View Full Version : The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
Chris Hibner
12-05-2013, 09:01
Having a due date is both sensible, realistic and meets the demands that we see in the "real world" .
I don't think I'm advocating removing the competition events. As long a everyone is attending a competition, a "due date" still exists.
Mentor burnout is a big problem. Making the build season longer will enhance the problem. I may be wrong about what I am about to say but I doubt it. The longer we make the season, the longer people will take to do exactly what they do now. Procrastination is the biggest issue I see with so many people. How many students do you know that are given 6 weeks to do an essay or project and they don't start until the last minute.
If we don't start until the last minute, how is a longer build season increasing burnout?
If we don't start until the last minute, how is a longer build season increasing burnout?
I think we're mixing different issues here. My take on the mentor burnout issue was that some teams are doing more work than they should be in the time available and that leads to burnout. The proposed solution is to give them more time, they'll keep the amount of work the same, hours per unit time goes down, and burnout reduces. Some say they would stop building a practice bot which reduces the total work. Other say they would still build a practice bot to reduce wear and tear on the competition bot.
Overall, I'm not convinced it will have significant effect on burnout. The burnout is driven more by a desire to be competitive than by the task at hand. There will always be ways to push yourself harder to be competitive.
The other issue is how to best help consistently under performing teams. The "give them more time" argument fits nicely in this thread. However, as some have pointed out, it isn't necessarily that easy. In general we don't know what drives these teams. If they are in a place they are happy with, feel they are inspiring their students, they may not need help. Others may need help but don't know how to get it. Time may or may not be an issue.
If we don't start until the last minute, how is a longer build season increasing burnout?
The same way I write an essay. Have Word open for 3 weeks and type in about 5 words an hour while browsing CD, so I feel like I'm working when I'm not, then doing it all in one weekend.
Not building a second robot is not an option for me being in Michigan and trying to field a somewhat competitive robot and have a sustainable program.
And yet, many people here are saying that the extra time spent in an extended build season is used "by choice". Clearly, the level of competition demands that you build a 2nd robot. How is that different than the level of competition demands using the time in an extended build season?
Since this thread has turned to money, think of it this way: What if teams were asking to be able to spend over the limit on individual components? Or how about the total cost for the robot? (While some teams would find it difficult to do this, others might not.) If teams could gain a competitive advantage by spending $10,000 on a robot, but said "those of you who don't have that much money don't have to spend that amount" I think the discussion might be a bit different. Why is there a cost limit? A motor limit? A battery limit?
Now, I recognize that FRC isn't fair. That's not the way the world works, but there are limits placed on competition (weight classes, salary caps, NCAA limits on practice time, etc.). We have our own in FRC - often for a good reason.
With regards to Jim's low OPR argument, I completely agree. We should be focusing on the teams that need support and help. Clearly, the issue isn't that 6 weeks is too short - the teams we're talking about (and we've all seen them) are the teams that are missing fundamental structure, and that comes down to two major elements - the most important being mentoring, followed by money.
On the tangent discussion regarding overall cost, I agree with Jim - sometimes it seems that FIRST's math doesn't quite make sense.
- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox
A bunch of things gnaw at me. Here's a big one:
Competitive teams will be "forced" to spend more time than they already do if we had an open build season.
If that's true, then those same teams are already "forced" to build a practice robot and continue working on their 30 lbs of parts. It changes nothing.
I am pretty frustrated that when people are confronted with the concept of more flexibility, they twist it into the fatal certainty that they will be "forced" to work to the point of exhaustion.
If that's true, then those same teams are already "forced" to build a practice robot and continue working on their 30 lbs of parts. It changes nothing.
Which is why you see nearly all the "pro-6-week" posts including "remove the withholding allowance". Because you're correct: we already ARE forced to work for 4 months straight to stay competitive. I for one would like to be able to be competitive WITHOUT having to work for 4 months straight. This year, other commitments forced me to not be able to work past mid-february. I felt like I was abandoning my team, even though I had been there most weekday meetings throughout build season.
2012 was the same way: we met at nearly the same tempo between mid-february and mid-march, because the shooter needed tuning/lightening and the aiming code needed changing.
2011 was the same way, but even more intense because we qualified for championships and were doing a "big year": mid-feb to mid-april was minibot revisions, claw revisions, gearbox revisions, code revisions, vision system revisions.
