[dmoody92]

Hey everyone. Well, as we all know it is well into the build season with the deadline fast approaching and since I am on a rookie team we hardly have the grasp of the gravity of our situation. What makes it much worse is a big argument we have been having and can't put behind us.

Here's the issue, when we were starting brainstorming ideas for this year's robot we had a couple ideas that people felt passionately. They were "Wheel", "Auger" and "Dual Conveyor". As a team we decided to pick "Wheel". The problem is, our lead mentor was the one who created the auger idea. Now, when we decided against it her figured that we just didn't understand it. So he decides to take his son and ONE other student and develop it as a "backup".

We thought that was alright as long as this was outside of the time we worked as a team and that it would ONLY be used if our first choice didn't work. Well, he calls a meeting today declaring that once we are done with the build season we are going to have a performance test the two and pick the one that works best, which is totally hypocritical to what he said in the beginning of the meeting which is that FIRST isn't about winning or losing.

I raised my hand and voiced my opinion that if we decide to pick the Auger that everyone who didn't work on the team would feel totally alienated because they had no help in making it. I said that I would rather lose miserbly with the bot I made, then win it all with a bot I had no help on.

I didn't make this just to air out dirty laundry and for you guys to back me up. I want to know how you guys handle back up ideas, do you just pick an idea and go with it or do you make two robots and pick the best one. Another big issue with this is that they have split our total funds between these two robots. What do you guys think?