What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by BigJ

Safety Award reform. Less theater, safety escorts, and taped up signs. More focus on actionable and smart suggestions and practices. I dislike having to entertain or deflect safety captains who want to interview a kid on my team who is usually busy, or having to have an extra person in the pit to be "just safety captain".

My answer builds on this. At competitions for the past couple years we have had to fight the influence of the "safety advisers" at events in order to keep our students focused on actually being safe. So many of the interactions we have with safety advisers make our students beleive that they are only concerned with safety theater and keeping up appearances.

For instance at our events you are given a slip of paper each night ranking you on your "pit safety" when you leave. We strive for a smiley-face versus a straight or frowny-face each time. At our most recent event we were given a straight-face so we asked the safety advisers to point out what we overlooked. They said that they didn't really know and that they didn't see anything unsafe. I then had to keep an ear out for our students grumbling "it doesn't matter if our pit is safe or not, they don't even look" and reinforce the importance of maintaining a safe work space.

Later that day we needed to hammer a difficult shaft back through a variety of bearings and rollers and the safety advisers determined that, because we needed to hit the end of the shaft with so much force, the repair was too dangerous and we needed to stop. Luckily we were able to get them to relent after explaining the details of the operation to them, but I hate the kind of message that this is sending to the students involved. So many of them are getting the impression that "we shouldn't take the safety advisers seriously, because they aren't advising us on real safety issues", an impression that we mentors have been fighting for years now.

My improvement to the FIRST experience would be de-emphasizing all the UL mandated safety theater and increase focus on seriously unsafe behaviors or rewarding intelligently safe policies.