I was wondering if you would prefer a loose or strict interpretation of the rules.
Espessialy after this years issues surrounding teathers.
The rules are set for a reason, stay within them.
or
The intent is within the spirt of FIRST.
Wetzel
CuriousI think they need to stick to the rules more. They make them for a reason. If you do not follow the rules than you cannot compete. “Well, we don’t break the rule” is not an excuse.
I also think that they need to lay off a little on the ‘Spirit of FIRST’ thing. There should be more clear cut winners, and not as big of ‘everybody’s a winner’ attitude. They don’t tell high school athletes everybody’s a winner because they made it the team and came to the game. Just because a team gets to the game doesn’t mean they deserve recognition. Yes, building a robot is an acomplishment, but to many teams its no big deal now. They can build a robot fairly easily now. Starting a rookie team is, however, a big acomplishment, especially when they build a good robot without alot of experience.
Loose or strict interpretation…I feel like a Supreme Court justice…jk
Anywho, I also favor the strict. As the future lawyer, I was in charge that our team followed every rule albeitly. Yeah…it really really sucked when we got DQ’ed in a round in Seattle for unintentionally hitting a caster on the goal with our skirt and got bumped down 11 spots but we repaired the prob and eliminated the chance of that happening again. Personally I thought it was a dumb rule because it was a 1 time accident and we didn’t mean to lift the goal but we still complied and didn’t complain to the judges.
Strict rulings are good because it makes all of the competitions uniform. Also, our team spent $800 on building an extendor that would fit all of the rules. No tape measures, no strings on the ground because a strict interpretation of the rules would say that its illegal. Our extendor was really cool AND legal but it only worked 2/15 times because the springs were stored for such a long time. If we would have known that FIRST would have been so lax on those rules, we would have gladly used that $800 on another part of the robot or help send a team member to Seattle since we could only afford to send 1/3 of them.