In each year, the revisions that we did between "end of build" and competitions made pretty enormous upgrades in our robot's capabilities and kept us competitive. If we hadn't, we would have done much worse.
The people saying "make it 4 months officially, it'll make it easier" are ignoring a truth: it already is 4 months. It has already burned me (and I'm sure, others) right out. Allowing MORE access to the robot would make it even worse. We have seen the 4 month build beast, and it is awful.
Here's another one that bothers me: we shouldn't lengthen the build season, because teams just waste the first part of it anyway, in spite of working hard during that period of time.
Here's what is in question:
1) Would the longer season result in worse burnout?
2) If so, is improved robot performance worth the cost?
Here's what is not in question:
1) Would a longer season result in better robot performance?
You can argue that some teams will insist on shooting themselves in the foot no matter what by wasting time or following bad processes or designing beyond their means, but why on earth would that sort of pessimism be the basis for the FRC rules? If you think the longer season wouldn't improve robots due to complacency when the deadline isn't close enough, then FRC might as well shorten the season. Or teams can simply take the first two weeks of the season off and find out if it makes any difference.
Which is why you see nearly all the "pro-6-week" posts including "remove the withholding allowance". Because you're correct: we already ARE forced to work for 4 months straight to stay competitive. I for one would like to be able to be competitive WITHOUT having to work for 4 months straight.
Removing the 30 lb allowance isn't enough. You'd also need to ban practice robots.
A bunch of things gnaw at me. Here's a big one:
Competitive teams will be "forced" to spend more time than they already do if we had an open build season.
If that's true, then those same teams are already "forced" to build a practice robot and continue working on their 30 lbs of parts. It changes nothing.
I am pretty frustrated that when people are confronted with the concept of more flexibility, they twist it into the fatal certainty that they will be "forced" to work to the point of exhaustion.
Very good point. Unfortunately some people are arguing against a change because they "think" others will do this or do that, that they have no control over themselves and they will work themselves to death.
I told you what I will do with my team if we have unlimited access. Tell me what you will do with your team, not what you think other teams you don't know anything about may do. Otherwise this discussion here is meaningless.
Removing the 30 lb allowance isn't enough. You'd also need to ban practice robots.
Which is why all my posts have said "make it so the operator control software doesn't work between mid-feb and the 1st week of competition"
Even better alternate: make it so the cRio firmware won't run between mid-feb and at competition. Have a "competition dongle" or something that must be installed at competition to make it work. Permit cRios to work after the championship date. People could use past year's firmware all the time (so past robots would be available for demos and whatnot), but if they flash to whatever the latest firmware is, it'd be restricted to the current season's dates. This could also be used to enforce fix-it windows.
Which is why all my posts have said "make it so the operator control software doesn't work between mid-feb and the 1st week of competition"
Althought I disagree, I have to give you credit for having an argument that's internally consistent.
You'd probably be better off banning practice robots if you want to keep people from working after bag day. Your solution doesn't prevent people from working in March, for example.
pfreivald
12-05-2013, 13:36
Banning practice robots isn't a consistent part of my argument, certainly. If there was no withholding allowance, a practice robot would allow you to do just that -- but there'd be no need to meet at the grueling build season schedule... You could scale back a LOT and still be competitive.
So I think people are, in essence, correct: it's already a four month schedule, and addressing burnout would include eliminating the withholding allowance. Otherwise, when we got knocked out at Buckeye this year, I wouldn't have simultaneously thought, "Awwww" and "Thank God".
DampRobot
12-05-2013, 13:36
Which is why all my posts have said "make it so the operator control software doesn't work between mid-feb and the 1st week of competition"
Even better alternate: make it so the cRio firmware won't run between mid-feb and at competition. Have a "competition dongle" or something that must be installed at competition to make it work. Permit cRios to work after the championship date. People could use past year's firmware all the time (so past robots would be available for demos and whatnot), but if they flash to whatever the latest firmware is, it'd be restricted to the current season's dates. This could also be used to enforce fix-it windows.
This would have two effects. First, it would put an end to the current allowance in the manual that lets teams develop software at any time. Not allowing them to run it on the C-Rio pretty much stops them from being able to test it and work on it in general. Let's face it, software often gets pushed to the very end of build season (and beyond). Maybe the goal is to make everything fit into 6 weeks, and if it doesn't "too bad," but I for one don't think it's a bad idea to let programmers tinker with the code before competition, build season or not.
