New Michigan Offseason Robotics Competition

[Ed Law]

Originally Posted by CodePoet

I Like this idea. It will allow more students to experience tournament competition. I hope our team is able to participate.

Why is there this one exception?

I guess it is because drive team and pit crew are student positions but drive coach is 50/50. About half of the teams have student drive coach and half of the teams have adult mentors as drive coach. We are trying to encourage female students to participate in FIRST. We are not encouraging or discouraging adult participation.

We certainly would encourage a female mentor or student as drive coach but we don't want to make it too difficult for some teams to participate. We plan to have a female engineering mentor as drive coach for our team that day.

[jeremy callahan]

Also you already have inexperienced drivers most likely, so you want someone that is experienced like my suggestion would be the drive coach or one of the main drivers that can guide them and make them feel more comfortable.

[Jack Murphy]

This is wrong on many levels.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Mr V

Certainly there would be an uproar over that.

However the fact is that in many teams pit and drive crews are often dominated by males, not necessarily males only but often mainly males.

Relevance? In my mind both types of events are equally sexist. If you are telling someone they can't participate based on some criteria they were born with it is disgusting to me. What's next? Only students of Asian heritage are allowed to compete at an event?

Originally Posted by Mr V

These girls only events encourage them to take on those roles w/o the worry of "not being as good at it as the boys" and not feeling that they have to "fight" to get the right to participate in those area.

As opposed to in the real world where they will have to "fight" to get the right to participate in those areas. We're not doing anyone favors setting up little playgrounds where everyone gets to feel special.

Of course, as a white male I don't know anything about this topic...