[moderated] pic: The 2006 NiagaraFIRST Triplets!

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by Elgin Clock

I once hear either Dean or Woodie say of the FIRST competition a while back something to the effect of "It's amazing; we have (x amount) of teams competing and no 2 robots are exactly alike."(...)

Sure, you may win a teamwork award or something, and sure, you may be inspiring to some extent, but I don't think these teams are reaching their full potential to create future engineers, and "outside the box" thinkers.

We started the year with about 40 interested students, and ended up with about 20 active. Most of the students who left were more interested in building robots than in doing other things like PR, fund-raising, or the animation competition. With so many hands and so few design-and-build tasks available, they were bored. We have discussed starting a new team just so more students can be hands-on in the design and building process. I don't see students being happy building carbon-copy robots, and am curious as to how it worked in the Niagara teams.