[Dave Campbell]

I woud like to see FIRST award teams for the most complete use of the Kit of Parts... This might help those teams that do not have the precision machine shop sponsors or teams that have a lower budget. It would also help FIRST validate the generous donations of the sponsors.
In my 9 years of advising a couple of FIRST teams, #144 and #1038, I have seen robots evolve into extremely complex machines that are difficult to build and maintain within the constraints of a FIRST season.
We always try to keep it simple, sometimes we actually do. It seems to me that many teams think that designing a robot means to solve a problem with the most complex device possible when it should be to find an elegant simple solution...This leads to "bad" robots (over-designed or under-engineered) that can not begin or finish a competition weekend.
Although I haven't seen too many "bad" robots. As a matter of fact, all of the robots I saw in Pittsburgh were great creations from teams that wouldn't have had the experience at all without FIRST.