[FTC]: FVC (Vex) VS. FTC (Tetrix)

[JesseK]

The REAL elephant in the room here is "does this hurt my team's chances of winning award xyz?" I would submit that it would all be helpful, however if a judging panel were to view it otherwise, then I suppose it would be an award my team wouldn't care too much for anyway.

This hit the nail right on the head. Teams can get burned out on awards. I know mentors do, all the time. There are two major points I'll make:

• We've moved away from being 'Team 1885' driven for our county-wide initiatives and more 'Prince William County' driven. We take all of our FIRST 'awards' and used them as leverage for more corporate support, and now we're seeing huge county-wide benefits for it. Simply put, it's become such that we no longer need FIRST's recognition (via awards) to garner corporate support for county-wide activities. The school board has been a key stakeholder in this process, yet I can honestly say that I believe FIRST falls short in recognizing that potential on a national level.
  
• Any 9th grade student would easily become overwhelmed by our history and the 5 robotics initiatives 1885 and 2068 have started in the county since our inceptions. Eventually all of our robotics students participate in these initiatives via mentoring, so it can be overwhelming for a first-time student.

That said, 1885 did FTC last year so that our students would be better-versed in LabView should we use it in future years in FRC. I like the simplicity of the 'new' FTC and the fact that championship-attending FTC teams in 2009 had double the average regional score. On the contrary, VEX can be extremely complicated to do if students only use the kit for 1 year of competition. We also told ourselves 'Let's face it -- our students will never be able to compete on the same level as VRC teams who have 4th-year students'; that and other reasons made the choice very obvious for our specific situation.

FRC isn't sustainable in all 10 county high schools, so we had to figure out how else to continue the vision of FIRST, including exploring other non-FIRST avenues. That said, VEX is primarily done in our middle schools in STEM-specific classes though it started as VEX only, not VRC or FTC. FLL is now being done in middle schools' general curriculum and some elementary school extracurricular activities, and jFLL will be done in many elementary schools. On top of that, we have the only* underwater robotics competition curriculum in the country that's implemented in all high schools county-wide (SeaPerch). Finally, since I'm completely against students getting to have all of the fun, the proposed new VEX controller will probably be exactly what I want for my master's program research project, which won't start until January 2011 (so get working on it IFI!).

The whole FTC vs FVC debate, to me, is moot. Do what fits in your local situation, but never lose sight of the big picture. Awards matter for leverage and egos only, so use them wisely and move on. Judges seem to get bored after two hours of explaining the what's, why's and how's for everything a team has accomplished so don't burn yourself out on it. FIRST is nearing perfection for mentor-based science & engineering education on a large scale, yet I believe students still need to be "given a kit, go off to a corner, build a robot in X time, and compete with it" ** at some point so they can learn their own individual potential.

*that I've found
**sorry Dave :/