[archiver]

Posted by Adam Krajewski at 1/5/2001 4:22 AM EST


Engineer on team #221, MI Roboworks, from Michigan Tech and Houghton Area Schools and Meritor Automotive.


In Reply to: student competency
Posted by asher on 1/5/2001 12:14 AM EST:



Last year, I was a student on one of the best financed teams in the competition. This year, I'm an engineer on a team with a very limited budget. I don't think anyone will argue with the fact that it is much easier to build an absolutely amazing machine that does eight times as many things in one sixteenth the time if you have an army of engineers and machinists working on it. But this "myth of money" is often blown way out of proportion. We don't see the teams with the most money leaving everyone else in their dust. Look around regionals or nationals and you'll see so many great teams that have neither an enormous amount of money nor a big name.
Sure, it is always disheartening to see students that don't know very much about they're machine. But I don't think it is cause to write off a team. There are many reasons why a student may refer you to an engineer rather than answer scouting questions themselves. I would not jump to the conclusion that the student did nothing/very little on the team.
I also think you're missing the point of FIRST. FIRST is not about winning competitions. FIRST isn't even about building robots. FIRST, as the acronym suggests, is about getting people, high schoolers in particular, excited about science and technology. I can see that you're excited by building robots. You seem very passionate about it. It certainly feels unfair and unjust that other teams have much greater funding. But try to remember the spirit of the competition. Think about the kids that see or hear about the competition and wish they could compete in it. Be thankful that FIRST inspires that kind of response. That there are kids who watch a 30 blurb on FIRST on the TV news see science and technology as exciting as any other sport. That how I see FIRST. Be proud that 95% of your robot is student built and smile every time an engineer or other adult tells you "I wish they had this around when I was young."

Adam