How has FIRST effected you?

[Rob Ribaudo]

I went to a water park the other day and when we were leaving my Dad said we could get something from a souvenir store that was there. I was looking around and something came to me. Why am I buying a souvenir instead of just trading for some. Then I remembered this is not a FIRST Robotics Competition or something like that.

Has anything like that happened to anyone else? Has anyone tried to do something that is not FIRST related and try put in things that is FIRST related only to find it would not work?

[Hubicki]

sort of...
I've become much more persuasive when yelling at people
Nah... I don't really yell...
but I do tend to speak my mind more openly around people. I guess that's experience from talking/explaining a point to people at the competitions. Also, I've learned how to organize a group of students into some resemblence of a unit. I learned how to get things done on a deadline. I'm now much better at turn-based strategy games too .
Overall... I learned to deal with people. You wouldn't expect that from a robotics program, but you do. You learn to get your point across and support your ideas so that a random stranger can agree with you and say "lets do that".
And on a random note... I now know the names and purposes of random tools even though I had nothing to do with the robot .

I think that's a legitimate response
~Hubicki~

[Hubicki]

wait...
Sorry... I just realized my post was completely irrelevant .
Sorry Rob *crying*...
~Hubicki~

[sanddrag]

It has taught me to treasure every moment of sleep I can get. Just before the deadline I was awake for 40hrs straight with the exception of like 30mins to get the robot done. Nothin' like cutting tire treads at 2 AM.

[rlowerr_1]

For the last few writing assignments in English class this year I always tried to stick in something first related. For example a poem I wrote was about pollycord.

[Melancholy]

Well, whenever I see a number, I think of what team it belongs to...
Rob's post actually got me thinking about how the whole world should be more like FIRST. Trading gifts instead of exchanging money for them; the price unimportant as compared to the memory. Working kindly and fairly with an opponent so that you both will benefit; no hard feelings towards the "enemy". Everyone truly wins; you've all got a robot to call your own, haven't you? Free water.
I think FIRST has the formula World Peace here!

[sanddrag]

School isn't so boring when its applied to FIRST. In your math or physics class, you can calculate torque and speed and current draw. In PE, you can work out to build up muscle endurance for many hours of wrenching on your bot. In English class you can write many exciting tales such as The Day I Dropped the Clutch Balls or Gears, Sprockets, and Chains Oh My!! or The Battle Between the Drills and the Chiaphuas.

Trading works great at FIRST events but that is only because everyone uses the same things. Trading used to work on a small scale a very very long time ago but it only involved food, clothing, and tools. In today's world, there needs to be a system of money. Say you work for Burger King and every two weeks you get paid 20 gears. Your friend works for McDonald's and he/she gets paid 15 sprockets every two weeks. Then you both go to the maket to buy 12 cans of soup each. How much would it cost you and how much would it cost your friend? How many gears=1 sprocket? If you didn't had a universal currency, prices would be drastically different across the nation and you'd have a million exchange rates. Trading would set the country back many years.

As for free water, it is free. You can go all the way to the local pond, river, or beach and fill up and bring it all the way home. The cost we pay for water is not the water itself, it is the purification, pumping, plumbing, and bottling. So if you would like to go to the lake, install a massive pump, run miles of pipes, buy a very costly purification system, and then run more pipes into your house, and buy bottles for water you want to save and spend time filling them up, then, you can have free water.