FIRST on "The Fosters" - Monday Nights on FreeForm 8e/5p Starting Tonight!

[itsjustjon]

I just wanted to say thank you to all the teams who volunteered their time and their robots on the Fosters! You guys went out of your way to make robotics and engineering a known high-school program by showing it to millions of Americans on prime-time TV.

Okay, so a few details here and there might be out of place, but the message and truth of the story being told is still very accurate: High-schoolers can build a robot as a team, learn a lot of cool concepts, compete with their machine, and play to win a competition.

As far as I'm concerned, many more people would be interested in joining FIRST by watching what the Fosters produced than by watching some footage from a regional or a documentary. We aren't all engineering or analytical types, and that's definitely not the type of which this TV show's audience is composed.

If NASCAR was only 'How It's Made: Stock Cars' combined with a breakdown of 'official' NASCAR jargon, few people would watch, too.

[Pauline Tasci]

Hey all,
The big show is tomorrow on Freeform at 5pm PST/ 8pm EST!

I got an official OK to release some pictures from the 3 days of filming.
Here they are!

http://imgur.com/gallery/F2sDG

Thanks!

[Ed Law]

Watched the 8/8 episode. Pretty cool!

[FIRSTonTV]

OK CD,

Tonight is the final episode, where we get to see the Anchor Beach Anchor Bytes compete at the "Southern California Regional"!

If you haven't seen the sneak peaks, you can check them out here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_dc4fJO5tA
https://www.yahoo.com/tv/fosters-sne...000000745.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j63v_X0Kq24

Tune in at 8pm/5pmPST!

[Ryan Dognaux]

So... fears confirmed right? That episode absolutely painted engineering mentors in the worst light possible. Specifically a Boeing engineer / Boeing sponsored team. As a Boeing mentor, that was fun to see, I guess (not really.)

Things I thought the episode did well -

- Showed what an FRC competition is and what a typical match looks like.

- Showed the difficulty teams go through to pass inspection and even had the team dead for an entire match - pretty realistic.

- Showcasing an all girl drive team and the empowerment that can hold. I thought that was pretty cool.

Things that didn't go so well -

- The antagonist mentor guy. If I were thinking of starting an FRC team and watched that episode, I might not now because of how that character was portrayed. What a jerk! I really hope that's not how FIRST or anyone involved with this show sees mentors who help teams - specifically some of the most competitive teams.

- The drive team stopping and hugging every time they scored a boulder. The match is still going! Why did you stop?!

- While the all-girl piece was cool, I didn't think "$@#$@#$@#$@#$@#es Get Things Done" was the most inspiring motto. But maybe that's just me?

All in all, a lot of potential but I think more could have been done to show what gracious professionalism is really like in FIRST. Time and time again we see teams call their own time outs during the finals to let teams fix their robots - and it would have been so cool to see something of that nature occur on the show. But it didn't. Big opportunity missed there.

[Liu346]

I will also agree that the mentor who was portrayed as the main antagonist did not act in a way that was any different than he should have. From a students perspective being behind that glass that is really how high intensity matches are. Yes i do believe he did over step his boundary when talking to the mom about taking their team home but that was merely an over exaggeration in order to make him the villain.

[first3234]

it looked like FIRST made some adjustments to fms and the audience display fms is suppose to show qual 1 of x number of qual matches but i guess for the purposes of the show they adjusted it

[Ali Ahmed]

Now that the episode has finally aired, I would like to give my thanks for all that were involved. So many people made a big effort to get this done and I am very grateful to them. We had a blast filming. I always love just chatting with fellow FIRSTers and this provided a pretty great opportunity to do that.

Even better was being able to explain FIRST to the crew and extras. They were very interested and asked questions about the robots and what we do and why we do it. They had us run some "matches" for B-roll and it was pretty funny seeing how into it they got. They would cheer any time a robot made a high goal. Or wince when a robot took a Defense particularly hard. They were also extremely patient with us in setting up and trying to get the robots to do the same thing take after take.

All-in-all, it was a great time and I was glad to be a part of it.

[frcguy]

Just got done watching the episode.

