[BB] What Do You Want at St. Louis Championships

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by EricH

I've been there, and I'd say that it would be possible to get those extra fields if and only if FTC and FLL and JFLL were held in the America's Ballroom (upstairs from the convention halls) and the theater in the complex and the other side rooms, or in a lobby area on the second floor. That would clear a space where Franklin and Edison typically go, and open up Einstein for use in matches. Some clever floor arrangement could get the rest of the space. I don't think it's worth the effort, though, particularly since now you're taking FTC and FLL robots up stairs.

It never made much sense to me why the FLL field was on the floor of the Dome. I competed in the FLL World Festival in 2003 and 2005. In 2003 it wasn't on Einstein, and in 2005 it was.

We were a bit disappointed in 2003 to find that we were somewhat of a "side show" to the big robots. That said, we were near the pathway between the pits and the field, so we got to watch robots stream by all day. However, being in our own little world meant we could speak to the judges in a normal speaking tone, and watch other robots compete.

On the floor of the Dome, we did get to see the FRC robots competing, but they still were never really introduced to us (I was already on 1276 though, so I took a great interest! ). That said, it still felt sort of like a side show because we couldn't hear ourselves think over the noise from Curie and Galileo. The path was also not well marked between areas (this may have changed in the past 5 years) so we managed to get very lost between the GWCC and the Dome.

The mesh never seemed quite right. My dad was really interested in FRC in 2003, so he went out of his way to talk to FRC teams about the program, and we even had one team (the robot was green, I think it was MOE) who showed us kids all sorts of neat-o robot stuff. In 2006 when 1276 went as an FRC team, we went out of our way to show our robot to Maine's FLL team. Through official channels we learned surprising little about the big robots travelling every which way round us.