FAHA: The Effects of Vex

[gblake]

Inspire students.

The rest will unfold correctly.

Don't focus on winning a CA. Focus on inspiring students and changing the culture.

Be an excellent FIRST team - and then grab with both hands as many more opportunities as your members can.

Excellent organizations applaud the success of their peers, and adopt and adapt their peers' best practices. Excellent programs clebrate diversity. FIRST is an excellent program.

Author Gordon Livingston advises, that in interpersonal relationships, the person who cares the most about a relationship has the least control over how it evolves. If you agree that theory has can be applied in this circumstance, then you are faced to with a decision:

Do you want second-guess your team's actions, using pursuit of a CA as your metric; or do you want to set about the business of being an agent of change in your community, and let the CA come to you?

Either the FTC program or the VRC program can be an effective, powerful tool for changing your community. Pick the one that is right for your community, not the one that might or might not be right for a CA process that sometimes involves human fallibility.

Do the right thing, and if the CA is a useful measure of teams' successes (and it is), the CA will come to you.

Blake