QUESTION OF THE WEEK!!!

[archiver]

Posted by Samuel Lindhorst.

Engineer on team #240, MachVee, from Jefferson High School and Visteon.

Posted on 11/6/2000 11:50 AM MST


In Reply to: How to make the expansion of FIRST work? posted by Ken Leung on 11/5/2000 3:50 PM MST:



: But one question I have no idea how to solve: How can we keep politics out of competition at the global scale, or even continental scale? And how can we ensure that it’s really high school students who are building the robots and not some high tech factories with a team of 100 professional engineers, just because some countries felt the need to win the competition no matter what?

Exactly right, Ken. I'd love to see the Japanese and Germans compete, but I think very quickly it would devolve into a 'cost is no object' Olympic style national pride contest, and of course the students would be long forgotten, along with some FIRST ideals.

I'd love to see the quality of build either nations's teams would come up with. I think both nations would incredibly fertile ground for something like FIRST. The Japanese have a Robot Sumo competition for high schools, but I think our games demand much more creativity.

I think in order for this to happen, FIRST has grow from the ground up inside of those countries. There has to be a strong national organization, as there is here, able to keep the focus (barely) on the important things, and resist pressures to make it something else.

I'm always struck by the manner in which the awards for winning the national competition are handed out very quickly, and the winners almost dismissed, and the 'real' awards, schoolarships, Woody Flowers, Founder's and Chairman's awards rolled out with much more fanfare. Even things like 'featherweight in the finals' get a play up as much as the National Champs do. I think the whole thing just drives home the point about what FIRST really thinks is important in the competition - and it's not the competition... )