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I don't pretend to know all the intricacies here, but IME school robotics competitions are mostly used by UMC strivers to pad their kids' college resumes (the earlier they get funnelled into this the better), complete with parents "helping out" in the class to get their kids favors from the teacher.
Inshallah this whole edifice will be plowed under and the earth salted.
That's fair, and it (along with the grant/scholarship ecosystem) are a serious frustration with these programs.
But there is a separation between the telos and the day-to-day work: even for students that are only getting involved to fill out their college resume, they at least have the opportunity to learn more. I've had students go into the program unfamiliar with the "plus" and "minus" screwdrivers, and come out knowing how to safely use a lathe; start without the ability to read basic Java assignment, and leave building a command scheduler library; to begin with a wire management scheme of 'rat's nest', and grow to something that's not horrifying; to start a stuttering mess and grow to actually give a confident presentation.
My bigger criticism of the programs are how poorly they play into some portions of that: the program designs make it very hard to justify teaching soldering, or electrical engineering, or good CAD principles, or serious ground-up manufacturing, even off-season. ((to be fair, because it's hard to find the mentor expertise. I can't CAD worth shit. Finding anyone who can run a hot air rework station and volunteer six hours a week is a pretty hefty lift.))
The Lego stuff has always been at the less productive end of that. You can teach basic programming with it even if the EV3 did a little better, and there is a public speaking and product development bit even if it's never been very realistic, but the design and problem-solving sides have always felt a little too much like encouraging students to solve by exhaustion rather than learning.
But it's noteworthy that Lego seems to be pulling toward the UMC strivers, that FIRST decided to nope out. It's even more noteworthy that result seems destructive toward FIRST, rather than anyone else, and will only become more so if FIRST doesn't shape up fast, and that they don't seem to have any route to do so in no small part because of the skills development segments that they've missed.
Sorry about all that, but I'd still rather see this buried. Maybe we can bring back shop class, or just return a few hours a week to the kids that they can use to go to a maker space rather than grinding legible college app activities.
I don't quite understand. Who is even doing this besides the strivers?
Is FIRST not basically the only game in town?
Anecdote, but there's a decent number who use it to see if their kid actually likes programming or STEM-adjacent stuff since the school programs are garbage and self-driven learning is very hit-or-miss, a smaller number who just insist their kid do something as an after school program to get them out of the house and FIRST is something that's still air-conditioned, and a lot of kids who get into it because it's an in-school program and less dumb than most of the other electives.
The dedicated strivers exist, and they're really obnoxious when you run into one that's made themselves a drive coach, but it's not the only entry point.
No, surprisingly. VEX V5 is the most comparable league to FTC, and it's technically a little larger in terms of just student count. The teams I mentor actually have pretty serious recruitment conflict because it's so much easier to run an 'award-winning' V5 team. FRC is pretty unique in scale, at least until you get into battle-bot style destructive stuff, but that doesn't really show up on the resumes. And there's a bunch of smaller programs like REFC Drone or the National Robotics Competition.
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Yeah, the guys working on robots in the real world were mostly diesel mechanics or HVAC techs or generator guys whose brother in law mentioned someone who was hiring over an NFL game, and who don't know what 'python' is('update the software' is treated as a mechanical repair and what it actually means is a question for tech support, which doesn't know either and suggests it when everything is working except the machine).
That's reasonable. There's some robotics industry stuff that FIRST helps toward -- most heavily machine shops, where you want someone who can actually work through g-code or particular CNC interfaces, and to a lesser extent you do see some LabView in 'the real world' for aviation research -- but it's definitely not going to get you more prepared to work in a median industrial factory. I'd like to raise the sanity waterline there, too, but I don't think I can speak the language.
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I mean sure, there's tons of jobs in robotics like that, but those robotics competitions were designed (at least originally) to funnel young nerds torwarts going to college for electrical engineering. Because the field needs large amounts of those, too, and for the last 20 years you could more easily make more money (unless you made it into Boston dynamics et. al) if you went into pure software instead. So a little PR for a career close to the hardware was a good idea in principle.
If you'd want more technicians straight out of school, you'd do something like an RC racing league with a build phase for the car/drone.
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