[Tristan Lall]

I've got to stick up for Rick and Tom, here.

To me, anyway, one of the most interesting parts of working within a FIRST team is seeing how the students progress through it, over the years. Though it may sound like I'm using the students in some grand social experiment, the point is that they are progressing. In fact, I might go so far as to say that I'm most impressed with the ones who go from mediocrity to playing a vital role on the team, in just a few years.

If there is a minimum standard that students need to meet, every single one of those students is excluded, at least until their grades improve. But that's the thing—as often as not, their grades won't improve, because they're unmotivated and uninterested by their education. FIRST is a great tool for motivating and captivating—but it's only useful to those who are allowed to participate.

The GPA requirements smells like an arbitrary standard that is fundamentally flawed in the way that it assesses the needs of the team, and the goals of education in general. Schools don't (or, at any rate, shouldn't) exist to churn out students with high GPAs—by all rights, that's a side effect, not a goal. They ought to be attempting to produce educated, capable individuals, and high marks or not, FIRST helps this immensely. Similarly, these sorts of people are exactly what a team needs—it doesn't help the team much to have someone with a 4.0 GPA if they can't wire a robot, or scout and strategize, or learn how to do one of these things. Teams, like real life, function because people have the skills to make things work; their GPAs in and of themselves are not sufficient predictors of the skills that they possess.

As a matter of fact, I'll go out on a limb and opine that if there's one worst thing that a team can do, it's preventing students from going to competitions, because of their marks. It seems foolish, to me, to expect that by leaving them at school for the three days that they would miss, they will somehow take the opportunity to correct whatever caused their low marks. When you think about it, it means that a left-behind student has to accept the fact that they're not being permitted to go, not because of their actions as a member of the team, but because of something unrelated—it's like being kept from playing baseball because you didn't practice the piano—it's got real potential for making them resentful. That's not going to help the team, the student's marks, or the excluded student. And if it's not helping, why do it? Because of the perverse (but pervasive) belief that by punishing an individual (and especially a teenager), they will come to accept and live up to your expectations? That is truly outrageous, and flagrantly ignores the natural tendency to learn better when having fun, than when being punished.