[archiver]

Posted by Joe Johnson at 04/09/2001 1:05 PM EST


Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.


In Reply to: Some other thoughts, and observations
Posted by Jason Rudolph on 04/08/2001 9:03 PM EST:



I loved that FIRST broke the Nationals up into 4
regionals.

While there were a lot of teams who can fairly agrue
that they were in a division with an unfair number of
XXX robots or not enough YYY robots. This is NOTHING
compared to the CHAOS that would have reigned had they
not divided the teams up into divisions.

For the most part, things seemed to work as fairly as
possible when you are trying to sort through and rank
so many teams with so relatively few comparisons.

To all the teams that were infact "done in" by their
dumb luck, I am sorry. But again, I think that things
would have been MUCH worse if they had not regionalized
the nationals.

Also, having the Semi-finals and Finals on the main
stage was a big improvement too. In past years, one
set of teams for the Finals came from a totally
different stage. It didn't seem fair to those teams.

Joe J.

P.S. One final note, I hope that FIRST goes to 6
divisions next year rather than keeping 4 divisions and
increasing the number of teams per division by 40%.
Maybe even 8 stages would be a better idea. One good
thing about divisions is that they are "scaleable" to
fit the number of teams. For me, the important thing
is to keep the ration of teams per division to number
of seeding rounds as low as possible 10 seems to me to
be about as high as the ratio should ever get. JJ