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Re: Battlebots I.Q.- A serious threat to FIRST or a half thought up cheep copy?
I've got to chime in here again. Now that I have actually been to a BBIQ competition (Championships are going on right now in Orlando at Universal Studios) I have to say my opinion has greatly changed.
I DON'T agree that FIRST bots are "better" or more creative than a Battle bot. With FIRST you are playing against a set of rules, and in BBIQ you are playing against someone else's brain. You have no idea what they are going to do. For example, I watched a match where the driver of an incredible robot "faked" our the other team by slowing down his weapon. They thought it was not working and they came out of the safe spot. As soon as they did, he took them out. BBIQ is just as creative, but you don't see it. All of the cool stuff is inside the robots. There are teams that had figured out awesome ways to weld and attach things that we would never do in FIRST. I watched matches for almost an entire day, and I never say a robot that was "killed" at all. Most of the matches were king of boring because the bots could not drive straight or their drivers needed a lot more practice.
I still LOVE FIRST and will never leave it, as I really like how its gets kids working with engineers, and has a lot of other concepts to it. However, If I wanted to get a student to learn science and math I would put in them in Battlebots before I would FIRST. If you ask a FIRST student what about the calculations made on their bot, or what the torque is of their arm, they can give you all of the equations and all of the physics that go with it. I know on my FIRST team we don't have time to go over all of that in six weeks. Most of the kids on our team know about how our robot was put together, but could not pick out a motor our of a catalog based on what we wanted the robot could do. Nor could they pick a battery, or design the pneumatic circuit. All o that is given to you by FIRST. Please don't get me wrong, I love FIRST, and love working with sponsors and other teams.
The executives of BBIQ say they do three things: Train teachers, teach students, and run events. They are SOLELY in this for the education. They want to change the way science and math is taught today.
I understand there are those who think BBIQ is all bad, and I guess they will stay that way -but I would love to see a day when there was not "jealousy" over who has more publicity than the other. There are a lot of things about BBIQ that I thought could change. Their pits for example are just a bunch of tables in a big row inside of a sound stage. It is very difficult to see as the walls are all black. Robot parts seemed to just mesh with other team's parts. Most of the robots were on the floor as that was the only place to put them. There is not very much room for spectators to watch, and the matches seem to run slow.
To sum everything up - BBIQ and FIRST are both great programs, and I see plenty of room for both of them to exits. One of the biggest factors why I like BBIQ is that it is only $500 to enter the competition - so you can enter a lot of teams for a small amount. I teach BBIQ in my engineering course, and we do FIRST as an extra-curricular activity after school. Most of the kids in BBIQ are also on our FIRST team and they love both sports.
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Florida First
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