QotW 09-21-03: Obsolescence.

[Madison]

FIRST is growing by leaps and bounds, and while far from achieving Dean Kamen's goal of a FIRST team in every high school, the program is markedly larger than it was even three years ago.

As FIRST has continued to become larger, it's experienced its fair share of growing pains. It seems that, with time, what FIRST is (rather than what it tries to do) is going to change drastically. Some may argue that what we have now seems not to work -- or, at the least, it does not work nearly as well as it used to.

Question of the Week 09-21-03: Do you think that the FIRST Robotics Competition is obsolete? Do you think it'll ever become obsolete? How can obsolenscence be prevented and relevance remain?

I wonder what upper threshold there is before FIRST reenvisions what the FIRST Robotics Competition is. We only have participants from a small fraction of the high schools in this country, and already, they're turning away ~67%
of teams from the premier event.

I realize that a lot of you will answer "No," when asked if the program is currently obsolete and I'd agree. I'm really hoping, though, that we can take the time to make a real examination of what works and what doesn't work and try to extrapolate what a program three or four or five times as big as the one we're in now could do to retain some of the best characteristics of what we have now.