[JVN]

Originally Posted by Garret

I have to disagree. I really do not think the goal of FIRST is to score points and win matches. I have always believed that the goal of FIRST was to Inspire students. This kind of statement is hurtful and definitely a clear example of what FIRST does not represent.

Hi Garret,
As many others have said...
You need to think about this from two perspectives: "success within the competition" vs. "success within FIRST itself"... though many people will immediately dismiss "success within the competition" as irrelevant, I feel that is an ignorant, and naive thing to say.

The robotics competition itself is the mechanism which FIRST teams use to inspire students. As you know, this robotics competition provides a "problem" which students are supposed to solve by working with mentors using an engineering design process. The first step in any engineering process is to define your problem -- what are you trying to do?

Now each team answers that question differently. You need to determine what your team values.
Most people say: "We're trying to win a World Championship!" (148 does this) and centers the design process around solving the problem of: "How do we win a World Championship?" -- Lots of teams use this as their ultimate goal.

To me, it is the obvious choice... FIRST gives us a game, robot rules, scoring criteria, a tournament structure, a series of regionals, and a World Championship. At the most fundamental level, the "problem" we are presented is: "Design a robot to win this game." The cool thing is, this is a fun and fulfilling problem to solve! Not only that, but it is an easy problem to engage students in (you can trick them into getting excited about engineering, because everyone is naturally wired to love competition).

When it comes to FIRST (you've all heard the cliche) -- we're all winners.
When it comes to the competition: to the engineering design challenge, we're NOT all winners -- some solutions are better than others.

Do people really believe it is hurtful to acknowledge failure in the engineering process is possible? All engineering SOLUTIONS (the robots are our solutions) are not created equal -- in the real world, or in FIRST. If you remove the potential to achieve excellence, you remove a goal to strive for, and you encourage mediocrity.

So... why is it bad to say: "We failed to achieve at the highest level..." ?

On 148 our goal is: "Do everything we can to achieve excellence."
We're not disappointed if we don't achieve excellence, so long as we did everything we could in our pursuit of it. You always want to make sure you leave everything on the table. We're constantly searching to improve such that we can move toward this end. I think that is the magic in our process, and I believe our students have really latched onto it. This philosophy works at all resource levels -- it doesn't matter what your team has..

It is NOT possible to fail within FIRST.
It IS possible to fail within the competition (whatever your criteria for failure may be).

Disappointment is different than discouragement.
A little disappointment at failing to achieve your goals is (imho) a healthy thing. It will make you try a little harder next time. It will force you to evaluate the process you used, and work towards improvement in the future. As long as you're not discouraged... rock on!

I think this is some of the BEST of what the competition has to offer... on 148, we celebrate failures as opportunities for improvement.

So here comes the controversial part:
Teams have NO excuse for setting their goals so low in FRC. This drives me NUTS!
It doesn't take a whole lot to be a competitive team with a competitive program. If you set your goals high, if you work towards those goals, if you take advantage of the PLETHORA of widely available resources and if you're smart about it -- I believe any level of team can play on Einstein. Instead of just figuring out how to build a custom drivetrain, how about you focus on the problem FIRST gives us, and figure out how to win a world championship with the resources you have?

Originally Posted by Garret

My team has some things we want to do better next year, but we are always striving to improve and never give less than our best. My team had problems with money this year and we had to build the robot on an extremely small budget. As such we decided to buy cheaper materials rather than sacrifice functionality. Looking back if we had bought higher quality parts our robot would have done better. We could have gone with a basic kit-bot chassis that we built and hooked up in the first few days, but would we have learned as much? No we would have made a robot that was boring (no offense to anyone who used kit bot).

By neglecting to use the kitbot you've done yourself a terrible disservice. The engineering challenge presented to us involved scoring points in a goal, not building a custom drivetrain. Maybe if you had used the kitbot, you could have used your (self described) limited resources to build a better mechanism for playing the game. Maybe you could have had time to modify and expand on the kitbot foundation to better play the game. There are plenty of opportunities for learning in this type of design...

Originally Posted by Garret

I understand your frustration, but seriously FIRST is more about Gracious Professionalism and Inspiring than building the best robot.

You've got gracious down, but where is your professionalism?
Striving to build the "best robot" is a fine goal -- don't hate on it. Pursuit of this goal will result in plenty of inspiration. Probably more inspiration than pursuit of a lesser goal...

-John