Development of Writing Skills Through FRC

FIRST General Forum
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As the current president of Team 987: The High Rollers, my experience in FRC has definitely changed my life, no small thanks to all the users here who have taught me so much. I have been reflecting a lot on my experience, how to improve my team, and how to make the job easier on whoever follows in my footsteps as team president, and I realized that there is a lot of writing involved in FRC. Writing, although not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of robotics, science, or technology, is integral to communicating with judges, other teams, sponsors, etc.

So my questions are, do FRC and the other FIRST programs have a positive effect on the writing skills of their participants?
If so, how much of an effect, and how have you seen this in your own life/team?
And finally, why is this something that seems to be glossed over in the discussion about FRC and FIRST in general?

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The FIRST programs can have a positive effect on writing skills, if you are involved in the aspects of FIRST that reward that skill, such as writing award essays or website copy.

One of the biggest problems that I have with writing education in the US (and I write this as someone who scored highest on the written portion of their SAT, even through said person is now an engineer), is that there is too much focus in high school and college in the US on length. As you go further and further into high school and college, length is ever increasingly incentivized. Write 20 pages for this assignment, 50 pages for that, 80 mages minimum for your final…

And yet in the “real world”, this is completely the wrong metric to judge the effectiveness of writing by.

Writing is merely about the communication of ideas - no different than an engineering drawing.

The real world doesn’t care about length; they care about getting the idea across as efficiently as possible.

It’s taken me years to unlearn the “teachings” of high school and college, and to distill my thoughts and concepts to as few words as possible. In regards to this, I believe FIRST actually does help students learn effective writing habits by restricting the length of submitted essays.

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I’ve seen the Chairman’s submission process have an indelible impact on the writing skills of a significant number of students (and mentors). The key to effective writing is rewriting; the process of developing an effective Chairman’s essay truly emphasizes this notion.

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I think FIRST, and FRC especially, is specifically structured to incentivize students (and mentors frankly) to develop high level communication skills. Not only in their writing, but also through presentations, conversation, and multimedia.

Everything from awards submissions, grant writing, developing promotional material, and even keeping all team members up to date on meeting times, are all solid marketable skills that could be used in any career. By all reports these are even more valuable in a technical field because of the lack of focus these so called “soft skills” get in more formal education settings.

A lot of teams develop this sort of curriculum unintentionally or over time because creating a cogent argument that eloquently describes the work your team has done that season is the best way to do well in the competition.

In a field where every team has done something remarkable, fielded a competition robot in a very limited amount of time often under adverse conditions, the surest way to stand out is to tell the judges the clearest story.

It also happens to be the best way to convince businesses to sponsor your team, get positive press coverage, get school boards to continue to provide support, and convince lawmakers to pass helpful legislation.

By lining up the incentives of their competition to reward these communication traits, FIRST has essentially created an incubator for students to develop and hone this skill early in life and sets them up for greater success later on.

Side note: Exploding Bacon goes to a lot of technical conferences to represent FIRST and our team (outside of Vegas, Orlando is probably the biggest magnet for large corporate conferences) and every single time, without fail, the mentors will have at least one of the attendees marvel to them about how surprised they were that high school students could clearly and quickly explain something like a FIRST robot.
But like anything else in life, what you get out of the program will vary depending on what you put in to it. Bacon spends A LOT OF TIME putting our students in situations where they can improve these skills. Other teams might not put as much emphasis on this part of the program, which could be why sometimes these positive aspects can be glossed over.

Sorry for the novel, apparently i’ve been building up a backlog of posting during CD’s absence.

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At least personally, it’s been a pretty big impact. I was one of the main authors of my team’s Chairmans and WFFA essays, and despite pursuing CS out of high school, I realized that I enjoyed writing much more, and ended up switching majors. I definitely attribute some of that due to my experience writing in FRC.

I don’t think FIRST does a good job in general of promoting all of the non-STEM related skills that you learn in FRC like leadership, team organization, time management, finances, etc.