Quote:
Originally Posted by Henry_222
I think a lot of people are assuming a fair bit of information... I will try to correct and bring this up to speed.
I am a fan of cheering, a bigger fan of having a good time. Cheer your brains out, 222 '03 National Team Spirit; trust me I know what getting excited and motivated is.
Apart from that, the competition has been hindered by the dancing. You say "why not?" I say "to keep the integrity of the game play together." Time to cool down a robot between back to back matches is provided for, as are timeouts. Having a good time can go too far sometimes. Without crossing the 'office dull' line I still think dancing is far too unprofessional for the regionals. Cheer and go crazy from the stands don't bring it to the field.
As the thread has moved along, I have honed my initial statement and question. My view of the dancing that occurs has always been the stereotypical 'kid who doesn't do things' kind of view. Please don't jump on me for what I just said, I am well aware that there are kids who enjoy themselves in such a manner that have a wide range of of roles on a team. When the hard facts come down to it, there are some kids who don't have a function on a team and are just at the events to hang out. I have seen it myself, nothing will sway my opinion on this. I am not in any way giving a magnitude to it, but it exists.
|
You said yourself that you would trade 5 inspired students for 100 uninspired ones right? I would submit that many more student are inspired by the energy and excitement at a competition (the dancing is definitely part of the overall atmosphere), than are turned off by it (poll results seem to agree with me).
Despite you saying nothing will sway your opinion I will trek on anyway. I am very curious as to what the role of a PR member of a team is at a competition? How about a finance team member? Animation? I know a few members of my team (different members than the last post) that I'm sure you definitely would have pegged as "just socializing" if you saw them at our regional last year. You wanna know why? Because they were. These were members of our PR team that spent a weekend handing out buttons and "hanging out".
While these girls had worked on our t-shirts and buttons for the competition they hadn't been at our build site for more than about 4 hours in the whole six weeks. So these girls just came along for the ride and are the uninspired socializers you talked about right? Wrong. Two of the three are on the team again, and this year they're more involved. They still haven't touched the robot, but they showed up at our initial brainstorm/strategy meets, made our PR a bigger deal than last year and had a lot more respect for the robot and the guys and girls working on it than they did the year before. So did we inspire them to become engineers? Nope, but I'm fairly certain we accomplished one of the major goals of FIRST.
If you truly want to change the culture towards one that respects science and engineering (Dean has mentioned this in multiple speeches), then you need to inspire both groups of people, those that will be scientists and engineers and those that won't.