lets take FIRST up a notch

FIRST General Forum
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Posted by Adam, Student on team #177, Bobcat Robotics, from South Windsor High School and International Fuel Cells/ UTC.

Posted on 5/5/99 10:48 PM MST

I love FIRST and all that it stands for, yet I wish sometimes it was more practical. Why can’t games be based on real world problems? With 300 teams searching to build the best robot to win a game similar to the problem, some good idea or prototype may come up. I like the design challenge of a new game every year, but i hate the fact that the result of 6 weeks of hard work go down the drain, to be salvaged as a practice bot or for parts. Couldn’t we encourage big corperations to suggest real problems for us to consider? Sure, what we build wont be a final project, but the company will have 300 prototypes, and ideas to look at!! Make the game fun and all that, but make it useful

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Posted by Frank, Coach on team #97, Psychedelics, from CRLS and MIT.

Posted on 5/6/99 7:26 AM MST

In Reply to: lets take FIRST up a notch posted by Adam on 5/5/99 10:48 PM MST:

As great as that would be, in the eyes of Dean the point of FIRST is to
create the ‘NCAA of smarts.’ It’s all about sports and making FIRST
just as much of a game as basketball is. He wants to create a fast
paced, interesting game every year that will capture attention from
the masses. It would be just another science fair if we were all
building robots to just complete a task…we’re building robots that
put on a show and inspire by playing a game. And yeah, it’s a shame that
robots go into storage after the year’s over, but wasn’t it all worth it?

Frank Bentley

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