Keep FIRST in Michigan (FiM) from killing FIRST Lego League

[Daniel_LaFleur]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

The usage of school-grades as a metric is an exceedingly poor one, and it should be done by ages.

Tom,

While I agree with the 1st half of your statement, I disagree with the 2nd half. Ability is far more important than age/grade and that's the issue I have with bureaucratic entities and the arbitrary metrics they use.

I've been a FRC mentor for 15 years. I've seen 7th graders that were ready for FRC and I've seen 10th graders that weren't.

My question to FiM is: Why must the programs be separated? Why should they not be allowed to overlap?

My question to the Michigan community is: is the program you run a FiM program or a FIRST program? The answer to that should dictate which set of rules you'd want to follow.

FiM has done a lot of good for the FIRST community, thus I am very willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I would be interested to see the data that they based this decision on.