New FIRST competition structure in Michigan

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

People seem to have lost sight of the fact that this is a pilot. Of course you don't launch it everywhere at once. You have to see if it will work.

OK, nobody should be fooling themselves here. This is a "pilot" program in the same way that the first flight of the Airbus 300 was a "pilot" test flight. The real, full deployment is going to happen after this "pilot" program and there is not a lot that will be allowed to stand in its way. This model is going to be continued, whether this first year works or not. It is going to be spread across the rest of the country, whether the other states want it or not.

Why do I say this? One simple reason: no one is actually interested in the "success" or "failure" of the pilot program. It appears that it has been pre-ordained that the pilot program will be a "success."

If this were a legitimate pilot program, a well thought out set of goals to be achieved by the pilot program would exist, and be readily apparent. The criteria for a successful experience would be carefully spelled out in a set of thoughtful, objective, and complete, test conditions that would determine whether those goals were achieved or not. Those test conditions would be well-rooted in a legitimate business model that looked at the appropriate areas of impact on the teams, the region, the state, and the national organization. The FIRST board of directors would know those criteria, and approve them. And the criteria would NOT be written by the people charged with executing the pilot, but by objective third parties who have no stake in the outcome.

However, those success criteria do not exist. And they don't exist because no one wants them to. Because if there is no standard against which you determine success, then you can never fail. Instead, history will be re-written retroactively when the pilot program is over, with the success criteria suitably defined at that time to correspond to the actual events.

Then, the same political forces that shoved this pilot program through the system will demand that the "successful" model be adopted across the country. The same concerns that tried to counter how this pilot was structured will be unable to stop this next effort. And two years from now, we will all be playing at district events, whether they are appropriate for our states or not.

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

To quote Dean Kamen:

"Over the years FIRST has aggressively taken steps to invent new programs and reinvent existing programs to find new ways to take our message to ever more participants. The district event pilot in Michigan is an important opportunity to help reinvent FRC, our flagship program. It holds the promise of making FRC more accessible, thereby moving us closer to the day when every high school student has an opportunity to participate. Team members should be able to play more and play closer to home, all at a lower cost."

Sorry, but that smacks of "well, if Dean says so, then it must be right, so we can all stop talking about it now." I could not disagree more. The whole reason this thread was started was to get people talking about the pros and cons of the new idea, to see the reaction, and understand the concerns. If, as I suspect and discuss above, this is going to become the new national model of how the entire FRC program will be structured in the future, this whole topic needs a lot MORE discussion, not less.

-dave


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