[Bomberofdoom]

I doubt we'll be able to make students, teachers, princepls and parents to understand that FIRST is more than just the robot. After this season, only 8 people in my team understand this is not just robotics, but we weren't able to convince the school and the other students in our team that it's not just robotics and the 8 of us just kind of decided to let it go and hopefully in the recruitment and along the building we'll be able to make them realize what FIRST really means. I guess only in our 3rd year we'll be able to show that we've come to the point where our team is recognized not just by it being a robotics team. But with luck and with the right people, we'll be able to do so.

Truthfully, I think that only after students have been able to accomplish one thing, they'll want to accomplish others. Our team understands that our 2nd chance in getting to the championships is by getting the Charimen work, but from what I'm hearing from my teammates, they prefer to work on a kick-@$$ robot next year and I believe it's with all of the teams (or atleast most of them). The team is first built, thinking of a competition and only later seeing it in a larger prespective.

I think it would be a great thing to see a mentor being able to insert the idea of "Beyond the robot" to a rookie team. If he'll be able to do it, that team would deffinatly have higher chances in that year and/or the seconed.

Furthermore, I would like to continue about my team.
I'm very dissapointed that almost all representetives of FIRST Israel that visited our team have encouraging us to just built a robot this year and nothing much, unless we thought we could do more.
I understand that it was the right thing to do, only building the robot, because of our weak experiences, but I think that trying to go beyond the building of the robot would atleast set us for the following year. I doubt we're ready for the Chairmen work the next year.

By writing this I feel I'm quite talking behind FIRST Israel's back, but I am just saying that I'm hoping that other FIRST regions will try to really make rookie teams understand FIRST fully. I'm not saying they don't, but I am saying that if they don't(or they are not able, like in our case when we were told of FIRST quite late) the teams will lose thier chances for the following years. Students have only about 6 years to experience first and every year counts. I've started at 10th grade and I feel I'm not going to have enough years to fully experience FIRST and enjoy all aspects of it. I'll try, but I doubt I'll succeed or atleast feel I've acheived something greater in FIRST, I'm hoping I will, but I'm not sure about it.