Quote:
Originally Posted by luciaes
I think that anyone should be able to be on a FIRST team, regardless of grades. Why cant someone with low grades contribute to a team? with a basketball or football team i can see grades being a factor, but with robotics its completely different. Robotics is a place ware you can learn so much from being on a team, i highly doubt that you can learn as much on a basketball team than you can on a FIRST team.
Saying someone cant be on the team because they have low grades is saying "well you don't do good in school, so you don't deserve a chance to learn anything here and be inspired to do good just because you currently don't do so good"
Personally i think I'm doing better in school now that I'm in robotics and have a much higher desire to learn, and now i might be taking extra classes over the summer just to learn more and get farther in school, and if i wasn't allowed on the team because of my grades i would have never got the chance to see that.
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I think the argument is that if the student is getting poor grades, it could indicate that they are not able to handle their current workload. When our team goes on trips, we miss 2 days of school, meaning that when we get home, we have 2 days of work to make up (and usually our work from Wednesday night, as well). I think most advisors/mentors/teachers want to be certain that the kids on the team will be able to handle all the make-up work. If a student is overwhelmed with their workload when they are not participating in robotics, how are they going to do once they join the team and get involved with build season and competitions?
It's not that they're trying to prevent "dumb" kids from joining; they just want to make sure robotics doesn't hurt their academic performance.
On our team, students have to maintain at least a C average in all their classes; this is also the requirement, I believe, for most of the conventional sports teams. To travel, they must meet this requirement, as well as our community service requirement. Each year, students must complete
at least 10 hours of community service to be allowed to travel. Other factors, such as attendance at meetings are also factored into this decision. Ultimately, Mr. Cokeley (WayneC here on CD) makes all the final decisions on who gets to travel.
For our "away" regional, we try to only bring veteran members of the team (or, in some cases, new members who have truly stepped up during the build and off season are allowed to go). This helps to prevent students who simply want to join to go on trips from joining as often and eating up travel funds (we instated that this year after word got around that we went to Las Vegas last year) So we bring the entire team to Atlanta and New Jersey, and usually a group of ~20 students to our away regional (though for Hawaii, that number will be far less).