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To Kate,JJ and other frustrated players
Posted by michael bastoni, Coach on team #23, PNTA, from Plymouth North High School and Boston Edison Co.
Posted on 5/7/99 7:12 PM MST Guys (Women included), Isn't the solution to your frustration obvious? The kids, the engineers, the teachers and the marvelous parents that help....they all need the same remedy for the same frustration....they all need to PLAY WITH THEIR ROBOT MORE... Not wait till next year to work so very hard to play so very little.....but to work very hard to play ALOT... To play enough to make the effort worthwhile...and I can think of only one way to accomplish this without all of us giving up our day job.....extend the FIRST cycle time to 36-48 months... It is PLAYING WITH THE ROBOT that is just as inspirational as building it.... FYI I just returned from 2 days at the MIT 2007 Design Competition. Wow...very cool...and looking more and more like FIRST. The 2007 design competition is the genesis of FIRST...it is the competition orginated by the good doctor his own self. DEKA hung a banner and the MIT FIRST team offered a show and tell.... I went because I wanted to 'sense' the roots of FIRST.. I went because I am listening to Dodd Stacy and JJ and Tom Wibble and so many more of you who do not frequent these pages... and I am trying desperately to formulate a consensus.. I believe we are all searching for a way through the FIRST woods.....and we are coming close.... But I noticed one thing at 2007...the students are doing the design process FOR COURSE CREDIT....the students are BUILDING THE MACHINES....and every student who completes a machine gets an A for the course...Participation in 2007 is FREE (There have been kit costs in the past but GM made them free this year)and get this....of the original contestants....about 50% were none or low functional... But please note that those top robots who were functional were very functional... So within the parameters of 2007, a builder can work hard learn by doing and laugh when things go wrong...and walk away with little or no frustration... Because, They have not sold themselves to a sponsor, promised their community that if they send them to Disney World they will do their best (and be their luckiest)....moreover The kind wonderful MIT prof's are not neglecting curriculum development because 2007 IS CURRICULM..and students are not forgoing grades because 2007 IS THEIR GRADE... Putting FIRST in the classroom is one way to make it serve the valuable purpose that 2007 serves..and this is becoming even more more attractive since the state educational frameworks has added Engineering to the Scince and Technology strand ...and making the game more PLAYABLE is a way to get it into the schools. After all,,,no sports teams practice six to eight weeks in order to play only twice....the kids simply would not stand for it. Campaigning a machine that you as a student helped to maintain, in some instances to design and fabricate...is very very inspirational....not to mention empowering... Look, many FIRST teams have been fortunate in placing many of our FIRST students into good competetive colleges and universities, ..because we can write wonderful truthful letters ABOUT WHAT THEY DID TO MAKE A TEAM SUCCESSFUL not about how inspired they are...but WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DID... Quantitative, descriptive assessments...not anecdotal meanderings about how much they like technology. I loved 2007...I loved the scale of it...the robot building and design effort is in proportion to the playing time.Maybe all we have to do is to get our building effort/costs to playing time proportions in line..... and hats off to Alex Slockum the professor who runs it is a worthy antecedent to Woodie hisself... |
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