Second, this wouldn't do anything to stop practice robots. If this restriction were in place, I would advocate very heavily on my team for them to create a practice robot, and run it with either an old C-Rio or a Arduino or something. Practice robots aren't just for practicing, they're mechanical systems development tools too. And it would create a massive "they're cheating because they're using a practice robot!" uproar when top teams do just that to stay competitive.
I think this could be a better thread if people acknowledged certain self-evident truths. I'll start by agreeing to a few:
1) Mentors (and other people involved in FRC) do get burned out and it is a problem for the long term sustainability of FRC.
2) If the build season went into March and April, it would have affect other things people want to do during those months (more than it does currently).
3) In an open build season, some teams would work very hard the entire time.
4) Most teams would probably put in a higher number of total hours if the build season was longer.
5) As a result of a longer build season, some individuals would end up putting in enough additional time to cause issues in their lives.
Here are the ones I'd like other people to acknowledge:
6) Teams get to choose how they want to run themselves, including setting their own schedules.
7) It's possible to meet fewer times per week over a larger number of weeks and get the same amount of work done.
8) It's a problem that so many teams' robots can't play the game, or can barely play the game. More time to work on the robot would help many (though not all) teams overcome this problem.
9) An open build season would reduce some team expenses for some teams, including expedited shipping and practice robots.
10) Many teams already work very hard after the bag deadline.
Second, this wouldn't do anything to stop practice robots. If this restriction were in place, I would advocate very heavily on my team for them to create a practice robot, and run it with either an old C-Rio or a Arduino or something. Practice robots aren't just for practicing, they're mechanical systems development tools too. And it would create a massive "they're cheating because they're using a practice robot!" uproar when top teams do just that to stay competitive.
Easy:
1) If you're using an arduino, you're already restricting yourself so heavily that you probably won't learn much, so I don't care. You certainly wouldn't be able to run/test PIDs, vision, or other really complex systems.
2) If you're using an old cRio, WPILib could be modified slightly each year so that it becomes very difficult to update and maintain your code between the "2013 code on 2012 crio" and "2013 code on 2013 crio" versions.
Also, all you'd get out of it would be practice (on a non-representative robot controller like an arduino or using an old version of WPILib). Since there'd be no withholding allowance in this hypothetical world, you wouldn't be able to tune or upgrade anything unless you planned on manufacturing that upgraded part in the pits at your competition.
It would obviously still be possible to make a practice robot (FIRST can't ban the building of robotic devices), but if rulechanges were in place to make it very difficult and make the payoff uncertain, fewer teams would do it, which in turn would mean fewer teams would feel the need to build one to keep up with the Joneses.
I should also mention that the firmware-modification solution would be an extremely hard-line approach. I'd be fine with just getting rid of the withholding allowance. Eliminating the withholding allowance gets rid of a large amount of the gains you see from a practice robot anyway (since you wouldn't be able to bring in the revised components you made).
I've read the entire thread, and I favor open build season. But I'm also sympathetic to the problem of mentor burnout. Here's my proposal:
1) Extend the bag deadline closer to the start of Week 1 events. I suggest Saturday at midnight local time. Now that few teams ship robots to Week 1 events, I don't see a good reason to keep the robot in a bag for those few days.
2) Allow every team a bit of robot access during each week of the competition season; perhaps 4 hours. (Not my idea - but I agree with it) The goal would be to allow some robot work without providing an incentive for teams to be in their shops 24/7.
One could also shrink the fabricated parts allowance, but that becomes less consequential if you have robot access time each week.
I guess my question is this:
How much time does your team need before they are completely happy with their robot and would change nothing else?
The point that I'm trying to make is that with the open build season many people are currently suggesting there is still a finite amount of time and that time is not long enough to make a perfect* robot. As such we will likely continue to work as hard as we do now for as long as the season will allow trying to be our best.
If the season was year round I believe that we would comfortably be able to make the best robot possible for our team without the intensity of the current season.
The point being, if you provide enough time for teams to build such that every second isn't valuable then all teams can afford to take long, sustained breaks from FRC without affecting their performance on the field and the program isn't all-consuming for students and mentors.
Thoughts on this?
