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Unread 13-01-2010, 02:55
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dtengineering dtengineering is offline
Teaching Teachers to Teach Tech
AKA: Jason Brett
no team (British Columbia FRC teams)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Rookie Year: 2004
Location: Vancouver, BC
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Re: Soccer Ball Sold Out

Quote:
Originally Posted by indieFan View Post
Wait a second. You all mean to tell me that you expect to have a specific soccer ball available to you?
Yes... if a specific soccer ball is defined in the rules and was available to other teams, then it should be available to my team. Check out the rules of the game surrounding what defines a vendor, and a COTS part and it would be reasonable to assume that FIRST would follow their own rules in regard to game pieces.

I don't know whether having access to an HS300 would make our team more competitive or not, but I do know that covering up for a repeated lack of foresight on behalf of the game designers -- who otherwise appear to have done an excellent job this year, as usual -- is not what I define as "part of the engineering challenge". If it were intended to be part of the engineering challenge, then NO ONE should have had access to the offical game piece. I'm not quite sure why guessing at what the real ball might be like should be an interesting engineering challenge for my team, but not for other teams.

And yes, I was planning on buying two balls and testing them at the different circumferences as specified in the game manual, and I can guarantee that surface scuffing will occur during testing. I try to teach the students to be thorough, and account for and control that which can be accounted for and controlled.

Like I say... I don't know that having some teams have access to the official ball while most others do not will be of any real advantage, but I do know that having one of the balls is obviously perceived as an advantage by many, many teams. That's why the part spec was put in the manual, and thats why they're all gone!

I also know that this problem could have been solved by putting one, ten dollar soccer ball into each KoP. Given the orbit ball fiasco from last year, I am surprised to see the same problem showing up again.

Can we work around it? Yeah... Will it be a big deal when the season is all over? Probably not. Am I going to roll up in a coma for the next six weeks muttering "HS300... HS300...", no. Is this a good game regardless of which soccer ball we use... yeah. But could this whole "sold out" mess and perception of inequity (if not actual inequity) have been avoided?

You bet.

Jason
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