FIRST Choice is Profoundly Flawed

[zzzag]

Put in my two cents or avoid beating the dead horse... putting in my two cents wins.

Originally Posted by Doug G

I don't think it is that flawed.. What is flawed is many folks understanding of what FIRST Choice really is... I so much enjoy a kickoff without the crate of stuff we won't use. I know this is an issue for more veteran teams, but I still have buckets of old drill motors (and cases), FP transmissions, etc... I am glad that I don't receive this anymore and that stuff like it end up on FC for another team to use.

I did appreciate the FC items we picked up this year... the new right angle drill, multimeter, extra C-Rio, compressor, etc... I thought it worked pretty well. Anyone want to exchange 14 plastic FP transmissions for ... well... anything?

First off, maybe I missed the posts about it, but the first I heard that our pneumatic components would have to come from FC was kickoff. Had I known back in December, we might have ordered differently.

Second, as a student team member who has witnessed the growth of FC, I think this year's use of the system is against the spirit of FIRST. Until this year, FC struck me as a nice way to add a few minor parts/tools (the 2011 system was easy to understand and functional). But this year, it became a race to see who could win big and who would end up with the leftover couplings. The teams who won big see no problem with the system that's given them 9 Talons (each of Clarkson's teams) or 2 Classmates or a new cRIO or compressor (or some combination of the lot). And indeed, even if I got one of those items out of FC, I wouldn't be so disillusioned by the system.

FIRST is supposed to be for the student team members. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. How many threads have we seen complaining about robots that were clearly built by the mentors? The students should be the ones designing, building, and testing a robot (IMHO), and this includes selecting parts to go into a robot/team. And yet here we have a system that forces the mentors to do the selection and ordering of parts in a crazy race-for-the-computer during the day while many of them are working (for the first round, at least). By the time our school day ended and we were able to gather the team's student leadership to complete the order with our mentor, a mere three hours after FC opened, all of the parts we desired most were gone - compressor, battery, cRIO, classmate, even the multimeter (if I remember correctly). We ended up with a decent haul including a few window motors, some tools we've put to good use this build season, and a battery mount we won't use in this year's design, but the fact remains that we're still using a compressor, cRIO, and Classmate that have been with the team at least as long as I have (pretty sure the first year of the Classmate was my first year also) and running on three working batteries.
It's not that we can't work around this (our cRIO still works fine, even after a few coatings of sawdust from our old digs, our programmer brings his laptop for us to work off, and we could in theory order more batteries), it would just be better to know that these items were going to the teams that needed them the most or at least in a more even distribution.

And for the second cycle of FIRST Choice, the entirety of my team's leadership was on a bus headed home from kickoff. Even less useful stuff was available by the time we were able to get to a computer, which led to us ordering useless items to use up our credits as we'd be paying for the shipping anyway.

I'm in favor of the draft system, and I know a few programmers who might be up for writing it. There needs to be some way to bring more balance to FIRST Choice.