Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr.G
Ok. I will retract the "every year" statement......
But teams that go to one event are very unlikely to win regionals. The more time you spend working on the robot the better you are going to do and the more you are going to learn.
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You are correct that many more teams that win late regionals have attended a previous event.
For 2009 Week 5 Regionals (districts excluded) I counted 8/30 winners that were one event teams.
I would echo the point that correlation does not equal causation, however. Of these 22 winners that had attended previous events, I counted 21 that had been in the eliminations at their previous event. 13 had advanced to at least the semifinals. 8 had made it to the finals, with 4 of the teams winning their previous events. In a competition like this where it is all about the alliance you end up on and a little bit of luck is definitely involved, these stats tell me that these teams build good robots.
I am not going to deny that going to a second event helps show a team what works and what should be improved as well as giving the drivers valuable experience behind the sticks. What I am suggesting however is that these teams would have stood a good shot at winning these late events even if they had not gone to a previous event.
The other thing we have to take into account is that FIRST is already working on a solution to the "problem" of how to get teams more playing time. The FiM system you are participating in gets you 2 events for the price of 1. FIRST has opened up this system to any region that wants to implement it. This decision by FIRST was made late in the process of planning this year's events and their are many hurdles to implementing this system in other places, so no other regions have taken advantage of it this year, but hopefully we will see more areas shifting to this system.