New FIRST competition structure in Michigan

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Craig Roys

Three things:

First:
Why can't you take 40 kids when only three are presenting? I think it would be a wonderful show of team unity if the the entire team were to be present to support the CA presentation team. As a coach, I would be pretty upset if my team didn't want to go the the competition even though we weren't competing. Given that CA is the most prestigious award, my team would be going - robot or no robot.

Second:
As to the "nothing to do", why not have them volunteer for the competition or help out other teams or watch a fun competition w/out the stress (albeit fun stress ) of competing?

Third:
I believe that any team that is organized enough to win a District Level Chairman's Award would also manage to be one of the over 50% of MI teams who qualify for State's. If they're not, see first point above...

We could not justify time away from class for most of our students unless they were participating actively in a team activity. Watching a competition or volunteering at a competition are not, in my mind, important enough to warrant the time away.

Traveling to an event, even for a single day, represents a significant expense to our team. We are responsible for funding and arranging transportation and meals for many of our students -- so even something as simple as visiting an event might represent hundreds or thousands of dollars of additional cost.

All of this, of course, completely ignores my fundamental disagreement with eliminating mediocre or bad robots from competition. While I agree somewhat with ideas that a field of proven competitors increases accessibility by the public of FIRST programs, I also believe that students benefit tremendously by seeing the caliber of work of other students, mentors and teams.

How can you congratulate a team for doing the stuff that matters -- ostensibly the role of the Regional Chairman's Award -- while at the same time telling that they can't play along with the stuff that doesn't matter? If it's not about the robots, why not just let them bring it along and have some fun with it?

Or is it really about the robots?