[Donut]

We get this on our team just like any other; our response is always "sorry, but you know this is a school team, and the district won't allow something like that." Actually I know our officers a few years ago actually looked at doing a Battlebot in addition to FIRST but the idea faded out somewhere.

Show them some of the other cool things you can do. Build something that shoots stuff for the off-season; shooting things seems to be just as cool as smashing them, at least that's what our t-shirt cannon (and the ones other teams have built) have proven.

You will inevitably have to mention you can't do that though, and if they leave purely because of that then they probably weren't actually interested in building a robot in the first place, they just wanted to be the driver for smashing things.