Quote:
Originally Posted by DeepWater
Your bare minimum may just be some other team's best effort. Everyone deserves to be rewarded when they work hard and do the best they can don't they?
Really? That sounds pretty elitist to me. I feel the opposite. FIRST is for everyone. You do the best you can with what you have and hopefully everyone leaves with more than they came with.
Easy for a Michigan team to say I suppose. Anytime you want to come on down to a small Mississippi town and bring some big corporate sponsors with deep pockets with you we would be happy to have you. We are known as the Hospitality State. 
Because every student deserves the opportunity to experiance FIRST, not just the students that live in areas flush with big corporate sponsors.
You are kidding right? FIRST is all about teaching! Professional mentors teaching students how to solve a problem to the best of their collective ability given the tools available and within the constraints placed on the solution. It is not about who can build the shiniest, fanciest, most sophisticated robot using the most expensive CNC equipment they can find. If you have that resource great, if not that's fine as well. FIRST should be for everyone. I could have sworn that I had seen one or two of the hundreds of thousands of FIRST students over the last (almost) two decades learning something useful. I'm sorry you fell you weren't one of them. I suspect your corporate sponsors would be sorry to hear the money they invested in you must have been wasted as well because I'm pretty sure the whole reason corporations invest in FIRST is because they fell it better prepares their future work force by TEACHING students real world lessons.
Agreed but that is just one of many things that FIRST "is all about".
FIRST = For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Inspiration and Recognition comes in many forms and on many levels. If a team (rookie or vet) can only build a box on wheels but they learned even a little something along the way why is that a bad thing? At least they built SOMETHING. I have run across many people that couldn't figure out how to get themselves out of a hole in the ground if you gave them a pile of 2x4s, handsaw, hammer, and a box of nails. |
Sigh, I really stirred up a hornet nest with my comments. Oh well, open discussion is always a good thing. I apologize to the person who started this thread for thread jacking.
First off, I suggest reading
http://www.huskiebrigade.com/DEKA1998.html which is a speech from Dean himself. Thank you to the Huskie Brigade for making that available. If the goals of FIRST have changed in that time then so be it but I feel he very adequately describes them there.
If a team does their best that is great, teams should always do their best and not get discouraged when they lose.
I admit my comment about FIRST not being the right place for some teams does sound elitist but frankly I don't feel that FIRST is for everyone. There are other competitions out there for groups with fewer technical resources. Vex is an excellent example of one. If a person decides FIRST is for them, then they bring what they can to the table and hopefully get something out. Im not saying that we should raise the price of FIRST so that small teams die out, in fact FIRST in Michigan is about trying to lower the costs so that teams without major monetary sponsors can compete. I believe and support FiM but feel that the teams complaining about the "elite" teams need to stop, these teams started as rookies just like everyone else.
About Michigan being "flush with big corporate sponsors" I apologize but if we are so flush with corporate sponsors why is our unemployment rate so high? In fact Michigan posted the highest jobless rate in the nation in November. I still stand by my statement that FIRST is about partnering with industry to inspire kids though.
Your argument about how every kid deserves FIRST makes sense, honestly it does, but there is one problem. Every student deserves an education too. Does that mean that teachers have to start testing so that even the worst students can pass? In a class room if I get 28% on a test and you get 90% what do you want the teacher to do, adjust my score so that is a 90% too? Because, you know, every student deserves to graduate. And you know what, while we are at it, everyone deserves a Mercedes Benz, and paid vacation, and a million dollar home right? You know why people can buy those things? You know why teams pay Michael Jordan millions of dollars to throw a ball in a hoop? Because he worked his butt off. If you want to score that 90% on the test you better study. If you want to build that winning robot you better be willing to put in the time it takes. 217 can build a stellar robot every year, you know why? Because they have dedicated students and mentors. I would be willing to bet you that if you told 217 that they could only spend $800 on a robot this year they would STILL put out a stunning machine. How do I know that? I know the team, I know that their quality doesn't come from money, it comes from their passion for FIRST, their desire to win. How do you think RUSH won its Regional Chairman's award? Do you think they bribed the judges? Do you think that the judges thought, "Oh hey, this is RUSH they deserve to win because they have a long history"? No, they won out of sheer determination, they won because students and mentors on that team dedicated 6 solid weeks of their lives to that presentation, they won because a decade of people like me dedicated ourselves. The teams that win don't win because they build complex robots or because they spend thousands of dollars, they win because they have dedicated people involved.
And no, I am not kidding about FIRST not being about teaching students. FIRST is often compared to the Super Bowl, does the Super Bowl teach you how to play football? No, it is a high profile event that gets kids hooked. FIRST is the same way, it is not our job to teach the students how to program some advanced algorithms or to use a 5-axis cnc mill. We are here to say, "Look, you have other options other than working at Pop's used car dealership for the rest of your life." You said it yourself, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Nowhere is the word education mentioned. We are here to inspire these kids, make them recognize that Science and Technology are options for them, we need to show them their lives can be better than, "Would you like fries with that"
In response to the impression that I learned nothing in FIRST, well, actually, I'm not sure how to reply to that. FIRST gave me everything I am today, it is the reason I am at the college I am at. It is the reason I am majoring in Computer Science. It is the reason I actively mentor a team in inner city Flint. No, FIRST is a wonderful program but it isn't what taught me about engineering, it taught me about following my passions. It showed me a path I may not have considered. Why else would I give the time I do trying to give other kids the same chances I had? And about 397, we are by no means an elite team. We build out of our shop in our school, we have between 6 and 15 students, most of whom have never touched a mill in their life prior to FRC. We have a handful of college mentors and some Delphi engineers. We receive very little money from Delphi and community fundraising is hard because we are based in Flint, MI.
If I come across as elitist or a jerk I apologize, that is not my intent. I merely have a problem with some very specific rules that I believe are punishing "elite" teams for doing well.
Sorry for the somewhat disjointed post, I was trying to respond point by point as best as I could. I also apologize for the novel I just wrote.