Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneYoung
To take a travel team to one of the regionals that is made up of girls, encouraged more active participation, involvement, ownership of the experience on the part of all the members.
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All of the
female members. What about males on the team that struggle to take the initiative to participate more activly. If this was the goal of the segregation of the members to participate on the trip, then I would have sent all of the team members who had little-to-no experience, both boys and girls. Even then, I still think that I would have a fundamental problem with sending only people who don't take an active role on the team; The people who are very active on the team worked very hard to get to this point (going to regionals), and are not being excluded for something they couldn't control.
I spent over 200 hours this build season progging our bot. If I was told that I couldnt go to one of two regionals and/or champs simply because I was male, I would probably
leave my team. I would be frustrated greatly, seeing that I raised all of the required money to go on trips, and stayed overnight several nights working on the bot. I got used to being the only person in the school both before and after everyone got there. I agree that people who didn't have the opportunity to participate this much should have a chance to play more active roles at the competition, but I don't think that this detracts from what I put into the team. To correlate, I'm sure that the girls put quite a bit of effort into building their bot at home in Jan and Feb, but I'm sure that the boys put in equal effort. In my opinion, not allowing them to travel simply because they are male is both discouraging and unjust.
This is a sticky situation, because I can definatly see the argument of most (seems like everyone) of everyone else posting here. Sending an all-girls team definitely benefits the girls in some aspects (in my opinion, can hurt them in some ways, but thats another issue). But on the flip side, my point is that the boys who worked hard to get to the same point couldn't travel due to their gender.
My team is about 25% deaf. Does this mean that we should send only deaf team members to one of the regionals we go to, simply to have them see whats its like to not have to work with hearing members on our team, and to have to deal with hearing members on other teams.
This is not a realistic situation, because in almost no conditions in the real world would deaf engineers be working only with other deaf engineers. And in almost no situation would deaf engineers be required to communicate with hearing clients without the assistance of hearing colleges.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneYoung
Good luck in Atlanta, Team 842.
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Absolutely. Best of luck to team 842, as well as all of the teams participating in ATL.
Jacob