are you suggesting that since I'm on the robot side my concerns are not valid?
Your list of things FIRST does is not accurate. The regionals are organized by volunteers. The kitbot is created by IFI. Very little work at the FIRST level is involved in obtaining college scholarships.
The most important thing FIRST does is create a game. I'll he honest and say that I don't know how the Game Design Comitte works. The scoring system and ranking software is subcontracted out.
FIRST needs to concentrate on the game and keeping subcontractors in check. A final system integration is in order to determine if everything will work.
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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
FIRST has kept the customer in mind alot more than you thought. For instance, the center couldn't have been much taller, or else it wouldn't fit in most indoor facilities, therefor limiting the amount of teams capable of constructing it properly, and able to utilize it for testing even further.
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At approximately 11 feet heigh the field already won't fit into many regular rooms. There's a big difference between what the teams need to create to simulate the field and what FIRST should create for a production field. This year a piece of plywood with a hole in it was enough to simulate the center goal. I would expect FIRST could create a much more advanced solution.
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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
In order to be able to conduct MORE testing, they would have to release the "product" (game) after kick-off, and that would generate a ton of more problems than a not-perfect center goal, or an annoying scoring system.
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That might hint at a problem with how FIRST handles game design. I work year round. FIRST should too. They have 7 months to design, build and test a game and field. What does FIRST do between now and January that is more imprtant than creating a new game?
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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
If you ask every single student who attended a FIRST competition this year to give you their comments, I doubt any more than 5% would say a word about the scoring system.
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This would completely cooberate my feeling that FIRST was not open and honest about the software problems.