2006 Season - The Negative

[Donut]

Originally Posted by Tetraman

I think FIRST needs to get more active in the realm of the Mainstream Media! They need more news coverage! They need more people to tell more people. I think a lot of it is in the hands of the teams, but half of the teams and people on those teams (includeing myself) just don't. We rely on the teams that are known for spreading FIRST rather than ourselves.

I couldn't agree with this statement more. We need to get the word out about FIRST and technology more, but we need it to be done more by all teams. We know there are teams doing it, you often see them with a Chairman's Award, Engineering Inspiration Award, X Award, etc., but we need the teams (like mine) that worry every year about whether they'll be able to attend a regional competition, let alone win an award, to try to get the word out of FIRST. I'll admit myself and the rest of my team have been guilty of not going to lengths many teams do to get the word out, and that needs to change. The lesser known teams that attend only 1 competition a year make up the majority of FIRST (remember, only 1/4 or less of all teams attend the Championship), and these are the teams that would have the largest voice if they could all just try to do some of the things these role model teams do.

On the note of this year's game, the 2 main things I disliked were the bicycle flag team indicators and the automatic DQ of an entire alliance for entering the corner goal during eliminations. For some reason I like big annoying flashy lights on the robot, not little flags or strips of color. As for the DQ, I would have preferred they just DQ that robot rather than the whole alliance, or to give them some large penalty (30 points), but at least give the team a chance to still win.