I don't understand why so many people are upset that FIRST might be moving from a shiny-fancy model to a more-competitions model. The State Championship and the World Championship still exist, and they're going to be just as big and shiny as ever.
It seems people are getting in a huff because their FIRST experience is going to get "watered down" being in a high school gymnasium instead of a hockey arena. How many other people are going to get an experience with FIRST that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten because we are saturating regionals and unable to reduce the economic barriers to running competitions?
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Originally Posted by M. Krass
Relying on donations immediately calls into question the sustainability and extensibility of this pilot, as far as I'm concerned.
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Where do you think money for Regional competitions comes from? Boston University (graciously!) allows the Boston Regional to use their facility, and many more local corporations and schools donate the significant amounts of money it takes to orchestrate an event of that scale. In that regard, Boston is potentially unsustainable as well.
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Originally Posted by Art Dutra
I wouldn't use professional, but I would use 'less worthy of potentially [tens of] thousands of dollars our money for sponsorship'. Or less 'Wow, that's really unique!' and more 'oh, you have one of those teams too? That's um... nice. Now can you let me get back to work?'.
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If FIRST gets to the point where it's "Oh, you have a robotics team too?"
then we've accomplished our mission. The goal isn't to have "special" high schools that are able to have robotics teams, the goal is to inspire people to be interested in science, technology, engineering, and math and to incite cultural change. Robotics teams being dime a dozen sounds like cultural change to me. If you can get Robotics on the same model as Football then you don't
need $10,000 sponsors.
I think people need to stop thinking about how this change would personally affect them, and consider the effects that it will have on FIRST as a whole. There are a lot of people who you've never met and might not even know FIRST exists right now who would immensely benefit from the experience this new program could offer them.