Ideas to move in the direction of making FIRST competitions 'fair'

[KenWittlief]

Originally Posted by dhitchco

Hey Ken,
a very interesting thread you started here, just a couple of thoughts from "an old man".

1) Repeat after me....."It's not about the robot......It's not about the robot"
....

Ive been saying that for years. People on CD jump all over my case when I say we should focus on giving the students the best exposure to engineering instead of focusing on winning

people tell me that 'playing to win' with a highly competitive robot is the way they inspire their students

the competition is there, its a part of FIRST, its a part of the drive that caps the program, its the goal at the end of the struggle.

If the competition is not going to be fair, why dont we let the teams play against each other for 3 days, and then have a random number generator pick the champions for that event?

If we say FIRST is not fair, its not meant to be fair, then why do we pretend there is a contest happening at all? If the competition is not fair, then there is no contest. Mostly (as the way things are now) its a random event.