Quote:
Originally Posted by JVN
Quantity over Quality?
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That's always my worry when I see announcements of big initiatives like this. It's FABULOUS to have govt officials behind FIRST like this and the thought of course credit for participation REALLY interests me, however the reality is that even if the government support AND money are there (for now), you still need the people to make it all happen. Cory has stated rather clearly what it takes to have a sustainable FRC team/program. Finding even one mentor/teacher to work with each of the remaining schools in a sustainable way will be a daunting task. Having students receive course credit for being on a team is a great idea, but how do you do this well and validate the individual experience? You'd almost have to create at least one new course in each school otherwise every school club could claim the need for course credit? Again, I love the idea, but I've been through the process of getting robotics courses written and validated and it is no little walk in the park - even one that isn't the FRC experience.
Lastly, I still wonder why folks involved in these high level discussions/planning don't involve an intermediate program in a more detailed way. Isn't it a no-brainer? FRC robots are big and expensive and obtaining our new control system in any kind of quantities is just about out of the question. If we're going to give course credit for students in FRC, how many students do we really serve when we're talking one FRC robot a year in most cases? If you really want to engage a community and curriculum in a profound way doesn't the NXT/Tetrix or VEX platform make a whole lot more sense? More affordable, more availability, more hands-on for more students, more curriculum materials, more user-friendly in non-shop classroom environments?
Given the current structure, if you really want sustainable involvement, wouldn't building courses and teams around an intermediate program make more sense? If you really wanna go crazy, why not put some of the money in Jr FLL expos and follow those students up the ladder in a school district. Yes, it would take longer to get to FRC teams, but think of the solid foundation and flow of students after 5 or 6 years. Ramping up to FRC gradually in one way or another would help to address John's quality/quantity questions.
I am not trying to be a wet blanket here at all, but this is not the first announcement of this kind that I have heard and very few (if any) FRC-only initiatives like this provide quality, sustainable growth on such a large scale. Now, if you look at the model we see going on in Hawaii, using multiple platforms and programs to ramp up the learning toward FRC, you've got the right combination of government support and volunteers/mentors/educators in the trenches making it happen in a much more profound and lasting way IMHO.
To me it comes down to this:
How best do we serve the "mission" the way Woodie describes it and is that mission simply "creating large numbers of FRC teams"?
I would hope that every time we get a governor on board like this we would have a plan with some detail that we could show them that is a "stretch goal" but at the same time includes the building blocks for sustainability that can outlast any one governor's tenure or budget cycle.