The Growing Gap in FIRST & on CD, and Our Responsibility to Fix It

FIRST General Forum
#25

Certainly these are all factors which contribute to the sustainability success of the team. Without them it is nearly impossible to keep the team going. My point was that when teams are registering for FRC and seeking grants, there is no way to verify whether those success factors are in place or not. Even if part of the registration process was to ask, “Do you have mentors? Do you have parent support? Are there enthusiastic student leaders?” - there’s still no way to monitor it.

When a team does not have things like that, it is imperitive for a mentoring team to teach the team these values, and help them to attain them. Existing teams sharing their expertise is one of the best ways to do this. Teams have to step up and help. I wouldn’t want to see a rule making it mandatory, not allowing a new team to register without a sponsoring veteran team.

#26

With respect only to the matter of helping ensure the viability of new FRC teams, and not in response to any particular post in this thread…

Perhaps a decentralization is in order?
Maybe FIRST has reached critical mass and it’s time to think in terms of establishing regional counsels – composed of members from multiple veteran teams.
They would (and should) have no specific authority over individual teams.
Just a willingness and ability to help rookie teams understand and embody the guiding principles of FIRST while also helping them survive and thrive as a competing entity?.

This seems more sustainable than individual veterans striking out alone and unsupported.
While the willingness of any one person to take on that burden is laudable, it just might not be realistic. The demands on that one person’s time might easily become too much.

I don’t view it as a tragedy that teams fail – some must.
I would view as a tragedy (just about) any effort to make it more difficult than it already is for new teams to form.
I believe being denied the opportunity to fail is far more disappointing than failure itself – because an opportunity to fail is equally an opportunity to succeed.

#27

Don, this point really spoke to me.

Due to the nature of our team’s structure, we were like this up until a few years ago. We knew of the existence of other teams in our area, and they knew of us but there was never any sort of communication or sharing between any of us. We had a narrow minded idea of what FIRST really was, and many of us, myself included, though that it was just a robotics competition. We always seemed to be one of those “nobody” teams at every competition we went to because of this.

After a while, there was a shift in thinking. As we grew through High School we began to learn more and more about what FIRST was all about. The biggest asset to us was Chief Delphi. Some of us spent hours reading posts and talking to people and learning . This change was reflected in our Robots, but more importantly in the bonds we built with other teams.

In retrospect, I realize the reason we didn’t know what FIRST was, was because we didn’t have anyone to teach us. Our mentors didn’t really put much worth in networking and meeting teams and getting out in the community and learning new things. I think the best way for us as a community to move forward is to make sure that we teach each team what FIRST is all about.

#28

I have sooo many thoughts on this thread… and agree with a lot of points here. While I don’t disagree with some of the issues, I want to offer a completely different perspective.

Look at FIRST from 30,000 Feet. The number of teams is growing, the number of students coming out of the programs is growing, the number of students entering engineering/STEM field is increasing! That certainly sounds like success to me.

If you pile some of the observations here together, FIRST may be looking at it more in a way that we teach our students. So many students today are AFRAID to fail. What I like about most FIRST teams & mentors, is that they try to show the kids that it is OK to fail. The guy who made the Dyson failed what, 500 times? Edison supposedly failed making the lightbulb hundreds of times as well. In order to have amazing success, you are very very likely to fail first. Maybe Dean has considered this. Maybe it is part of FIRST’s plan. Before we can get a FIRST team in every school, we will hit failures along the way. And while it would be great to have a success rate of 95%, its not realistic. And we have seen that some teams that fail go away and come back. Some teams that begin to fail merge. Others have different stories.

We helped a city school rookie team last year, and really gave it our all. I spent hours a week on the phone with their mentor, we met with them 4 times a week (they came to our place, we went to theirs), their kids had a great time. Unfortunately, they didnt make it back this year, but a student & parent that came to help/shadow during that time went off to start another rookie team that is alive and well and I believe has all the drivers to succeed. So out of one “failure” came success. Its really hard to measure things by just looking at team numbers.

