[Bomberofdoom]

So what makes FIRST worthwhile to students who have no hand in designing or building their robot? To students who don't learn nearly as much about engineering as others do? If it is solely the Competition, and learning doesn't take place. Then wouldn't a student's time and a school's money be better spent on a 6 dollar basketball?

If you get those kids that don't have that knowledge of how to build a robot and involve them with the doing, they'll learn something.

I love this saying from the FIRST guidebook for teams:

"I do, you watch
I do, you help
You do, I help
You do, I watch."

If they want to learn, they need to be involved. Of course, you cannot force kids to be involved soo much and force them to dedicate their whole day just for the team. Try to understand how much the kids in the team want to be involved. You teach them about FIRST and everything and you need to get a feedback from the kids to know what they think about FIRST, the project, about building the robot, the knowledge required, the time spended etc. and then you can see an overall of how much the kids in the team are dedicated for FIRST. Then you can set a plan of how you'll have them involved with FIRST without having kids ditch to playing basketball instead.

You get them to watch/get involved, they learn. It might not be EXACTLY what they learn in college, but it is the basics towards college and for some schools, that's already above the school's curriculum. Otherwise, why would students join that school to join a robotics team? They'd learn more sitting in a desk in front of a teacher, right?

I doubt....

But I quite agree with you that FIRST is also said to be about the inspiration for kids to learn science and engineering. Check the "I" in "FIRST" .
I belive (probablly with some others too) that first is a SOURCE for inspiration in Science and Technology. You need insperation in order to know what you want to do in the future.
You need a goal. You need inspiration.

In the past, kids got inspiration from seeing famous sport characters and said "I wanna' be like him!".

Now FIRST shows kids famous (and real, not phony) pioneers of Science and Technology and some of the kids (if not most) get truly inspired from the things involved with FIRST (some, if not most would say it is the robots ). I believe in some of them are saying in their hearts: "I wanna' be like/better than him!"