Quitting FRC for Vex?

[gblake]

Originally Posted by mrnoble

I've heard rumblings of this for the past several years. My own team is quite happy continuing with FRC, but the other competition we have participated in since 2009 (BEST) will be no longer part of our plan for the coming school year, as we are intending to add Vex teams instead. I am sincerely curious if any other FRC teams are adding Vex, or are thinking about leaving FRC in favor of Vex. If you are and feel that you can share, would you mind saying what your reasons are, both positive (Vex is fun, for instance) and negative (the expense of FRC is too great, perhaps). Thanks.

A few years ago, I spoke to an FRC school team's teacher/headmentor. They were participating in both FRC and VRC. He said he/they were going to drop FRC because:

• VRC made it much easier and cheaper for him to make all of his students members of teams in which every member is expected to make hands-on contributions to their team's STEM product.
• VRC made it possible for all members of a team to be intimately involved in their team's actual performance during competitions.
• In his location it was easy (and relatively cheap) for his several teams to participate in several nearby formal tournaments, off-season tournaments, and scrimmage events.

For his STEM robotics program (that I think was integrated at least semi-formally into his school's curriculum) he was asserting that he got more bang per buck per student, plus a few other upsides.

We agreed that he/they would be giving up on the flashy circus side of FRC tournaments (unless he took his students as spectators). His thoughts about that were that he was more than willing to live with the reduced flashiness of a typical, local VRC tournament, if what he got in exchange was being able to look across the fields and pits, and see all of his students driving or working on robots, instead of sitting in the stands watching a handful of their classmates doing that.

Originally Posted by Landonh12

I can see Vex being a good way to start feeder programs for FRC, but in no way do I see Vex replacing FRC. The amount of engineering that goes into FRC completely overshadows any reason to switch to Vex, unless your team has budget problems. I can see FTC teams switching to Vex, simply because they are similar.

In my (limited) experience the folks who choose VRC over FRC usually aren't very interested in maximizing the complexity of the work a few team members do. They instead usually want to maximize the number of students who get a chance to try their hand at high school level STEM topics.

They focus on giving lots of students a good-enough taste of STEM topics, not on having a smaller number of students dive deeply into one complex problem.

Remember - It's not (supposed to be) about the robot. It's (supposed to be) about getting more students to give STEM a try, and for them to enjoy what happens when they do.

There is a place in the world for both programs. Each serves a purpose, and satisfies a need. There are definitely student who look for tougher (than FTC/VRC) challenges before they graduate high school. If the funds, mentors, and other prerequisites are in place, FRC is a great capstone to put on top of a solid VRC/FTC base.

Blake