The big picture and the GOAL of FIRST is to inspire students. And my answer to the question of are we meeting our goals is YES.

Is CD Cranky at times? yes. Should all of us do everything we can to help teams sustain? Of course. But are there some times where is ok to fail? Yup. Could all of this have been considered by FIRST? Of course.

I’m not saying things are necessarily perfect the way they are, but sometimes it helps to look at things from a different perspective.

#29

Good thought. I would only add, ‘and explore the possibilities, together.’ :slight_smile:

By teaching, we learn. By sharing, we grow. By exploring, we discover. Individual teams can do that and have done that since the beginning of FRC. There have been teams (MOE comes to mind), that have learned how to share early on and have had a huge impact.

We are seeing a remarkable occurrence with Team IFI working with each other. They began learning to share their resources and talent a while back. Now we are seeing the products of that sharing and exploration - and are consistently wowed.

When teams only think about the robot, they are not open to other opportunities. When teams don’t understand the importance of the build and competition with the robot, then they aren’t getting the full picture. The FRC program is a smart program. The only other program that I like as much if not more, is FLL - and for all the reasons that I love FRC: for the value and opportunities that abound for people to learn to work together and develop in areas of math, science, technology, outreach, self-worth, self-esteem, community recognition and support. It’s endless. But… if we only think about the robot or … we don’t do everything we can to build a robust team and compete well - then we are cheating ourselves, our teams, our communities, and the opportunities become limited and sometimes disappear.

Sustainability is no small thing. Achieving a consistent level of sustainability is no small thing. A community of teams achieving consistent sustainability is no small thing. A region of teams achieving consistent sustainability is no small thing.

Jane

#30

Could not agree more. Its a GAME! Lets have fun, take everything with a grain of salt and learn from it!

#31

So many students today are AFRAID to fail !!

I love this video

#32

Reading, studying, absorbing, understanding, and being totally blown away by posts and sometimes even - whole threads - is something that is good during times of stress, down times (holidays), a lazy weekend morning, or a sick day when pillows and quilts make it better. That is a good time to use the quotes to help you gain a sense of something good that you are a part of and that you are contributing to.

I just looked in the quotes and noticed for the first time, that they’ve put the page icon next to each of the quotes there. I don’t know if that is a new addition or not, but it makes it so easy for you to browse, study, read.

Another favorite thing that I’ve learned to do is pick out a couple of my favorite usernames who have inspired me or made me think or dig deeper. I look for more of their posts. By doing so, I have found gold, pure gold.

A cup of tea or hot chocolate goes well with delving into the wisdom of CD and helping your self grow.

Jane

#33

This has been there for a little while now. I will definitely second Jane’s recommendation to spend some free time just wandering through the depths of CD. There is a lot of knowledge and insight contained in the posts on this forum and the spotlights are great doorway to that content.

#34

Jay,

You are certainly not alone in your thoughts and feelings. The more the community grows, they more we bring in folks from “mainstream” society who, quite frankly, carry with them the very pathologies and mentalities that we are supposed to be addressing and changing in our culture through FIRST.

As exhausting as this sounds, I think it’s a matter of educating. In some cases over and over and over and over again … being pleasantly persistent.

I’ve been concerned about these growing trends for a few years now and have posted similar ideas elsewhere. Some of it may be pertinent reading, so here’s two for starters (I know I’ve spouted more about this stuff elsewhere, but can’t find it all right now):


We need LOTS of folks to step up and educate. I believe FIRST is well past finding many more of those “early adopters” who intuitively “get it” - most of the Andy Baker’s on the planet have already been beaten out of the bushes. The new folks coming in now to run teams frequently need much more education (let’s face it. TRULY trusting in GP and Coopertition is no easy thing given what we’re led to believe most of our lives in American culture).

there’s work to be done … namaste

#35

Thanks for the advice. For now keeping up with the current threads is keeping me busy but I am sure I will do a lot of browsing once the competitions are over. We will be in Boston tomorrow and who knows after that. I am sure that CD will help with the withdrawals that are coming when this season is over.

