Quote:
Originally Posted by johnr
I asked in the other thread and i'm asking here. How do i explain this rule to students and parents? Not the rule but the reason for it? How do you explain that you might have to NOT do your best? Where in the real world do i point to for an example? What will the kids learn from this? 
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The way I explained it to my new students is that FIRST wants to see a more evenly matched game, and the *intent* is to discourage defense and encourage offense. There are plenty of valid arguments here and my own personal feelings are that the rank points are enough to try and keep this in check, but FIRST makes the rules. Im sure we will see modifications coming up (ie the 0 issue, and that its based on raw score not penalized score), but again the idea here is to build a robot that can score, not a robot that battlebots the other robots... that's how I explained it at least.
The initial thing that worried me about this rule was mostly that how is a coach to know the score at all times?? What if its 62 to 30... I cant imagine that is easy to judge with a bunch of robots running around and balls that just look like giant tangles. I dont even know how refs/scorekeepers could really accurately tell (although maybe FIRST has some way to keep the real time scoring updated well).
And then my last thought in reading through this thread, sort of spurred on by the discussion of scoring for your opponents... whether its "GP" or not... how do you explain that to a spectator? (same really goes if you are scoring in the terms of getting up your rank points). If Red Alliance is supposed to score in Blue's goals, how do you explain to the 8 year old sitting in the audience why Red is suddenly scoring points FOR Blue?
Whether its for rank points or to keep super cells, I think we will see scoring for the opposing alliances this year.