Hybrid Challenge-No Robot Left Behind

[Michelle Celio]

I, for one, do not accept.

I'm going to try and compile my perspective, but odds of that happening successfully and everyone understanding my points is going to be slim to none.

But..

Let's say, you're a freshman on a rookie team, and have been put in charge of programming. You work hard all the six weeks to get your robot up and running. You get to the competition, with no hybrid mode because you either didn't have the resources to learn how to program it or you just plain and simple ran out of time.

So, you're at your first ever FIRST competition, and a semi-established team comes up to you "Hey, you don't have a hybrid mode? Here use this pre-built one!". So they load the code on to your robot, and explain to you what it does or how they wrote it.

How important do you think this code is to the freshman? Do you honestly think that this freshman is going to sit down between the end of this season and next builds-eason and learn how to program for another possible hybrid mode since what they know from a FIRST Competition is that the "harder" code will just be handed to them?

Yes, helping other teams get their robot working for hybrid mode, and explaining to them how the code was made is the "Gracious Professional" way to do things, but what message are we really sending to the freshman and rookie teams that have joined this year?

FIRST OVERDRIVE should not be about handing out hybrid modes to people who don't have them, it's supposed to be a challenge. If some teams can't beat the challenge than it's on them.

Just my $0.02