And sorry for straying from this thread’s topic.

#36

Rich is better at saying it subtly, my more blunt way to cut to the chase is:
Congratulations! You have been successful! You got what you wished for! Now get to work.

In other words, “The coffee break is over, it’s time to get back on your heads”.

Blake
PS: Google the last sentence if you don’t recognize it.

#37

I think it all goes back to what Dean has been saying, “We get what we celebrate.” As long as one of the main rubrics for Chairman’s is how many FRC, FTC & FLL programs a team starts this trend will continue. Sometimes I wonder how much mentoring really went into a team started this way and how much of it was, “Hey, here’s this thing called FRC and its really cool and here’s some money, have fun and we’ll see you at the regional.” I know that the majority of teams only know why a CA team won by the introduction at the awards ceremony. How can we expect to have teams not go out in droves and start teams without the proper guidance and support when all they hear is starting teams = Chairman’s?

I was excited when the kickoff speeches were finally geared towards sustainability. I was less than impressed that the tone didn’t seem to make it past Saturday afternoon.

Some thought provoking questions:

  1. Do you know the name and contact information for your regional director?
  2. Do you know the name and contact information for any team within a hour of your location?
  3. Can you point out the adult leader for each team at your local regional?
  4. Do you know at least two people on your local regional planning committee that aren’t your regional director?

I don’t think that FIRST is going to get better with a top down solution alone, it is going to take a grass roots effort to strengthen teams. That starts by teams getting off their “islands”, self imposed or otherwise.

#38

I have to agree with there seeming to be a lack of focus upon the core principles of FIRST, especially with GP. I am currently in my forth year in FIRST, and am a founding member of my team. In our infancy, T.A.T. was a team which tried to promote FIRST as an educational experience where students could come in and learn to appreciate how to use science and technology to solve a problem. In our first two years (somehow) we won first and second place at VCU, respectively. In our third year, we fell apart. There has been much debate amongst our team as to why we were not able to perform at our best for lunacy, and why we did so badly. It has taken me this long to finally realize that its because we, as a team, forgot about the true purpose of FIRST.
Now, in this forth year, we are still struggling with what it means to be a part of FIRST. I was one of the candidates selected by my team for the Dean Kamen Award, and one of the things I was asked by the individuals writing the essay was to “define Gracious Professionalism”. I responded:

The entire idea behind the concept of gracious professionalism is to promote the idea that a team doesn’t have to win the competition, and be the number one team to win FIRST. Gracious professionalism is, effectively, the means to prove to everyone that all the participants in FIRST are winners in their own right, and that you don’t need to build the best performing robot to be a winner.

It has taken me 4 years to have it sink in, but FIRST is not about being first at competition, it isn’t about winning. FIRST glorifies the fact that by having completed the build season, and by showing up at competition, you have already won. I am currently faced with the task of getting this point across to the rest of my team.
The thing that I find most ironic about this whole thing, though, is that in the opening video to kickoff last year, there was a quote being said, I believe by Dean, that “FIRST is much more than just building robots”… I don’t know how many other teams are willing to admit to the fact that they have lost sight of what FIRST is about, but I will firmly state that I prefer FIRST as it is meant to be, focusing on inspiring students to be creative, and to approach a difficult problem using their innovation, as well as the resources technology provides for us today; while at the same time being conscious of everyone else around us, and being willing to help everyone else get to the point of being able to accomplish this difficult task.

I feel that some of this may not come through as I had intended it. If you would like to make comments on this, or if you would like to offer advice, I am open to suggestions and criticism - I would ask that you PM me over posting to this thread, though. I am still learning what FIRST is, but I feel that it is my duty as a highly involved student on my team to try to remind my team what we should be focusing on.

Rob.

