Quote:
Originally Posted by Shishkaa585
Winning isnt the only goal of FIRST though. Its about spreading FIRST's ideals so to me any team should be allowed to go if they can pay for it.
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I agree with this statement completely. FIRST is about inspiration and part of that inspiration is a chance to get out and compete and see robots that are really, really good, as well as those that aren't. I mean just because some team is a powerhouse and "better" doesn't mean that they can't learn from some novel mechanism or strategy from a newer, "worse" robot. There are thousands of people in this game and I learn as much from the smaller teams failures as I do from powerhouse bulletproof bots.
How is a small team that isn't located near where a power team lives and plays ever supposed to see how a "championship" level robot works and looks if they never get a chance to compete with them?
I know that some of the smaller regionals don't have the caliber of robot that is present at some of the older more established regionals/locations and for many, including our team, the only chance we get to see the other robots is at the Championships. I like the ability to go every 4 years even if you haven't "earned" your way there because you expose more students to the things that make FIRST great. FIRST isn't just about the competition.
As for the topic, I think that when setting up the pits at the Championships, more effort should be put into making sure that the PA system and announcements can actually be heard and understood throughout. I don't think i understood any announcement in the pits throughout the competition.
I also think that in addition to the "official" practice fields, there should be a more casual location setup with some of the main field pieces setup so a team can evaluate their robot without having to do a full practice thing. We made a couple tweaks to our robot to make our looper better and weren't sure we could still climb the bumps without flipping until we tried it in our first qualifier match. If there was a couple bumps setup somewhere where we could have just set our robot on it without having to go through the sign up process that would have been mucho helpful.
Overall I had a very good time at the Champs.