Thoughts on Ri3D and BuildBlitz

[PayneTrain]

The see these events as professional engineers and FRC lifers (and even some FRC rookies up in New England this year) donating just 72 hours of their time to telementor the entire FRC community. It's the next step in the ever evolving landscape of FRC resources. Some resources to compete at a high level in FIRST are universal (ie the KoP and manual) while some are used at varying degrees by teams of varying experience and other resources. It's easy for the segment of the FRC community that lurks on here to forget that for every Hall of Famer or World Champion, there are 10 rookies or low-resource teams who need things like 72-hour builds as their only engineering mentor resources for the whole season.

To build something like anything in these 72 hour builds is easy, to build them to a T is more difficult, but to use them as a jumping-off point to develop your capabilities is probably their best use for most teams on here. However, all of these things require someone learning at least how it works, and why the teams made decisions that affected the robot one way or the other, and that can lead them to creating something better, or at least learning how to make something good.