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School isn't so boring when its applied to FIRST. In your math or physics class, you can calculate torque and speed and current draw. In PE, you can work out to build up muscle endurance for many hours of wrenching on your bot. In English class you can write many exciting tales such as The Day I Dropped the Clutch Balls or Gears, Sprockets, and Chains Oh My!! or The Battle Between the Drills and the Chiaphuas.
Trading works great at FIRST events but that is only because everyone uses the same things. Trading used to work on a small scale a very very long time ago but it only involved food, clothing, and tools. In today's world, there needs to be a system of money. Say you work for Burger King and every two weeks you get paid 20 gears. Your friend works for McDonald's and he/she gets paid 15 sprockets every two weeks. Then you both go to the maket to buy 12 cans of soup each. How much would it cost you and how much would it cost your friend? How many gears=1 sprocket? If you didn't had a universal currency, prices would be drastically different across the nation and you'd have a million exchange rates. Trading would set the country back many years.
As for free water, it is free. You can go all the way to the local pond, river, or beach and fill up and bring it all the way home. The cost we pay for water is not the water itself, it is the purification, pumping, plumbing, and bottling. So if you would like to go to the lake, install a massive pump, run miles of pipes, buy a very costly purification system, and then run more pipes into your house, and buy bottles for water you want to save and spend time filling them up, then, you can have free water.
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