Collegiate FIRST competition

[Greg Needel]

Originally Posted by CJmango

As for the range of robot capabilities and the focus of the program, that's the beauty of the way we've structured this program. To start, there is a tremendously low barrier to entry for this sort of robot (closer to FTC than FRC). But more importantly, the winner in this event is not whoever builds the most agile robot... it's the team who executes, who reaches out to the FIRST community who is awarded our Event Champion. Sure, we'll select a game and play tournament style matches on Saturday, but there will be just as much focus on all the other things that go into the teams. If you have ideas on how to make that even more so, we would love to hear them!

I thought about joining the project on FIRSTforge to share this, but figure it is just as well posted here.

I love engineering challenges at the college level. They give students an ability to apply their knowledge beyond the classroom and in many cases keep students motivated to learn. Now there are an abundant amount of these challenges already (FSAE, Mini-baja, moon buggy, SME robots, Aero, IGVC, etc) each one of them presents a different opportunity for students to focus on a specific thing. That being said there are a few things that differ with the proposed format than other competitions which in my opinion will negatively impact the competition.

1) New game every year: While FRC is fun this way in a college environment all sports and most engineering clubs have the same rules year after year. This is due to the fact that most clubs take their previous works and build off of successes and failures. Iterative design is the key that keeps teams and clubs going, so each year knowledge can be passed from older members to younger members. Tackling the same or similar challenges allows people to focus on perfecting aspects of their systems rather than hurrying to try and get something complete.

2)Multiple challenges: One competition would be sufficient to challenge students to push their boundaries. By making multiple challenges with different feature sets required for each you are inadvertently causing the overall performance of each challenge to fall, as people will not be able to focus on solving a problem and with divided efforts comes less time on each element. In a sense it is being a Jack of all trades and a master of none.

3)Not focusing on the robot: This is the biggest one. To put it bluntly, I would never compete in a technical competition where the performance of my robot is not the deciding factor for becoming "the event champion." After reading through your handbook the "team spirit award" has the same weight as the best on field (or air) performance. With FRC the other awards (chairman's, EI) are all important because it is typically these things that put into perspective the big picture of what is important in life, yet the focus is still the robot. In a college environment I highly doubt that any dean would be satisfied hearing that his team was the best robot but lost to the team that had a cooler t-shirt and cheered louder. You are not catering to students in the sense that you want to inspire appreciation of Science and technology, you are presenting a no-nonsense engineering challenge where the robot performance should be the only metric. To give an example from the FSAE competition, there are different elements (braking, steering, acceleration, etc) and the requirements for a design presentation, but it is never a factor if a team spreads the message of FSAE in the community (although many teams do show their cars off).

All in all i think there is always room for another college engineering competition as different students have different interests and the goal is to challenge people within their specialty, but if you follow the model set by other FIRST programs and focus on things other than the engineering your program will not rise to the level of success it could achieve otherwise.