Championship 2010 - Atlanta - Your Thoughts Please?

[JesseK]

[FTC]
The awesome --
The FTA's, Emcee's, Field queuers, and Refs were all very good and very enthusiastic about what they were doing. It was a lot of fun to work with them. They also didn't mind us coming in and sweeping the field during lunch and in the morning so our drive train got more traction due to less junk on the field.

The good, in a backwards way --
The pit queuers, no matter how frustrated we were with them, kept up in their diligence with pushing us out to the Ga Dome 45 minutes before a match. Eventually we thought about moving our pits out there since we were only back in our pits for 30 minutes at a time. Towards the end of Friday though, all of it worked out well when we left the pits an hour early and sat behind the black curtain for 50 minutes because the queuer told us to. The good part about this was that it gave me the time I needed to photograph alot of the passing FRC robots and also talk to the teams about specific details that our FRC team hadn't been able to figure out. Many thanks to Chris Fultz on 234 for the swerve explanation since I had to miss the conference due to being in queue so much.

The bad --
The inspection process took two hours because of the lines. We offered to help with inspections since I did them at a local event, yet our offers were rejected. Finally, after standing in line for an hour and a half, they added some inspectors who didn't really examine the robots and simply gave us check marks if we answered "yes". The huge delays caused us to miss two of the conferences we wanted to attend. One might cite the old saying "Get there earlier since the early bird gets the worm." but that simply circumvents the larger problem of inspecting 100 teams in a timely manner and thus I would reply "If every worm got there early the birds would have a field day!"

The ugly --
I polled the students after Wednesday and Thursday just to see how things were going on the judging front. Not a single judge asked them about their robot design during the judging session, and only one asked them about it during the day on Thursday. Additionally, I learned that the judges in the session kept driving home the point that FTC teams need to differentiate themselves from their FRC counterparts in everything from fund raising to outreach. Our FTC kids took the forefront of outreach into their own hands with FLL mentoring and CyberDawn this year, yet in what universe does it remotely make sense for them to completely separate their finances from an associated FRC team? I wish the judging process were more transparent in this regard; if we don't even stand a chance since we have an FRC team then I'd rather not let the students put so much effort into giving the judges information that they're just going to throw away.