Are all girl FIRST team counterproductive to the philosophy of FIRST?

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Lledargo

Secondly, I never said that Dean said All Girls teams are bad, but rather that I seem to remember that he has said FIRST is to inspire innovation in youth, and teach people how to work in todays growing diverse society. Excluding people of a different demographic creates less chance for major disagreements, and less opportunity to learn how to deal with such situations.

Clearly you've never worked with an all girls team Our team has had some major disagreements over the past 5 years, and the students have learned a lot from them. The biggest was probably after kickoff in 2008 - the team was completely split 50/50 on what direction to go, and it was a huge, emotional discussion. We helped them learn, however, that there was a middle ground. That they could work towards a compromise that would make everyone happy and we ended up with a great robot that year.

You don't avoid any disagreements by being in an all girls or all boys team. Working with my team, I've come to see that it really doesn't matter what the make up of the team is - same gender, mixed gender, same ethnicity, mixed ethnicity, whatever. In the end, it's all about the engineering process. Sex and ethnicity of your coworkers simply doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what they are capable of doing, and you judge that on an individual basis. If you are finding major disagreements arising from working with a mixed group, then your group really isn't getting it. They aren't focused on the important aspects of FIRST.