[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Wayne C.

I wholeheartedly disagree!!! Fun is the number one reason kids get interested in robotics through FIRST. Take fun away and you might as well kill the whole thing.

I don't deny that participating in FIRST is fun. Dean Kamen's "It's the hardest fun you'll ever have" would make a great tagline for a recruitment commercial. Removing the fun would indeed kill the program. But I maintain my position: it's not about the fun.

If fun were the goal, we could meet it much more easily by building the program around huge parties instead of around robot competitions. Come to think of it, we do tend to build huge parties around the competitions, because we want everyone to have fun. But we still have the engineering and mentorship and science and technology as the foundation.