paper: FAQs Regarding the FRC District Competition System

[OZ_341]

Originally Posted by MikeE

...... I hate to compare FIRST to Burger King or Dunkin' Donuts, we could think of FIRST as following a franchise model.
FIRST is responsible for supplying the core product......

This is what is happening. MAR has generally been a positive experience, but I do think that FIRST needs to concede on some of the points that Jim has mentioned. We are paying a great deal of money and doing a ton of local work for the right to use this brand name.

Thank you Jim for all of the obvious work you have put into establishing the district model.

[DCA Fan]

Thanks Jim! I know I badgered you with questions last year at Vex Worlds, this is very helpful.

[BJC]

Great paper Jim,

I can't wait for the day when teams can just throw their robot in a van and ride over to their local FRC field to play pickup FRC matches.

Keep up the great work!
Regards, Bryan

[Ken Streeter]

Just wanted to extend my THANKS to Jim and FiM for making this FAQ available to all teams. The document is informative, concise, and generally well-written (I can excuse a few typos!)

The FAQ is a good resource for teams both in and out of FiM.

[Carolyn_Grace]

The end product is awesome. Thanks, Zondag. This will hopefully be a valuable resource for many areas just starting their own adventures into districtdom.

[topgun]

I really like your concluding points, especially 1 and 2. $4000 is a lot of money for a Regional, especially when the vast majority of the workers are volunteers. I would prefer much smaller entry fees and more competitions without the expensive media/show mentality.

Your 2nd concluding point is dead-on. Every year the students are so frustrated when we need to bag the robot at the end of the competition. They have just spent an intense three days and they know exactly what we want to do to make the robot better, and then it goes in the bag. My team doesn't build a second robot. Any changes we make have to be made outside of the competition robot and hopefully applied correctly at the next regional. System testing is essentially non-existant. There is so much learning that is being cut short by having to bag the robot at the end of a regional (assuming you have a 2nd regional to attend).

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Nothing that hasn't been said yet, but huge thanks for posting this. A massive amount of respect for all that you've done and continue to do with FIRST and FiM.
I absolutely love the district model, and every possible short-coming that I have identified about the model in the past few years (cost, state isolation, bag'n'tag) has just been explained here. Extremely useful document. Will be sharing with the rest of my team.

As a side note, if it's not being used to fund the FiM FRC competitions themselves, I'd really like to see where all our entry fee money is going to. For a school district with more than 68% of it's students on free/reduced lunch, and local industry in shambles/survival mode, it isn't easy to procure the needed funds to exist. We'd be more than happy to take a cut in the required funds needed department.

[Nemo]

I rarely read something that I so strongly agree with. Thanks for posting - it was quite enlightening.

[nuclearnerd]

I just read this paper to help me understand the changes when Ontario moves to the district system next year. I'm not sure whether Ontario will use exactly the same model (is that published somewhere?), but the paper does a really good job of explaining the general idea and rationale. Thanks Jim.