#39

Another Rant, it’s a little harsh

Just to bring this topic back to light because of something mentioned during Kickoff, here’s a quick pop-quiz for all you FIRST-a-holics.

How many teams are actively participating in LOGOMOTION, 4 years later?

Answer: Just over 2000

In what year did FRC reach it’s 2000th team?

Answer: 2007

How many rookies are there for the 2011 season?

Answer: Approximately 400

For those of you stumped on the point of this, 1/5 of all teams competing this season are rookies!!! STOP the unchecked growth and look towards sustainability for a change.

If you want to put an FRC team in every American high school, more power to you. If you think that it’s going to happen in the next 10 years, you’re simply being ignorant. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see this program expand. But at what cost are we expanding? Just because school X has FRC team 3### for 1-2 years doesn’t count as putting a team in that school.

It seems that by trying to reach Dean’s goal as quickly as possible we’re really just leaving students behind.

#40

It’s my personal opinion that we are not reaching Dean’s goal as quickly as we should be. If you look at FIRST as an investible business it actually looks fairly poor. The # of teams added every year is fairly static, and in an organization that should benefit from social growth rates, it doesn’t.

I think you feel a close connection to FIRST and I do to, but it was a game of numbers. I think there is a small percentage of people who will be impacted by first, and I don’t believe that the # of teams has any impact on that %. I actually love to see FIRST separating itself from an agenda, realizing that the less of an agenda it has, the greater impact it will have. Some schools will embrace FIRST, and some won’t, but by getting a team into a school for a year or two, you give them the chance.

If FIRST was to check its growth as you are implying it would fall into the chasm(see moore’s book crossing the chasm). Right now you see first trying to expand from the early adopters to the early majority. It knows that it will have to abandon some of the early adopters and innovators in order to achieve the goals it wants.

I believe you feel the way you do about FIRST because it had an impact on you, but again it think it was just a #s game and you were one of the few. Growth will allow for more cases like you. I feel that a lot of people get caught up in the religion of FIRST because of the impact it had on them, and believe that’s the right impact. I disagree and argue that we should approach FIRST with open eyes and let it have any impact it can, rather than a strong specific impact on a few. The marketing, business, and legal lessons that can be learned from FIRST can shape individuals just as much as the STEM.

#41

To this day, I have never met a student that felt that FIRST was a complete waste of his/her time. I am not saying they don’t exist. I just have never met one. I have met a couple thousand students from a couple hundred teams that got something more out of the program than they would playing a video game at home with their friends. I have met teams that only ran for one year. I have met teams that continue to struggle. I have helped with teams that eventually went under (249 Robodawgs).
If you are truly concerned about things. Find some of those 1 year wonders and talk to them about their experience. Was it leadership, was it money, was it ??? Better yet, do a large sample (100+) that way anecdote may actually be considered data, and see what you can do about fixing the conditions that lead to these teams demise.
Even your worst case hypothetical “win at all cost” team, is still likely better (when measured against FIRST ideals of GP, and Inspiriation towards Science and Technology" than they were the year before they had a team.

It is good to be aware of possible issues in the community, but some of it may also be a change in the way you are seeing things.

When you are little and you go to the carnival, everything is magical. All the games look winnable. And the rides look fun. Get a little bit older, and you start to learn that the relativley simple games are actually much more difficult than they seemed, and the rides just don’t have the same thrill. Go to the Carnival after getting your ME degree, and you begin to get scared for the people riding “the bullet” as you know that thing has been taken apart and put back together more times than intended and currently has 50% of its original fasteners. Guess what, the carnival didn’t change.

Same is often true of your first “real” job, your FIRST Robotics team, or even relationships. Its difficult to see the faults early on. After a while, it is difficult not to focus on the faults.

#42

For the past couple of years, I have been involved with the Central Ohio Robotics Initiative in an attempt to increase the number of teams in Central Ohio involved in FIRST. I have been a mentor for (here you go Dean:) FIRST team 1014 since 2003. I also coach cross-country and track & field. All of these experiences have given some insights on why it is hard to grow FIRST (I don’t think we have anything like unchecked growth, more like growth just barely larger than required to maintain health) and why it is hard to sustain a team.

