A Request

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Foster

...And don't disrespect Pewee or Little League. The Pro guys got started there. You never know what motivates. I see stuff and go "cool, out of my skillset", but I see an easier / lower level and go "Hey, I can do that" and I do and oddly I get better. And soon I have that skillset to...

I think everyone's on board with all these competition robotics programs being highly beneficial to the students in them. When a kid wants to be an NFL player, he doesn't go try out of the Eagles, he goes to little league. (Andrew did in fact note this impact.) I'm not saying this analogy applies to competition robotics, but it certainly doesn't indicate a disrespect for little league. That's where kids actually get good at their vision, but it's not the vision in most of our heads at that age. (Ok, so once upon a time I wanted to be in the WNBA.) No disrespect.

My take on the Varsity argument:
For us, FTC is in fact a middle school team. It is, in fact, our JV team for FRC, and I know many other FRC programs that use FTC (or VEX) this way. I also know a lot of programs that don't do this, and I know brilliant high school students on FTC and VEX that will make fantastic professionals (not FRC experience).

I don't think FRC is better than VEX. I do think that FRC is better than FTC in several ways, but none of them have to do with the engineering and teamwork challenges. In my personal experience with each program and events, FTC just isn't as professional and doesn't have the community presence/commitment that I see from FRC and VEX. This--particularly not knowing its root cause--discourages my participation, and I think it's also what Koko Ed is alluding to. I'd like to understand what drives it. I still volunteer for FTC, but it just doesn't seem to have it 'together' yet. That became abundantly obvious to us as we started our FTC team, and we actually had a discussion about it with the high-level FIRST HQ contact person* that had answered us about the problem they'd caused. His/her answer was (no joke), "well, we can't compete with VEX".

I don't think that is reflects poorly on the students in FTC. Their challenges and solutions are just as impressive as FRC and VEX. The program doesn't appear to do them justice, and at least in our case the limit is quite salient.

*Position and gender redacted for privacy.