[droithomme]

> I remember talking to a high up on the program at a FIRST robotics event who complained about them running so long.

Not surprising at all. Coached a FIRST team for several years. At this point they sell licensed robotics kits with canned instructions for kids to put together and those kids win because of time limitations. The teams that build from scratch and actually contribute discover or learn anything at all are intentionally blocked from winning. The entire program is total crap for retarded children. Meanwhile smart kids are off doing their own projects that are 1000x as complicated as the most challenging FIRST challenges. It's just turned into a money burn.

[pault]

Retarded is a bit much, don't you think? We are talking about children here after all.

[spyspy]

...what? They've always given out the Kit Of Parts and I don't recall those teams that relied on them ever winning anything substantial.

[JCharante]

> The teams that build from scratch and actually contribute discover or learn anything at all are intentionally blocked from winning

This is ridiculous, and I'm saying it is from the perspective of having been a student whose team finished fourth in FRC in a recent year (and won multiple events per year), and having volunteered and assisted multiple teams.

While it is true that a lot of lower resources teams may be better off going with commerical off the shelf (COTS) components, such as the Greyt Elevator and Greyt Intake, teams that perform at a higher level will build everything from scratch. Whether this means utilizing gussets or welding, building your own drive train or using the AndyMark prebuilt chassis.

While it is true that some kids may be better off doing research projects, there is nothing wrong with participating in a team. From my three years as a student, I was exposed to developing solutions to split messages up and verify data integrity when communicating over serial with external microprocessors, utilizing version control, setting up Continuous Integration on our repositories, first deploying apps from Cordova to developing Progressive Web Apps, which forced me to learn to use a VPS on Digital Ocean, running a docker swam on hyper.sh, and storing files on S3 and using RDS.

FIRST is what you make of it, and I'm personally glad that someone holding your opinions towards the program is no longer actively interacting with kids in the program.

[kerbalspacepro]

It's well known that the best teams are the ones that eschew using the kit of parts and have their NASA/SpaceX/Autocorp sponsors laser cut their robot chassis for them.