ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by jman4747

Also don't act as if this is completely noncompetitive because then it will be, for you. I personalty will not quit or become "demotivated" if elite teams actually just started leaving. All that is is quitting because you can't be the only winner. We are builders not buyers here. I don't need to see the viper just show me the track and give me a budget. When my car is on the start line next to it I'll worry about it.

Your setting up strawmen. This is not a dichotomous choice of "fully" competitive and "non" competitive. This is a matter of degree. And that matter of degree matters.

And this isn't about your personal motivation--this is about motivating a large segment of the student population. While you are a builder, the fact is that FIRST's target audience--students who are not yet in STEM activities--are the "buyers." So the Viper analogy holds when focusing on the vision statement that was quoted.

Drawing anecdotes from our personal experience isn't necessarily relevant--you need to conduct a large survey of students across the board and assess how their motivations will change or provide a much more general source of information to support your position. And you need to demonstrate that reducing the motivation for the elite teams (which seems pretty well documented on CD) won't have a cascade effect through the FRC community. I know that those are all big burdens, but personal assertions carry little weight. (It's why I have avoided making those sorts of claiims in my posts. I have only referred to what has happened in the last couple of weeks to our team because I think its a unique perspective and is not speculative in any way.) We need to see some form of empirical evidence.

I'm thinking that Adam's point that we're arguing past each other might be revealed by this conversation. I see JM4707 and Lil'Lavery referring to the motivation on their own individual teams. On the other hand, I and many others are looking beyond existing teams to the broader society and how this affects the motivation to join FRC. I see a hierarchy of FIRST's mission, which looks like this:

1) Attracting new students who are only marginally interested in STEM using the sports metaphor.
2) Once students have joined a team, providing a motivational experience so that they continue to participate in FRC.
3) Providing a technical engineering challenge to the most motivated students that further motivates them and trains them in specific skills.
4) Providing a competitive challenge to students motivated by achieving excellence. That competitive challenge becomes the culturally visible highlight that leads back to 1) attracting new students.