FIRST Choice is Profoundly Flawed

[EricH]

Originally Posted by cmrnpizzo14

I see your point and I wholeheartedly agree that the robots should be student built and student designed. After all, what is the point of FIRST if we are taking the mentors who presumably already know what they are doing and let them have free reign with everything. That being said, there really is not a way that I can think of to change the system and I believe that it should stay the way that it is, the spirit of FIRST is not winning, it is learning.

FIRST has specifically stated that robots built by mentors, or more specifically with mentor involvement, are OK. Also, FIRST is about Inspiration and Recognition. The vehicle they use is a robot competition--FIRST is NOT a robot competition.

@zzzag: I point you to the mission statement at http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/vision and ask you to show me one piece of FIRST literature, web-based or in print, that says that FIRST is all about the students.

I could go off into a rant about what I see as the real motive behind the "mentor-built robots" threads, but that would serve no purpose. Instead, I am going to suggest that a mod split off the posts and portions of posts beating the glue-that-was-a-horse for separate discussion, and return to discussion of how to make FC better.



If I was to make FC better, I'd start by seeing if I could get more of high-value items. Higher supply means more teams can get more of those items. Second, I'd see what didn't distribute well the previous year--that stuff would go down to really cheap, really quickly.

Then I'd start tackling the real problems. Price point, computer bugs, large orders, small credits. I'd actually start out by not changing the limits on quantity able to be bought, but credits available per round and number of rounds. Instead of having 100 points per round and 2 rounds, I'd make it so that only 25 new points were available each round, and have 8 rounds, of short duration (3 days to a week, 6 before build and 2 after, or something like that). But, if you didn't use all your points in a given round, they'd carry over into the next round. Between rounds, update quantities and possibly do some new items (say, if I had Talons one round, I might have remaining Talons and some 888s available in the next round). The last round is open until CMP.

I'd also look at some resemblance of points to dollars as the baseline, followed by how many teams are likely to use something for a "fudge factor" to move the cost up or down. Talons go up a credit or so, snowblower motors down a credit, game pieces go way down but with a cap based on the number of FRC teams and the number of items (ideally, each team gets the same number if they want them).