Competition becoming too big?

FIRST General Forum
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Posted by Jason Flanagan at 04/10/2001 10:07 PM EST

Student on team #250, Dynamos, from Shenendehowa HSE and General Electric, Verizon, .

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I saw a thread lower down that was talking about it but I’ll start a new thread. Now this isn’t about the amount of teams, thats great its amazing. This is about the access to so many parts and barely using anything in the kit itself except for the motors and the controls. This gives teams with sponsors that give a ton of money a large advantage because they can buy anything they want. I think the competition should regress back to using mostly the kit so to even things more out. Also this would help students get involved even more because with this little kit of parts the students could design the robot very simple and not so intricate that they couldn’t build it themselves. I have a strong grudge against these robots that u can tell have no chance of being built by students, with all these smooth running systems that are built by teams of engineers. I’ve said some pretty brash things in this post so correct me where I’m wrong, and respond nicely cause I’ll apologize in advance for stupid things I say.

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Posted by Pamela at 04/10/2001 10:22 PM EST

Student on team #166, Techno Insanity, from Merrimack High School and Texas Instruments.

In Reply to: Competition becoming too big?
Posted by Jason Flanagan on 04/10/2001 10:07 PM EST:

While it would be nice to even out the playing feild for all teams (pennyless ones like mine :P), I feel that limiting resources to just the kit would be a bad idea. Why limit peoples ideas into a small plastic crate? Let the teams with money run wild and spark other teams imaginations with their outrageous designs! It is great that these teams are able to take full advantage of their capabilities! (wouldn’t that be nice). The only thing is, yes, I find it wrong when teams robots are built entirely by engineers (it’s not always for the better either!) it uninspires students, makes them lose interest, and doesn’t allow as much for their growth in knowledge. The point of FIRST is to inspire High schoolers, and by not being able to fully participate this idea gets lost easily, and without teams with money and beutifully engineered bots at competitions, small teams like mine would not have anything to aspire to.
Pamela 166

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