Bills Blog - Champs info

[Nuttyman54]

Originally Posted by jvriezen

Mission

"Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership."

One of the often stated goals is to inspire kids to take an interest in engineering fields. I suspect everyone that cares enough about FIRST to read this thread (and this post) is already inspired. FIRST has accomplished their goal with respect to you.

When I first saw Will.i.am at kickoff and Dean alluded to seeing him again later, my first thought was that their would be a free (or nearly free, perhaps a food shelf donation) concert at St. Louis. Or perhaps for the general public to get into the concert you have to visit the pits and get your ticket stamped by 20 teams after seeing their bot. At the concert you'd also get to see matches played. This would be a great way to get kids in the St. Louis area who have no idea about engineering and only care about pop music and bounce, bounce, pass exposed to FIRST and engineering.

FIRST is not about all about you and your experience and whether your experience is maximized. Would you rather have a great personal experience or would you rather know that your team was instrumental in getting hundreds of Will.i.am kids involved in FIRST who may not have had any previous idea or inkling about the wonders of engineering?

FIRST may not be about maximizing any one particular person's experience, but they are about maximizing the experience of their target audience and customers. FIRST's biggest recruiting tool is not a single high-profile event with pop stars, it's all the teams and the students and mentors on those teams going out in to the community and making targeted pitches.

To that end, the complaint is that FIRST would be sacrificing their current customer's enjoyment to try and expose the program to prospective customers, and in doing so may be hurting their own efforts. If teams come back from champs feeling like FIRST doesn't care about them, they're going to have a much harder time getting enthused to go recruit and to inspire their own teams.

Teams are paying a lot of money to attend this event, and most of are doing that under the premise that they can use this to wow and inspire their own students. As much as they might support FIRST's mission to recruit new members, I highly doubt they're willing to spend that money so that others can enjoy a free concert and maybe see what's going on.

The bottom line is, the teams are the paying customers of FIRST, and FIRST needs to respect that. Getting to the championships is the goal of almost every team in first; it gives them something to work towards, it's the crowning achievement of a season. To get there and feel like you have to take a back seat to some big show that FIRST has organized undermines that entirely. These students are attending under the premise that they are the main attraction.

I believe it would be extremely counter-productive to FIRST's goals to push FRC fields out of the dome for an entertainment show. They keep telling us we need to celebrate and idolize engineers, but then they make those take a back seat to a rock star...it seems kind of hypocritical. I refuse to believe that FIRST is really that ignorant.

Edit: EricH, I really hope you're right about expanding programs needing more space, and showcasing CollegeFIRST. That makes much more sense to me than some big show. If they need to put the wrap party indoors for weather reasons, perhaps they put that in one of the conference halls and moved FLL or FTC on to the dome floor.