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If you want to get involved in that competition, talk to those that are involved. (See thread about "name our battlebot" about a year and a half or so ago.)
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If you want to learn and be inspired in science and engineering join FIRST, if you want to just destroy things go to a junkyard, battlebots may be exciting but they get destroyed and all you learn is basically that machines are for destroying things. FIRST has an educational base and it's not completely about building robots. FIRST is a sport with robot, Battle bots is like wrestling robots.
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What on earth brings about this view on things? I first got involved in robot combat during 8th grade. I joined my highschools FIRST team in my sophomore year of highschool, and without robot combat, I probably wouldn't have cared about any robotics related activities.
It isn't some evil form of robotics, it's another way to get involved and learn.
While the specific goals of each respective event are quite different, they teach many of the same things. Each have their strengths, each have their weaknesses, but they both can, and have been in my case, be valuable educational experiences.
If you'd like to become better informed on the subject you seem to dislike, these links may come in handy.
BattlebotsIQ
Robot Fighting League
For an event near you
The Builders Database
The frightening thing about all this is that from what I've seen in the robot combat community, FIRST is respected and builders are encouraged to mentor or join local FIRST teams. Here, there's an unsettling amount of hatred of the robot combat world.
What I'd really like to see would be some San Francisco area teams getting together with Dave Calkins and getting a FIRST arena setup at
RoboGames.