The Spirit of FIRST

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by steelerborn

I know that we only have 6 weeks to build the best robot we possibly can. However what stops a team from building two bots, ship one, and then get an extra few weeks to practice driving with the other. I know that a few teams do this, and those teams are also very good.

This is totally against the spirit of FIRST, and gives an unfair advantage to those teams, and should not be allowed. It all comes down to if you think Dean would be upset, or not, with what those teams are doing.

I would like to know other views on this subject.

Thanks

Dean has made clear his stance on this before. Simply stated "Life isn't fair."
FIRST does not want to get into the business of micromanaging thousands of teams on what they do, how they do it, why, where or when they get together to work (the teams that strive for excellence in FIRST do as much outside the six weeks more importantly building their team than they do the robot. Because when you build the people and the team building the robot comes much easier when they learn to work together which enables them to build that second robot).
As you have already learned you don't want to open that Pandora's box about complaining about what other FIRST teams do. Every FIRST team is different from their sizes to funding to motivations and histories.
We've been in FIRST from year one and have almost every robot from all those years at our disposal to observe at our leisure at our build site to learn from. That is a huge help for us (not every robot is a great one but you can learn just as much from your failures as you can from your successes).
So is that fair that a handful of legacy teams have that history and long term mentors to help them while other teams have to learn on the go?
You'd be wise to learn from these teams that it is not just about the robot. Instead of looking at the robot on the field observe the drives team and see how they interact with their partners. Watch and see what the team itself is doing while the match is going on and after their match is going on what they are doing. Most of their success comes outside of the 2 minute and 15 second window when they are preparing for the nest round. I go to alot of events and the one thing that has always stood out to me is how some teams come so grossly unprepared to the field that could simply be remedied with some organization and simply reading the manual. You don't need to build a second robot to do that.