I loved participating in Lego League growing up. The key is that the building/iteration itself is a form of play, which locks adults out of the conversation and forces technical solutions, often requiring teamwork to overcome. Everyone wants to be the rockstar, but Lego League forced you to develop collaboration skills.
It's a shame most of that magic wears off in the high school level FRC competitions. It's still fun and a great learning experience, but people take it way too seriously. Our team would go up against NASA-sponsored robots or people who borrowed Toyota schematics for their drivetrain. After a certain level, it becomes less about what the kids are capable of and more about who has the most connections/highest funding.
Of course, the fun was never the winning for either program. It's just funny to me that Legos did such a good job of gatekeeping those meddlesome adults, and now Minecraft might do the same.
FRC at HS level has become an important credential for Ivy League admissions, with all the downsides that come with it. It’s incredibly difficult to compete with private schools with almost unlimited funding, bankrolled by b/millionaire parents. As a metric is almost useless now.
I was in Texas and would have to compete against these teams really early. It kind of sucked, we had a pretty good design imho but we just got steamrolled early.
It's a shame most of that magic wears off in the high school level FRC competitions. It's still fun and a great learning experience, but people take it way too seriously. Our team would go up against NASA-sponsored robots or people who borrowed Toyota schematics for their drivetrain. After a certain level, it becomes less about what the kids are capable of and more about who has the most connections/highest funding.
Of course, the fun was never the winning for either program. It's just funny to me that Legos did such a good job of gatekeeping those meddlesome adults, and now Minecraft might do the same.