The Meaning of FIRST

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by NotaJoke

If there is a team of 10 students and none want to program or have interest in programming, should this team not use other resources in order to have the most successful robot possible?

This.

Not all teams have any students to program. I tried to sweet-talk the mess out of programming, making it sound like the best thing since sliced bread, yet nobody wanted to step up. We only had roughly 10 students anyway. So I basically programmed the robot that year as a college mentor. Did I want to do it? No. But what should we have done? Have someone out of high school program the robot and make the FRC program worth their time, or just waste six weeks of our lives and thousands of dollars on a hunk of metal that just sits on the field because of some imaginary rule that states mentors can't work on the robot?

But let's assume that they do, in fact, have a programming team of, say, 2 or 3 students. How do you know that those students gave it their all, their 110%, and just couldn't figure out a specific problem? They Googled, CD'ed, did whatever they could on their own to solve the problem. So now they're resorting to the mentor. For all you know, yes, that mentor is going to program part of the robot, but maybe they're going to show the students how they're solving it as they figure it out.

I don't mean to sound rude, but you should get your facts straight when making this argument (which, by the way, has been done way too many times on CD) before making absurd assumptions and statements.