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Originally Posted by aztech75
Am I the only one who see's this as compleatly against the spirit of FIRST.
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There are those who are opposed to collaboration, yes.
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Isn't the point of the program to see different designs that do different things? For every team to let there KIDS engineer there own custom design.
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Aaaaaactually, the point of the program is to inspire high school students to consider careers in science, math, and engineering. FIRST has historically not really worried about how teams go about this.
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Sure, making a similar design off of another team's claw or arm device makes sence. But to make exact copys, seams completly against the principals of FIRST to me!
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It didn't quite hit me until Cal Games 2006 that 254 and 968 are several hours apart. (The South Carolinian in me said "Oh, they're both in California, they can't be that far away from each other...") If any two teams can coordinate their robot design across 357 miles and produce Einstein-quality robots year after year, I'm willing to bet that they're doing pretty well at the whole inspiring thing. (I'll even better the odds, since half of that collaboration is in the Hall of Fame at least partially for their approach to collaboration.)
Besides, FIRST
explicitly authorized collaboration at the start of the season.
Edit: And another thing--1369 received the Judges' Award at Palmetto in 2007 for their collaboration and its effect on the team: having
two weeks to practice and fine-tune. (I've been in FRC for five years now, four as a mentor, and no team I've ever worked with has had two
days to practice.) That sounds like an endorsement from the judges to me.