[yaron]

First, good luck at Atlanta, enjoy, learn a lot, and represent Israel as we did for 4 years with great gracious professionalism- meaning playing fair game.
What I meant that what differ FIRST then other competitive sports is the friendship, and assistance teams might have one towards the others. Certainly, unlike other sports, you play with a different team each match and play against different teams the following match. For MisCar, the goal was always to achieve FIRST's higher standards and fulfill all the sub-tasks of the game, or of the competition. We design our robot to accomplish the game goals and not accomplishment of defeating others.
For us, playing smartly is not driving a bot with rover wheels which lost their original shape and characters because someone in Israel recommended to use floor material that we knew will destroy the nature of the game.
Each year we rebuild our team on hard work, longer design then any other team, because of that particular reason. Instead of beating others we want to solve the problem of the game sophistically, to achieve the mission, and play it exactly as we think Dean's team thought.
Some think that we do that by having engineers do the work for us. Those who really know us, and there are over 25 teams in Israel this year that visited our workshop, saw some of our internal thinking processes and surely know that our students design everything in our robot, of course with the guidance of two teachers and two - four parent mentors. Our students, build almost every solution they think of during the first four weeks as prototypes from LEGO, cart board, wood, junk and just raw metal, parallel to design via th AutoDesk Inventor the solutions we eventually elect for each sub-system.
I truely believe that I personally explained this strategy to at least 10 rookies teams during the last five years. I did it not to defeat them but to build more teams who play a fair game, a reasonable game, to fulfill a dream is to solve the game sub missions = gracious professionalism.
And if you are from Tichon Handasaim Herzelia you should know this because in 99% of the matches I have watched you during the last 2 years your team played a fair game!!!
Again, good luck,
Yaron,
FRC Senior Mentor since 2008.
Senior mentor at 1574 since 2006,
Head Mentor of 2630 during 2009 season,
The founder and Head mentor of 2214 for the 2007-8 seasons.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ASSIST: Advancing Skills Smartly In Science & Technology