Best Robot Ever(again)

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by indieFan

I keep reading these lists (Best Ever.. Top Ten.. etc.) and getting annoyed with them. To me, the best robots are not the ones such as Team 254's this year because it seemed to "dominate" the game. Instead, the best robots are the ones that allowed the students to learn something. After all, that is what FIRST is about.

indieFan

I'm inclined to agree, to a point. The robots aren't the sole reason we're here--it's the whole experience that can only be described as FIRST. There is, however, one flaw with that method of declaring a best robot by that criteria.

You can't go through a FIRST season and not learn something. Even if your students had nothing to do with the build, you learn something in a competition. Therefore, all of the robots are on an equal footing (assuming one doesn't say that some robots are more equal than others) when it comes to student learning, in that all of them allowed students to learn something. Therefore, we currently have a 900-way tie for the best robot from this year alone. While possible, it kinda defeats the purpose of having a best robots list. You just have a robots list.

So if we have all of the teams that have ever competed in FIRST meeting this primary goal, then we've got to have something to debate and reminisce about. And it seems that the most-agreed-upon secondary goal is building an awesome robot. That's where these lists come in--we're talking about the teams that have done the best at meeting that secondary goal.

Geeze, I hope that came out right.