#1 - The most obvious: It’s expensive to run a FIRST team. It is relatively easy to get funding to start a team, but sustaining one past the first year or two gets harder. In the current economy (the one we had for the past few seasons) it is even harder. Though I will say that my own anecdotal evidence suggest that the record corporate profits for the past year or so is starting to turn that around a little bit. We actually got some sizable money from new corporate donors this year. Thanks largely to a large, motivated group of parents and members of our local business community. If you can get about 5 years (plus or minus) into the program you can develop some more sustainable funding. And hopefully enough cash to bridge the gap in tougher times.

#2 - It is intimidating to start a FIRST team. Even for trained engineers the technical aspects can be intimidating. For a lot of teachers it can be downright scary. For a lot of engineers the thought of working with a couple of dozen teenagers is pretty scary. For the most part, it is VERY hard to start a school based team without a teacher being responsible for it. When you do get a teacher over the initial fear, you have to work to keep that teacher involved, because replacements are hard to find. One of the most important things we have been trying to do with CORI is to help support new mentors. I know that if I resign as the track coach, they will find a replacement for me. If my co-adviser and I both resigned from coaching FIRST in the same year, the program might well die.

#3 - Finding mentors can be difficult. Particularly for a teacher already struggling with the thousand and one things needed to get a new team rolling. Once you find mentors, you have to be able to find people with whom you can work. If the adults don’t get along things can go downhill quickly. (See #2: If the adult interactions get too stressful it is really hard to convince a teacher that all of the added work, responsibilities and stress are worth it.)

#4 - When the administration of a school or district changes, you never know how much support you are going to get. These kinds of changes happen every few years in most districts. The average tenure of a high school principal is fairly short and the average tenure of a superintendent is only a few years. When the support level changes it is really easy for a program to die.

I think that “team in every school” goal is the right one. In order to make sure that as many kids as possible have the opportunity to participate if they want to, we need to make FIRST ubiquitous. When we get to the point that starting a new school means “I need to hire a football coach, a track coach, a band director, a theater director, a robotics coach, …” then we will be in the right position. But getting there is a long, hard road.

#43

I think teams have a bit of a different opinion on what exactly defines sustainability.

While I’ve argued against unchecked growth in the past, I’ve also questioned my beliefs on the issue and come up with some questions that I can’t satisfactorily answer.

I think people need to ask themselves: do I believe it’s FIRST’s responsibility to partially finance teams? In general I’d argue pretty heavily against it. However, when most people say that FIRST needs to help teams be more sustainable, they mean that FIRST needs to either support the teams financially or to lower the entry costs (which amount to the same thing).

That is the crux of the argument for me right now. FIRST offers enough incentives to join the program. If the learning and real world experience isn’t enough, and the excitement and competition isn’t enough, the scholarships and friendships certainly should be.

FIRST promotes sustainability by sustaining themselves - the parent organization. If someone can suggest a way to promote sustainability among teams that doesn’t require FIRST to hand out more money in some way, then I suspect they’d jump onboard.

When FIRST says they want a team in every school, they mean it. If they had funding to make that happen overnight they would. They don’t, so it’s up to teams to do it themselves. I can’t think of any other sport where the parent organization funds the teams. Even in highschool sports, the schools end up financially supporting the parent body, not the other way around.

#44

it is a numbers game, so I don’t understand how you can say this. Just running through the numbers, every single year a new group of students enters every high school. every year another group of students leaves for college. impacting one set of students at a single school will never have the necessary outcome of changing the social norm,

And as far as FIRST helping to “fund” sustainability, why keep writing to our representatives to help us start more teams when we could be lobbying for state funding of regional competitions. We could be working to cut down the cost of registration, not by having first ‘give’ teams more money, but by having our states continually invested in our program at a level that reaches all students.