[Woody1458]

Originally Posted by Cory

I'd like to point out a few years ago that Dean flat out said "FIRST is not fair". It's up to the teams who feel that way to do something to better themselves, or take their time and money elsewhere.

Something I was trying to describe in my posts was that its not that robot dominance that I care about, its that fact that students are very often cheated out of the experience the deserve by overanxious adults. I don't blame these adults however. It is an undeniable fact that people want to get involved. Its the whole boy/girl argument on a large scale. These adults are scary to kids. Very often the engineering mentors, from what I hear, are not parents or teachers. They are possibly alumni or sponsor employees. These folks how really have no long term experience with teaching kids don't understand what it takes to push us to our full capabilities. They just do it themselves. While they are happy to take a kid along for the ride, I seldom see adults make an extra effort to involve the kids. It especially never happens when the condition of the robot is at stake. I think it is totally appropriate for an adult to do it the students way even if its the wrong way. Because the fact is that you never understand that something doesn't work until you see why it doesn't work. Being told that a way is wrong make have them do it the right way once, but later in life when something like a job is a stake that will never have seen the "wrong" way fail so they will do it that way and face the consequences. Im not trying to say that there is only one way a team can be run, but I think FIRST is neither the place nor the time for adult control.