GP? I think not.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by DanTod97

I understand FIRST encompasses many things, but I am speaking more specifically of the competition itself, which is why I say even though I see this problem with it, I still love FIRST as a whole. I have not heard one reason why teams cant do all these wonderful things for the students, while still being fair competitively.

The point here is it is NOT unfair competitively

Teams are allowed and encouraged to utilize engineers! If they weren't, there would be an open class of competition.

If students are building the robots all by themselves, then as Dave Lavery once said, they are not "getting it". It's their fault for putting themselves at a disadvantage competitively, and more importantly, not giving themselves the strongest opportunities to learn.

The little guy can compete with the big guy in FIRST. If you have enough know how, desire, and time, you can do anything. Blaming it on the powerhouse teams not letting their kids do anything is totally inaccurate, imo.

[Koko Ed]

The one thing that has always got me is everybody seems to have this idea of how a FIRST team is supposed to be. No where on the FIRST website or in any of their manuals is there such a thing. So why would people readily assume there is some pre determined model for a FIRST team to follow?
Let's look at the pinnacle of FIRST the Hall of Fame teams: Many of them are the un GP teams that you freely accuse of ruining FIRST (they win alot of award often. Even after they won the Chairman's award) which is ironic since they had earned the top honor in FIRST doing good works to improve FIRST as a whole. They seem similar in structure when you give them a quick glance but when you look more closely each team is very different from the other and no one team has the science of running a team down than the other Hall of Fame teams. In fact there are plenty of teams who are not in the Hall of Fame who are just as capable of running a top notch program and they can do it completely different from everyone else. There is no set formula to this. how else can you explain 1500 teams can come up with thousands of different solutions to the same problem? You don't think FIRST didn't intend this to happen?
Diverse thinking I think is also a goal FIRST aims for so everyone can see solutions form many angles and inspire others with that as well.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Cory

You're forgetting one small detail. FIRST has never said that teams should be run as a high school team.

In fact, they celebrate teams that are run as a business through the Entrepreneurship award. They celebrate engineers through the Engineering Inspiration award, and they celebrate mentors and engineers through the Woodie Flowers Award.

To me it is insulting to hear someone say so convincingly and so self righteously that the way other teams (my own included) are doing things is wrong, against the principles of FIRST, hurting the kids, and just plain unfair.

When FIRST becomes about being a high school science fair, maybe you'll be right. But the reason FIRST is great is because of the way it is. If you didn't have all these amazing engineers that FIRST students (heck, and mentors) look up to like Andy Baker, Paul Copioli, Raul Olivera, Dave Lavery, Al Skiekerkiewicz, Ken Patton, Dan Green, and countless others, where would this program be?

Some could contend having an all student team is just as "wrong" as having a mentor dominated team, but who cares?

The real point here is you have a team. Everything else is gravy. Whatever you choose to do with it from that point on is awesome, as long as the kids are getting inspired; and there's no way you can tell me the kids on the powerhouse teams who everyone thinks are engineer built (and often are surprisingly different than they may appear from the outside looking in after you get to know them) aren't being inspired.

How is that not a good thing?

While I agree with most of your points, I think you do need to consider what a "superpower" team looks like from the outside looking in.

Essentially, all teams start the season with the same basic resources - a kit of parts, a game description, and six weeks.

Now imagine you're a kid on a small team with a limited budget and mentor resources. You work for 8 hours after school each day, plus weekends, and finally show up at competition with something made of your own blood, sweat, and tears. It probably is a little homemade looking, maybe it works okay most of the time, but it is your own small victory after six weeks of hell.

Then you look in the pit next to you and see a robot that looks like it was ordered out of a catalog.

As an adult, how would that make you feel? I sure would be jealous!

Now, as a high school aged-student, how would that make you feel? Are you telling me that a 16-18 year old has the emotional maturity to not feel bad - even a little - about his own showing when kids the same age are sitting next to a future FIRST championship winner?

