With the release of the teaser for the 2018 game, I’ve noticed a somewhat concerning pattern with the recent trend in game themes. Stronghold, Steamworks ,and now Power Up are all great themes, don’t get me wrong, but I feel as if they are too insular; their “target audience” seems to be mostly the types of students who would already be interested in a robotics competition. In my mind, one of the bigger goals of FIRST and FRC is to excite, educate, and expose science and engineering to students who would not normally flock to STEAM as a career or education choice. With games such as Rebound Rumble or Ultimate Ascent, there was an appeal for students from a lot of different interest areas and backgrounds. Everyone can relate to playing basketball or throwing around frisbees. Maybe this is just me and my ranting, but I think FIRST might want to reevaluate having stints like this where for 3 years the game appeals to much the same people that building robots to compete does…
I think something along these lines came up about a year ago about last year’s game. But let me ask you something. RoboCup has been around 20 years, since 1997. How many non-technical, Non-FIRST people do you know that have even so much as watched a match on YouTube?
There’s something to be said for being able to relate to the game, but in the end it’s robots driving around a field manipulating objects. Is it more important to try to create a game that people not interested in FIRST can relate to, or one that energizes and excites those that are on teams? For me personally, I’ve seen the energy and excitement that came out of the past 2 games do more to promote our team and FIRST than any of the sports-themed games did. And this year is looking like it will be our largest rookie class since we started.
So, let me ask you, as an anonymous new account created to post this, what have you observed around student recruitment the past couple of years versus the years we had sports-themed games? Are teams in your area larger or smaller than they were for Rebound Rumble, Break Away, or Overdrive?
This is a concern I share as well. The themes, while having created some very interesting games, seem to be more harmful than helpful for the mission of FIRST. I’m sure there are people out there who feel ostracized by the themes, maybe have no interest in them, or maybe turned away by how heavily pushed they are. How do you keep students engaged with a program they can’t love? I don’t like the forming stigma that FIRST is for the ren-faire going, steampunk loving, gamer kids. I want the “sport for the mind” theme back, which never really left, but has rather been buried under fluff and costumes.
I posted this back when Stronghold was teased, and it seems to be relevant every year.
All this complaining about the theme is pointless.
Kickoff will still come, robots will still be built, matches will still be played, a few champions will still be crowned, and a bunch of students will still get inspired.
All this will happen with a [STRIKE]medieval[/STRIKE] gaming theme this year. Get over it.
I certainly agree. This is my biggest hangup. If video games or steampunk were in a sea of themes like space, pirates, adventure style thing, maybe even a sport here or there, then I think that it would just be one of the themes, but we’ve had 3 themes that all explicitly do not bring people in from the outside.
From what I have noticed I’ve gotten a lot more eye rolls when explaining the game, and it takes a lot more convincing for people to be into it and join. While our team is much more involved now than it was 5 years ago when I was a student, I would attribute that more to working hard to change the culture than to the engagement level of the games.
That being said, these themes are still way better than 2015 in my opinion, but I wish that they would return to the “Sport of the mind” model. I think it provided the capacity for a much wider variety of game.
I will be very worried if this year the game is ball + themed scoring element then climb something. If the GDC retains that pattern with the themes then they will be in trouble.
Man, I’ve been on this soapbox for the past few years. I work with mostly lower-income kids trying to get them into the college funnel (or even just a career) and it has gotten significantly more difficult over the past years to lure kids away from something like band or football to go to LARP with robots, and that’s coming from a dyed-in-the-wool-D&D-playing-wrote-my-first-program-in-basic nerd.
Sadly, FIRST can’t be everything to everybody. It appears as though the majority are in favor of the themes, in general. Sure, some themes will turn some students off, well, so did Recycle Rush.
Interesting question in your response, Jon. I’ve thought on this subject a fair amount, and hadn’t posed the question to myself that you are asking. My team has grown at a steady pace, whatever the game’s theme. Recycle Rush was probably the least popular game with our students, though the theme was not nearly the hindrance that the game design was. I don’t love the 2016 and 2017 themes, but oh well. The games were pretty well designed, and offered great challenges for the students. Thanks for making me think about this issue differently.
It certainly is easier to tell someone that we are playing basket ball, soccer or Frisbee, but the eyes start to roll when you follow it up with, and then we balance on a teeter-totter, climb a pyramid or structure, along with traversing a field that is unlike a real basket ball court, or soccer field.
The other risk is the “oh look the nerds are trying to playing basket ball with their robot” reaction, that is only amplified by the end game that is so disconnected from the sport that the game piece is from.
Im on the fence about themes, and what Im on the fence about is the overtaking of the theme from top to bottom of the year. We have had themes in the past, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2015 that didn’t over reach they had a subtle theme that you could mention and then explain the game. The last 2 years when explaining the game I rarely brought the theme into the conversation because it just brought more confusion into it.
Do the themes hurt our recruiting? I’m not sure haven’t asked my students about it. I do know that our team size has gone down the last few years but Im almost positive that its a direct correlation to our lack of active recruitment and we haven’t run an FLL event (which has always been our biggest recruitment activity) in that time frame as well. I think we get the students we get because they already like STEAM, we might lose out on a student or 2 because of the theme but that’s more on us for not recruiting better than it is on FIRST for giving us themes that are not mainstream enough.
Does it really matter if the game has a theme more than the fact that teams have a theme? Our team’s theme was already steampunk. Some teams already had a medieval theme, some teams probably already have a retro theme. A lot of teams have overall themes and that’s what the new students are seeing before they see the game, a lot of the time. It all depends how much each team adopts each year’s theme.
