[FRC Blog] Something New - SWE Grant

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

The driver requirement is leaving me scratching my head. Why must "driver" be the leadership position they chose for this grant? There are plenty of other high profile leadership positions on a team, many of which carry far greater responsibility than driver. Not to mention, many teams don't select their drivers for the upcoming competition season in November, so applying for this grant would handicap their ability to select drivers later down the line.

Seems like a silly requirement for an otherwise good grant.

I've had a couple of discussions elsewhere online on this one too. I'm going to copy/paste what I've said elsewhere with some edits for wording/clarity, but whatever. Here goes...

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Being totally honest here, I think this is pretty poorly defined and SEVERAL steps backwards.

1) Requiring a female driver. Why? If a driver is good they're on drive team, it shouldn't matter their gender. (This is my same point about everything on teams. Be special because you're useful, not because you're female.) Also, being a robot driver doesn't necessarily make you a leader, but it does make you a joystick monkey. Require a female captain if you're going for leadership; and even then, it’s a silly idea. Good concept, bad execution.

The problem with this is teams will just throw a female human player in there for the free money. "How many matches does the 'token girl' have to be in for me to get my grant?" Will most teams do this? Hopefully not, but it's an easy way to game the system, and a super-ineffective way of getting women to be actual leaders.

2) The 50/50 ratio. What about teams that are 51/49? 40/60? Do I need exactly 25 male and 25 female students to qualify? Where's the cutoff for 'roughly half and half'. Again, this doesn't do much for actually encouraging women in engineering, it just encourages women on the roster. Not every student on a FIRST team is a robot-centric person, and that's okay too! Not to mention, some teams may have already solidified their roster, so there's not much they can do about that qualification anymore.

The only thing I really do like about this is teams having a plan for encouraging diversity. IMO, the qualification for this grant should be the 'best'/most effective diversity initiatives and not 'throw a girl in your team's spotlight so you can get some money'. We have enough of a team-culture-issue accusing teams of that already without this grant aggravating the problem.