Life isn't fair, and FIRST isn't either. That's a hard lesson for a kid to learn.

[Billfred]

Emphasis mine:

Originally Posted by DanTod97

I understand FIRST encompasses many things, but I am speaking more specifically of the competition itself, which is why I say even though I see this problem with it, I still love FIRST as a whole. I have not heard one reason why teams cant do all these wonderful things for the students, while still being fair competitively.

I'll issue an open challenge: I dare anyone to find a message from FIRST headquarters saying that FRC is meant to be fair. You're going to have teams that bring the knife to the gunfight no matter what happens, and despite the best efforts of a lot of great people. You will see those same people protest on these forums and elsewhere about any attempts by FIRST to limit their effectiveness by holding down the top teams (see any of the threads from 2005-2007 about fix-it windows), while any effort to bring the lowest teams up (such as the kitbot) is met by cheers all around.

It all goes back to trying to get everyone to bring their A-game.

[Leav]

My opinion is that teams should be run by students.

My opinion is that mentors should teach how to design, not teach by designing.

My opinion is that teams where the adults do the work are robbing the students of achievements. obviously this is highly dependent on the way the adults do the work, but it still is inferior to a team where the students do the work.

My opinion matters to my team because I am part of that team.

My opinion matters to FIRST because I am part of FIRST.

My opinion is relevant because I was once a student, and now I am a mentor - So I know both sides of the city.

-Leav

[Kims Robot]

Dan,

The mentor vs student debate has long raged since what I can remember in FIRST. So has the big team vs little team. I was on a team in high school that I felt was "too" mentor run at the time, so I stepped up, I asked the mentors if I could take a leadership role as a sophomore, I forced my way into every design, build and program that I could, and I tried to make sure that the other students on my team had the same experience. On my college team, we started out high school and college mentor peers for the first two years. After that, the college started to bring in a mechanical team that while drastically improving the design of the robot, didnt seem to involve the high school students as much. I fought tooth and nail but lost that battle (but am happy to see that they were able to spin it around a few years later).

Now I've had the amazing experience of being able to form my own team and run it however I wanted with some amazing sponsor support. We, like many others here, have tried to strike that amazing tight-rope walk of a mentor student balance. With an amazing sponsor, we are one of the well-off teams, but probably not really one of the power-house teams *yet*. Looking at some of the comments here, I realize we are probably one of the teams that some smaller teams might seem jealous of at times. We take 60+ people to every competition, go to 3 competitions a year, have crazy PC pit displays, etc etc. But we are in that weird in between. We did terrible at the FLR competition last year, but then vaulted into 5th at Boston and 8th in Championships. This year we were 27th at FLR, but 3rd in Philly. Its all been about learning for us. This year we wanted to learn strategy before the build. I wrote to mentors like Andy Baker, Paul C, Karthik, and several others to ask them how they did it, year after year, how did they build good robots for the strategy. ALL of them answered me with quite awe inspiring details.

I know the "if you cant beat them, join them" or "learn from them" attitude can feel frustrating when you are at the bottom... I remember my high school team, no matter how much sponsor/mentor support couldnt ever live up to the cross town rival team that we always seemed to be up against. Heck in my first two teams, and 7 years of FIRST, my teams NEVER received a SINGLE trophy. It was disheartening sometimes to sit at the competition and think the awards were going to be for us, but they werent. But we always jumped back in and tried harder. At the time teams were much further spread out, ChiefDelphi didnt really exist to the extent that it did, and it was much easier to be jealous of the teams than learn from them.

I dunno, in my eyes, FIRST is what you make of it. We are all going to have those pangs of jealousy here and there. But we cant let this be like sports, we cant say "oh that team gets the fancy uniforms, shiny busses and expensive meals so they do better". We ARE NOT SPORTS, lets not let that rivalry or jealousy stay in our hearts. Everyone is going to feel it time to time, I know I get that feeling at some point during every year, but I often just force myself to turn around and see how our team can do better. Its not worth trying to BE them, its not worth being JEALOUS of them, we are who we are, BUT we can be who WE want to be.