I want to add that I’m personally guesstimating the amount of positive feels for each year’s theme among the students I work around: about 2500 kids in the core of a medium sized city. I think about this a lot. Knowing how to talk about each game to students, parents, school administrators and staff, sponsors, and community members effects how many people we can get on our side.
- I’d say that the 2016 theme had about 20% positive awareness of the idea behind the theme (Monty Python’s Holy Grail, or Medieval castle siege, take your pick). It was mostly a neutral response.
- Maybe 5% (if I’m generous) of our population think that 2017’s Steampunk was cool. Most students disparaged it.
- Probably 75% of the kids I work with play and/or appreciate games, and nearly all of them like retro pixelized stuff.
My team has always changed their theme every year, and for the last two they despaired when they knew that they had to choose between following through on their own ideas, or giving in and joining FRC with the official theme (they chose the former each time). This year, they readily abandoned their plans for an 80’s theme, and are pretty excited about it. So, I guess I am appeased for the time being.
Of course I’m not the one you were asking but my experience on my own teams and from talking to lots and lots of coaches when I was the FIRST Senior Mentor, the biggest reason that teams grow in size significantly has nothing to do with this year’s game. The biggest reason that teams grow significantly is the previous year’s success. If a team makes to CMP or DCMP they usually grow, often quite significantly, the next season.
On my current team we have had twice as many students express interest and actually start coming to the limited number of meetings we had this summer based on the recognition we received at the school because we qualified for CMP, and did pretty good there.
One definite plus to the most recent games as far as recruitment goes is the teaser releases the name and general theme of the game in the fall when it is time to recruit and train new students. It is very rare in my experience to gain new members after kickoff. With the past games based on a form of a traditional sport the logo gave the game away, so not conducive to releasing it before kickoff. So the fact that it is based on a recognized sport doesn’t really do much for attracting new students in that season.
Is there anything right now more mainstream than video gaming? Particularly among <18 year olds? Video games aren’t “geeky” or “nerdy” anymore, they’re a fabric of mainstream society. Obviously there are “hardcore gamers”/“PC master race” gamers and similar who can be very off-putting to outsiders, but that’s true of virtually every subculture. Casual gaming is a cultural staple now, to the point where video games have higher revenue than film and music combined.
I’m honestly stumped as to themes that would be more mainstream than video games. Perhaps breathing.
I agree. Video games are far more ubiquitous among high school students than football, basketball, frisbee, etc.
Ultimately, the execution of the game is far more important than the theme.
Though perhaps the starting point of “basketball with robots” makes it easier to build a good game than “robots that recycle stuff” or “dueling steampunk airships”?
Yes, but (and this is a serious question), is the “retro” video game style “in” in the same way? I honestly have no idea how much overlap there is between people who like playing Candy Crush or Angry Birds or the like and people who like (or at least appreciate the nostalgia of) playing a game like Super Mario Bros. 1.
As a nerd in my mid-30’s who grew up on these now-classic games I’m really looking forward to this year’s theme. But do even the “nerdy” high-school students appreciate the now-retro games that came out before they were born?
Like I said, honest questions, since I have no idea and I don’t have many regular interactions with high school students outside of FIRST events.
Every time this conversation comes up folks are worried about appealing to non-traditional STEM kids (Sports, band, etc).
Some of those kids might be enticed to get into STEM, but most of those kids have found their passion and are not likely to leave it. That’s a tough sell.
The larger audience we should be trying to appeal to is the enormous number of kids out there that WOULD be interested in STEM but are simply not aware of it or don’t have access to it.
We haven’t even scratched the surface with those kids yet:
There are over 26,000 public high schools and over 10,000 private high schools in the US alone. That means we haven’t even broken the 2% mark yet of FRC teams in High Schools. You can bet there are large numbers of kids in all of those schools that don’t have band and sports as their passion but are into “nerdy” stuff.
How about we focus on that low-hanging fruit first and worry about the sports and band kids later?
And IMHO: Themes do get the attention of those kids.
Disclaimer: We have been doing the annual Themed Animations for the past couple years, so we are little biased here at AutomationDirect …
I definitely see your point here, but let me offer you a different one. I personally saw FIRST in 2012 when one of the local teams was doing a demo, saw basketballs and went “that’s dumb”. This all due to being the naive kid I was, I fell in love with it once I found it again in 2016, going “wow robotics is cool.”
I have no problem with themes, so as long as the games aren’t designed around themes, the initial appeal is always the hard part. Sports, robots, not everything appeals to everyone, but I personally believe that most people can relate to gaming due to the wide appeal now. Everything from mobile games to PC gamers, we’ve never had quite this global level of understanding of a single modern topic.
I mean, Twitch is in a partnership with FIRST, one of the top 50 most trafficked sites on the internet. If there was one time in modern FRC that FIRST got the theming right, I think it’ll be this year.
One note about designing games is that themes give them the ability to tie together otherwise unrelated game mechanics. The 2016 game doesn’t happen without the theme, really. Crossing terrain and shooting dodgeballs made for a fun, exciting, interactive game, and I’m not sure how else you get those game mechanics together in a cohesive way.
I think the themes are fine, it comes much more down to the execution of the game- they nailed it in 2016, not as much in 2017.
This is actually a very good point. I think my biggest issue is that I’ve interpreted FIRST’s push to get those “outside the tent” involved is that I’ve been thinking of those like the sporty kids and ones traditionally unlikely to choose STEM. I guess it depends on if they’re trying to get new teams formed in the other 98.5% of high schools right now or reaching more of the kids with the existing teams. Very different strategies for very different problems, and I think that the themes might actually be a good strategy for generating new teams at those schools.