FIRST Philosophy 101

[Joe Johnson]

Originally Posted by JVN

"This year i'm going to inspire these students to be engineers, by showing them how to do everything we can to win the championship. By showing them how to play the game put before us, the engineering challenge given us, I will inspire them."


The mechanism given us to inspire the students IS the competition. I'm always shocked when people rant that being competitive and striving to win is against the goals of FIRST.

By striving to achieve more, we grow and learn together. We learn to be competitive, in struggling to achieve more we are forced to evolve and learn more. The students see this, and they understand; to be competitive, I need to be better. To be better, I need to work hard and learn more.

The desire to compete drives them to work.
This desire, inspires.

I've been there.
-JV

An athlete who is inspired to be more competitive works harder at being an athlete. A FIRST student who is inspired to be more competitive works harder at learning.

I am in John and Paul's camp on this one.

In my mind, you get 90% of the impact of FIRST on individual participants from just this one thing: Students & Mentors Building a robot and competing with it.

I believe that this can be accomplished with 10% of the effort that FIRST requires.

So what are we buying with the remaining 90% of the money and effort that we spend on FIRST?

In MY mind at least, it is silly to argue that what we buy is 10% more impact on the individuals that are already on a FIRST team -- it is a bad deal isn't it? Wouldn't it make more sense to spend that 90% by funding & supporting 9 more teams?

TO ME, the balance of the effort we spend only makes sense if we are talking about cultural change. I really DO think that much of what FIRST does that cost money and effort IS necessary to make the cultural impact we a working toward.

So... ...I think it is incumbant on folks that guide FIRST to measure everything we do (beyond the minimum that gets us that 90% impact on the participants) based on the impact to the larger community not on the impact on the members of the teams.

That is why I think that the focus on fairness to rookie teams, or teams without Engineering support, or teams with non-prime zipcodes.

The NCAA isn't fair, yet teams keep playing.

We are talking about changing the world... ...if changing the world requires rules that unfairly hamper or help my team, what of it?

I think it is a tradeoff we all should be okay.

Joe J.