While it may be unfortunate to see mentors fixing a robot with students standing back, and I know how it feels to see that, Im not sure its always as bad as we think it is. I struggle with it a lot. If I had the choice between a two mentors and a student fixing something and being done in time for our next match to let our student drive team get out there and give it all they have for all the hard work our students have put in all year, or letting 3 students struggle with it and miss making it out for the match... I can honestly say I would probably pick the mentors. I know that our students designed EVERY part on that robot, and that in reality our pitcrew is really 6 students and 2-3 adults, but if it came down to it in the heat of battle, and you KNOW someone can fix something in time and the students cant, what would you do? The answer of course is always training the students well enough ahead of time, and that is what we always try to do (and Im thankful I havent ended up in the situation I expressed here), but the reality is that student interest varies from year to year. If there arent any students interested in mechanical, should I let the electrical students fail because it should be all student done?

Really every team's situation is different, and I see your frustrations, Ive been there many times, but I think its what we do with those frustrations that determines our success or failure in FIRST.

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by DanTod97

I only created this thread to remind people this is a high school competetion and to request everyone just be aware of that and to be extra careful to make sure there team is run as a highschool team.

But that's the thing. It isn't just a high school competition. You must have high schoolers on your team, and high schools must drive the robot at the competition, but that is the sum total of the required high school involvement. It is a robotics competition that involves high schoolers.

I understand your argument though, as I've made it before I joined the dark "mentors are A-OK" side: Teams that utterly thrash the field each year result in a net lowering of engineering inspiration, because they discourage teams in their area. I no longer hold this opinion after having met several high school kids who take 1114 (our local unbeatable team) as an inspiration rather than a roadblock.

Those seemingly unbeatable teams aren't untouchable. Take the best robot this year: 1114. Nothing on it took (to my knowledge) extraordinary resources to manufacture. It's a bunch of bent metal on top of a 2 speed 6WD drive base. Nothing in its design is extraordinarily far-out. Other teams have roller claws, other teams have hybrid shooter-arms. 1114 just seems to have a process where they think about the problem, think of a solution, and then optimize, optimize, optimize.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Abwehr

While I agree with most of your points, I think you do need to consider what a "superpower" team looks like from the outside looking in.

Essentially, all teams start the season with the same basic resources - a kit of parts, a game description, and six weeks.

Now imagine you're a kid on a small team with a limited budget and mentor resources. You work for 8 hours after school each day, plus weekends, and finally show up at competition with something made of your own blood, sweat, and tears. It probably is a little homemade looking, maybe it works okay most of the time, but it is your own small victory after six weeks of hell.

Then you look in the pit next to you and see a robot that looks like it was ordered out of a catalog.

As an adult, how would that make you feel? I sure would be jealous!

Now, as a high school aged-student, how would that make you feel? Are you telling me that a 16-18 year old has the emotional maturity to not feel bad - even a little - about his own showing when kids the same age are sitting next to a future FIRST championship winner?

Life isn't fair, and FIRST isn't either. That's a hard lesson for a kid to learn.

It'd make me want to do whatever I could possibly do to make my team better, so that I could be at the same level.

When I was a freshman in high school, I was jealous of the so called mentor built teams. I didn't really like my current team. I thought that NASA built their robot, etc etc. I'm not real proud of myself for thinking that way, but I didn't know any better, and of course it's easier to attack others for the things they've earned than better your own situation.

I came to realize that those teams had the things they had because of hard work, dedication, and a desire to always be improving. I also came to realize that every person I looked up to in FIRST was an engineer or mentor for teams that appeared to be "mentor built".

Instead of limiting everyone who has worked hard for the things they have, the people who have less should ask them how they did it, so they can aspire to the same heights.

