Quote:
www.dictionary.com defines discrimination as "Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit"
I have no problem with the concept for competing with hopes to place high enough to attend. However, being dismissed based only upon our team number (odd/even) is neither "gracious" nor "professional", its just discriminatory. Is that what FIRST stands for?
tjrage_25
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I respectfully disagree with your statement implying that FIRST's decision was purely discriminatory. From what I've learned about FIRST during my three years of involvement is that FIRST wants to let teams that don't necessarily perform well participate in Regionals and the National Competition. Since FIRST's mission is supposedly to get students excited in engineering/robotics/etc, I don't think they ever intended on only allowing "the best" robots to compete at the National Competition. I think FIRST made this even/odd rule with the intention that rookie and second year teams that don't have "elite" robots could be able to compete with and against some of the more established teams. This isn't to say that we're throwing these rookies into the fire pan, but hopefully they can learn from the more experienced teams by talking to them in the pit and on the field. I know that as a third year team in 2001 my team learned a lot by talking to Andy Baker, seeing how the ChiefDelphi 'bot worked, and talking to Wildstang's team. IMHO, I think it's in FIRST's best interest to let this kind of interaction continue at Nationals...
Getting back to your statement tjrage_25.... It's not like every seed at Nationals is decided by the even/odd thing. The good teams will be able to go no matter what their number is.
-Bill