I'm pretty disappointed about the way the lead mentor is portrayed. I've never come across someone who behaves that way, and all of the mentors I know from "powerhouse" teams are excellent mentors, teachers, and just all around good people. I'm additionally a bit upset about the lead mentor being from Boeing, because that kind of falsely represents their employees. I also did a double take when the alliance used profanity in their name and cheers, and I presume (as I've never seen that happen at a competition) that it wouldn't be tolerated in real life.

All in all, minus the things above and the conflicts between the students I thought they did an OK job of showing FRC and FIRST. They certainly captured the wide range of emotions present an an event.

[Tyler Olds]

FUN will be having a special post show tomorrow (Tuesday) with Pauline Tasci to talk about the episodes and her experience with them. Bring your Q&A for Pauline to address.

Show starts at 8:30PM EST and I would expect the post show to start around 9:30PMish EST

Live: www.twitch.tv/firstupdatesnow
Archived (we will split this into it's own posting) www.youtube.com/firstupdatesnow

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by frcguy

Just got done watching the episode.

I'm pretty disappointed about the way the lead mentor is portrayed. I've never come across someone who behaves that way, and all of the mentors I know from "powerhouse" teams are excellent mentors, teachers, and just all around good people. I'm additionally a bit upset about the lead mentor being from Boeing, because that kind of falsely represents their employees. I also did a double take when the alliance used profanity in their name and cheers, and I presume (as I've never seen that happen at a competition) that it wouldn't be tolerated in real life.

All in all, minus the things above and the conflicts between the students I thought they did an OK job of showing FRC and FIRST. They certainly captured the wide range of emotions present an an event.

Basically how I felt. I was really annoyed about the gracious professionalism comments. How bout you just be gracious and professional instead of throwing the buzz word around.

Off topic but assuming Boeing didn't allow those comments to be said couldn't those sorta comments be ground for a lawsuit?

[tjf]

Though the idea that Anchor Beach would *ever* take their hands off the controller during a match is hilarious, it was overall a decent episode.

They touch on the importance of listening to mentors, though the interaction with the "299" mentor left a bad taste in my mouth. The fact they called out a specific organization is truly a shame, as they could have done without it and still gotten the point across... To have the "powerhouse mentors", those who often sink in just as much time as any other mentor as somehow "lower" than another mentor is appalling.

In my own opinion, the powerhouse teams aren't "mentor lead" as this episode tends to imply, but rather a group of students crazy enough to listen to their mentors and go above and beyond. It takes a small (and growing) army to run a FRC team. Skilled mentors are important for the 4 year turnover.

Overall, they covered part of the program as a whole, though obviously not to my (or a significant part of Chief's) satisfaction. Their treatment of GP and Coopertition like nothing more than buzzwords are... (though I can't lay claim to this) mildly offensive to those who actively practice it. However, the idea that FIRST made it into mainstream media at all is a miracle. Hopefully FIRST HQ can keep up their PR work and spread the word in ways we wouldn't otherwise see. It's sometimes easy to forget that as big as a community as we are, our voices don't travel far outside the echo chamber.

[jaredhk]

Originally Posted by marcusbernstein

Team 1836 is there repping those classic red team shirts.

Funny story: those are actually not our classic red shirts. Our red shirts had a different logo and lettering (as sort of seen here).

Freeform actually asked for our shirt design so that they could reprint it on another color for aesthetic reasons. That way they also avoid sponsors which helps them.

[smitikshah]

Originally Posted by WinterPoet

No matter how you feel about how the show reflects FIRST, you gotta admit, it's exciting to have a TV reference people can ask about that isn't flippin' Battle Bots!

I agree- unfortunately, though, looks like some people didn't take it the way I would have hoped " I've never been to a robotics competition, but according to this show, it's two parts BattleBots, one part Medieval Times."

- http://www.vulture.com/2016/08/foste...episode-8.html

[tjf]

Originally Posted by smitikshah

I agree- unfortunately, though, looks like some people didn't take it the way I would have hoped " I've never been to a robotics competition, but according to this show, it's two parts BattleBots, one part Medieval Times."

- http://www.vulture.com/2016/08/foste...episode-8.html

That's unfortunate, though to be fair, the show didn't exactly capture the idea of "the game changes every year". Imagine how tedious and highly optimized FRC would get if we had the same game every year!

At least 1/3rd wasn't the other thing...