[DanTod97]

I feel like people havent read my latter posts and are speaking to me based on my first one which I realized might have come off as a little hostile which I did not intend. Im not sure why people keep reffering to me as being jealous? Im simply stating my opinions about a problem I see, my team does fine and im very proud of it. Saying im just jelous of these winning teams is just unecessary and doesnt help anything.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Abwehr

While I agree with most of your points, I think you do need to consider what a "superpower" team looks like from the outside looking in.

Essentially, all teams start the season with the same basic resources - a kit of parts, a game description, and six weeks.

Now imagine you're a kid on a small team with a limited budget and mentor resources. You work for 8 hours after school each day, plus weekends, and finally show up at competition with something made of your own blood, sweat, and tears. It probably is a little homemade looking, maybe it works okay most of the time, but it is your own small victory after six weeks of hell.

Then you look in the pit next to you and see a robot that looks like it was ordered out of a catalog.

As an adult, how would that make you feel? I sure would be jealous!

Now, as a high school aged-student, how would that make you feel? Are you telling me that a 16-18 year old has the emotional maturity to not feel bad - even a little - about his own showing when kids the same age are sitting next to a future FIRST championship winner?

Life isn't fair, and FIRST isn't either. That's a hard lesson for a kid to learn.

This post has some merit. I would be lying if I said during our first several years, as lucky as we have been, that I wasn't jealous of those awesome robots from 100, 115, 254, 192, 368, etc. from the SVR regional. Our students and a few of the mentors were very very intimidated.
Everyone in the last several posts have offered positive solutions. It seems Dan that you feel that the solution of "joining" the group is not the solution.

Then I ask, what do you suggest teams do?
1. Dumb down everything so that we have a level playing field, no engineers whatsover?
2 Or embrace the challenge, hustle to find support, and step it up in order to "join the group"

We chose "step it up" and join the group attitude. We are far from it, but its our inspiring attitude. Just several years ago, we got a judges sheet showing the areas we needed to improve on the Chairman's Award. I was disheartened. More areas were "needed improvement" than the good areas. I had a few thoughts about just forgetting about enteriing already and let it be. Instead, we worked hard to build up our program the last several years. The feeling of winning the CA is priceless and will stay with us for years, knowing what we had to do earn it.
Now looking back at when we had the choice to step it up or dumb down everything, the proof is asking the students what has been more inspiring to them, as I have many students/former students still on the team the last several years.

They will ALL tell you, they like the program as it is now, and still want to strive it to be better.

[DanTod97]

Originally Posted by Leav

My opinion is that teams should be run by students.

My opinion is that mentors should teach how to design, not teach by designing.

My opinion is that teams where the adults do the work are robbing the students of achievements. obviously this is highly dependent on the way the adults do the work, but it still is inferior to a team where the students do the work.

My opinion matters to my team because I am part of that team.

My opinion matters to FIRST because I am part of FIRST.

My opinion is relevant because I was once a student, and now I am a mentor - So I know both sides of the city.

-Leav

*claps*

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by Abwehr

While I agree with most of your points, I think you do need to consider what a "superpower" team looks like from the outside looking in.

Essentially, all teams start the season with the same basic resources - a kit of parts, a game description, and six weeks.

Now imagine you're a kid on a small team with a limited budget and mentor resources. You work for 8 hours after school each day, plus weekends, and finally show up at competition with something made of your own blood, sweat, and tears. It probably is a little homemade looking, maybe it works okay most of the time, but it is your own small victory after six weeks of hell.

Then you look in the pit next to you and see a robot that looks like it was ordered out of a catalog.

As an adult, how would that make you feel? I sure would be jealous!

Now, as a high school aged-student, how would that make you feel? Are you telling me that a 16-18 year old has the emotional maturity to not feel bad - even a little - about his own showing when kids the same age are sitting next to a future FIRST championship winner?

Life isn't fair, and FIRST isn't either. That's a hard lesson for a kid to learn.

