Buyers' remorse / Pig in a poke

[KevinG]

Originally Posted by sdcantrell56

What is inherently wrong with competition and even saying you want to defeat the other teams? This seems to be a common theme around the FIRST community, and frankly seems misguided. FIRST, just like the real world has winners and losers, so why not start encouraging students to pursue winning?

There's nothing wrong with competition. Life is a series of competitions. You compete for jobs, you compete for a partner, you compete to get ahead. FIRST is not kindergarten where everyone gets a participation certificate and a pat on the back for showing up. There are definitely winners and losers and a competitive spirit is critical.

But at the same time FIRST is not just a competition, and focusing on winning and losing ignores the importance of GP and ensuring everyone has a good experience. The goal is to win, but not at the expense of someone else. If winning was the most important thing then teams wouldn't go out of their way to help each other with tools and spare parts. Nor would a team send a student over to help another team fix a problem with their robot, like our neighbors did last week when our robot was having electronic/programming/everything issues.

The bottom line is this; competition is just part of what makes FIRST so special. It's not even the most important part, which is why I suspect the culture of FIRST doesn't really focus on defeating an opponent. Everybody wants to win, it's ingrained in who we are. But the second you tell your students to focus on winning you lose a key part about the purpose of FIRST.

Originally Posted by Travis Hoffman

It's one thing to get them to understand these concepts when the challenges are borne out of a relatively pure competition experience, when the mistakes and failure are theirs to own and to live up to, to learn form. When excessive challenges are thrown in their path that are out of their control, when failure and struggle is made more likely by a flawed COMPETITION SYSTEM that should be designed such that it works so well it is invisible but instead randomly and frequently penalizes teams for no just reason, that is something I don't feel students should have to cope with at an event.

It is natural to expect some level of "built-in" unfairness at a competition, as no system is perfect, but NOTHING like the sustained assault of blar that has been levied against teams this season. It is natural for teams to expect and require corrective action from the governing body to restore the competitive system to some semblance of sanity.

This is a fantastic point. Aerial Assist is not a "pure" competitive experience when you consider the subjective nature of the rules and how significant foul points are. As I understand it the purpose of the game within FIRST is to provide students with a design challenge and then give them a metric by which to judge the effectiveness of their designs. The arbitrary nature of much of this year's game harms that intent because the metric is subjective.