Update #20

[JackG]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

When someone cheers because your robot design you spent 6 weeks building and 5 weeks tweaking has been made illegal let me know how you feel. Because that was what was done today.

You know how I'd feel about those people cheering? "What a bunch of jerks." You how I'd react if someone rigged a bucket of water to dump on me as an April Fools prank? "What a jerk." In either case, the best idea is to shrug it off. Having thick skin does not mean being insulted by one thing but not another. A big part of life is learning to roll with the punches (i.e. all of them), not roll with the little ones and get hurt by the big ones. Sure, the cheering when your robot has been declared illegal can be quite hurtful, but how you react to it is up to you. What an opportunity for maturity growth and building character!

Those individuals who cheered at 469's apparent misfortune were clearly acting in a distasteful fashion far removed from any semblance of gracious professionalism. But that does not mean we cannot make these kind of jokes. We cannot pussyfoot around around potentially sensitive topics or jokes because a few bad apples might sour the fun. FIRST is about changing the culture, for crying out loud! We can never completely eliminate those who belittle us and drag us down, but we can build ourselves up to deal with them.

pschre is absolutely right when he brought up that high schoolers are not exactly quite prepared to deal with derision and hate. But then again, we're in a competition where we have high schoolers, not professional engineers, build and program robots! We're asking a lot out of the students technically, and they grow and learn because of it. Simultaneously when we're asking students to live up to the standards of gracious professionalism, is it too much to ask them to grow and develop in other ways?

tl;dr version: Why silence the rude ones and naysayers when you could have the students learn to deal with them?