Here's a little story for you about my first FIRST experience. I first got hooked on FIRST through FLL. I joined in 6th grade during the Volcanic Panic challenge. Most of my team had played with Lego Mindstorms before and owned kits, but none had ever built a robot for a competition of any sort. We spent months building and programming our robot to complete the various missions. In our first competition run the robot shattered into pieces as I went to retrieve it after it drove astray. We put it back together and competed the rest of the day and ended up near the bottom of the pack, 40th out of 42 teams. Makes you wonder why I'm still here right?

We'll I'm still here because I saw an amazing robot built by the Rosemount Roboraiders that earned a perfect score in multiple runs. I was immensely impressed by their robot, their cool white jumpsuits, and their calm demeanor at the table. I was inspired to do better. I spent all summer researching Lego design and programming. I built and programmed countless robots of various designs. Each year after that I learned more and my team's performance improved. I never did manage to earn a perfect score in competition, but I sure learned a heck of a lot trying.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Leav

My opinion is that teams should be run by students.

My opinion is that mentors should teach how to design, not teach by designing.

My opinion is that teams where the adults do the work are robbing the students of achievements. obviously this is highly dependent on the way the adults do the work, but it still is inferior to a team where the students do the work.

My opinion matters to my team because I am part of that team.

My opinion matters to FIRST because I am part of FIRST.

My opinion is relevant because I was once a student, and now I am a mentor - So I know both sides of the city.

-Leav

And your opinion is a fair one based on your experience. But is it also your opinion that all other teams should follow how you would run your team?

That has been my problem with DanTod/Depreciation's posts. I find teams where students do a majority of the work completely valid and one of the many possibilities of FIRST. As George Wallace has said, FIRST is like a pizza, and no matter what toppings you use, it's still a delicious pizza.

I have no problem with any FIRST member wanting students to have power on a team, I have a problem with those who think that the team's who do it differently are somehow wrong, unjust, unfair, ungracious, and/or missing the point of FIRST.

[ChuckDickerson]

The students vs. adults debate has been going on since the beginning of FIRST. It just won’t die. I care little to get in the middle of it and am mostly of the opinion that each team can run however they want to as long as students are inspired and learn something. I do however find it interesting when my students notice only adults working on robots in other pits at competition with no student in sight. Enough so to bring it to my attention and tell me that they are happy that they get to do all the work on our robot. Seems kind of hard to inspire the students if they are nowhere around. Our students really care little when they loose a match to a team that they know is mostly adult designed and built. They understand the point is not to win every match but the experience as a whole. Sometimes in the heat of competition even I tend to forget this and have had more than one student remind me that FIRST is more about the journey than the destination.

I am curious though how teams decide on adults vs. students on the field. Of course the drivers and robocoach/human player are required to be students but what do most teams use for the coach position? student or adult? We always give the option to the drive team. If they feel more comfortable with a more experienced adult behind them then we use an adult coach. If they feel more comfortable and less pressured with a fellow student behind them then student coach it is.

Also, what about the extra pit crew members allowed during eliminations. Do you usually use adults or students? I have seen both but for some reason feel the students are more inspired and maybe learn a little more being the ones on the field fixing their machines in those precious moments between elimination matches rather than sitting in the stands watching all the adult team members from a distance. Of course, that is just my opinion.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by DanTod97

I feel like people havent read my latter posts...

And I feel like you haven't read our posts. It looks like you keep stating the same opinion, without supporting arguments, but you expect us to change our opinion to match yours. Your preferences for how best to run your team are certainly valid, and they are likely appropriate for your team. However, several people have pointed out that your wider view of "what FRC is supposed to be" is not supported by the facts.

I've tried to keep an open mind and listen to what you are saying. Unfortunately, it sounds to me like what you keep saying is that FRC is all about teams of high school students, and having adults as an active part of the team is unfair. I cannot accept that, because it is demonstrably false.

Try reading what everyone is trying to tell you, without prejudice. If you can't come up with a more effective way to defend your opinion than mere repetition, you might want to consider the possibility that your opinion ought to be reevaluated.