The Triplet Challenge

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

I think the spirit and intent of this thread, to start new teams and make it as easy as possible for them, is excellent. The thing that seems to be getting people fur ruffled is the idea of giving the new team a robot design.

That's not the only objection. None of the Niagara triplets are rookies this year. Why does an experienced team need to have a paint-by-numbers solution to building a robot? If each of the triplets had designed a robot for one or two rookie teams I might buy the argument. As it is, when all the layers are peeled away, most of the multi-robot collaborations look -- to me -- like a way for multiple teams to leverage engineering expertise to build successful robots. It's a program to develop robots that play the game successfully, which I will admit is a part of FIRST, but let's not kid ourselves that it has some unique ability to help the program grow. There are a lot more ways to achieve that than to hand a team a robot. I also question the underlying assumption that winning tournaments produces excellent teams. I thing it is just as likely that they causal flow is in the reverse direction -- excellent teams produce successful robots, not that successful robots produce excellent teams.

Teach rookies how to build robots and then turn them loose to innovate. Why teach writing when we can hand them literature? Why build your own cabinet when you can buy one built by James Krenov? Why learn to tie a fly when you can buy them at sporting good stores? Why not have Dave Lavery and the game committee commission a complete robot design and provide it to all the robots competing in FIRST? Because variety is generally better than uniformity, and because the learning value is in the process and not in the result.

This multi-robot collaboration thing is going to grow, and it's bad for the sport. I would like to see FIRST take a stand against it.