paper: Spanking the Children

[Jim Zondag]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

I know there must be something (multiple things) about it that keeps him coming back, but there was so much negativity in describing every pre-Logomotion game that it almost sounded to me like he hated the games before 2011. Maybe I'm just reading it wrong.

You read this wrong, this paper is about penalties, not about robot games.
I always love many things about almost every robot game, but I usually dislike many things about the way that FIRST handles penalties. This paper is about the dislikes and is focused on the problem of the day.

What type of game teams prefer is up to them. FIRST tries to change it up every year to provide a new engineering game challenge. I will say that I could build one good robot to play defense, and then just redeploy the same basic thing year after year after year regardless of the game. Yawn. It's effectiveness would be limited by the allowable defense rules of the game each year, but it wouldn't require much in the way of new design or features each year, since defense rarely does. Contrast this with playing offense, where completely new and unique solutions are required each year and require major engineering effort to refine to world class functionality. If FIRST is about Engineering (and Dean seems to convey that it is), then rising to the annual challenge is a big part of what this sport is about.