Lessons Learned - The Negative

[BurtGummer]

Originally Posted by Nawaid Ladak

Thats understandable, but when you lose mentor support/school sponsor support, thats a whole different thing, FIRST needs to make this appealing to schoolteachers and make it worthwhile for the teachers to stay after their scheduled hours. A lot of teams fold because of funding, or a ridiculusly high percentage of their kids are graduated the previous year. or just overall support for the program has donwhill.



I wouldn't say district events nationwide. I live in Florida, where we currently only have 43 teams. I don't think a district system would work here. You just don't have the density of teams. I would rather see SuperRegionals pop up like the Greater Toronto Regional in 2006, an event with two fields where up to 128 teams can compete would be something worth attending.... even if your team doesn't qualify for championships. I'd like to hear from the teams that only went to district events (not state or championship) and get their experience compared to regional events.



I didn't mean to offend the team that won the Xerox creativity award, so please if i did offend you, im sorry

What i was trying to say was, usually when i hear the Xerox Creativity award, i usually have this "wow" type of moment, like, "did some tea really think of that crazy idea, and it really worked?", this year, it seemed like that "wow" factor wasn't there. im sure many teams thought of the gyroscope. not all of them thought it would work, thus they ditched it. you guys stuck to it and made it work for you. That deserves to be awarded. but as i said above, it just didn't bring in that "wow/gasp" factor

I didn't get to look around at Atlanta, but what other teams would you consider having that wow factor? Personally I consider a 22 pound disk rotating at 1400rpm, or ours a 7lb disk at 5200 rpm a 'wow' device. Getting something like a control moment gyroscope to work is not only more difficult than you think, but it takes ALOT of careful building. With such a high speed and high energy device, safety is a huge concern. It's more "Wow" than a crab drive imo.