, Bryan
*as good as your team can be
AllenGregoryIV
12-05-2013, 17:06
I told you what I will do with my team if we have unlimited access. Tell me what you will do with your team, not what you think other teams you don't know anything about may do. Otherwise this discussion here is meaningless.
I like this idea.
3847s Current Build Schedule
- 48 days straight (we meet three days before kickoff as well). This is mostly because we like spending time together. We could spend a lot less time and still build the same robot.
- Pretty much 7 days a week during competition season as well unless I'm away at a competition where the team isn't competing.
- 2 weeks are spent prototyping
- the goal is to have the practice robot done by the end of week 4 and then the real robot by about week 5 and half.
- 2 Kitbot Build Days 2nd and 4th Sundays of build season
- 1 Bumper Build (super bowl Sunday morning)
- 1 weekend scrimmage (only a 1/4 field but it still helps)
- a huge amount of time is spent trying to make the practice robot the same as the competition robot and it rarely ever gets that way.
No Bag Day Schedule
- We wouldn't meet the first few Sundays and the initial meeting hours wouldn't be till 10pm or 11pm like they currently are.
- I would be able to go to another team one day each week and help them. I try to do this anyway but it's a lot harder with our normal schedule.
- Without the need to build a practice robot those resources can be diverted to other places. We only need to make two or three of everything instead of 4 or 5 like we currently do. Meaning we would could help other teams machine parts with our sponsor resources since we are using less.
- We would have our practice field open to teams every weekend except for those when we are at competition. We already meet with some teams during competition season but it's only the teams with practice robots.
- One of these practice days would also be a pre-inspection event for local teams. How to enforce this is something I have been thinking about for a while. I think by working with regional directors and organizations that provide funding to teams to put these events in as grant requirements could provide a big incentive to teams.
Grim Tuesday
12-05-2013, 17:21
I think the best argument against extending the season is this:
If it were extended, there are two options each team must choose.
Meet as often as possible/keep their regular build schedule that they used in the 6 week season but extend it for however many weeks possible. This would give that team the maximum competetive advantage and you can be sure that teams like 469 and 1114 will use this option.
Meet less frequently to avoid burnout. I spoke with our teacher advisor and asked him what he would do if the build season were extended. His response was "we'd meet three days less a week" (we currently meet 6 days a week). His logic was that we would need to help students, mentors and himself avoid burnout and lowering grades, and it is completely valid logic.
So in the end, if you're a team worried about mentor or student burnout maybe your team [or portions of your team - like your school administration] aren't quite as invested in the competitive aspect of FRC, you'll end up meeting less frequently or be forced back into a 6 week season.
We are currently forced into a 6 week hard limited build season with maybe 1 or 2 build nights after bag. We have to meet off site if we want to meet more frequently. Again, this is because our sponsoring teacher isn't terribly invested in the competitive aspect of the season. He knows that we can make an eliminations worthy robot with our current build schedule and does not see a huge increase in the impact of the program on students when the team wins or when they don't. So we are simply unable to meet as often as some of the students and mentors would like after bag.
Maybe this is an isolated case but I suspect it effects some other teams as well. It may not be their teachers but it could be their head mentor, their schools, their administration, their sponsor, their funding, the willingness of their students, their students parents, etc... that stops a team from meeting as much as their most dedicated members (who might be any of the aforementioned groups capable of blocking meetings!) may wish, and it is out of the control of those members.
I don't think we want to be increasing the gap between the elite teams and 'the pack'.
Tetraman
12-05-2013, 18:35
Tell me what you will do with your team, not what you think other teams you don't know anything about may do. Otherwise this discussion here is meaningless.
174's Current build schedule:
We have split the team between "crews", and each crew meets at different days throughout the week. The days we have for work is Tuesday, Thursday and Friday after-school, 2:30pm till 8pm or later depending on the need. Saturday work sessions are from 9am till 4pm or later depending. We meet all of these days throughout the entire build season. We also have a group of students and mentors who work of site. These students/mentors work very long nights, typically around 11pm, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and other days the extra work is needed.
How we would deal with open build:
Rinse and repeat, only skipping a few days before our competition weeks. While we could deal with the additional school work hours, the off-site team (which is the biggest core of our build students and mentors) will be beyond burnt out.
We have already had a team discussion about mentor burn out before this thread was started, and I can say that I am very scared for our mentor sustainability if additional build time was given. That said, we can adapt - there are problems with our system as it is and working to fix it.
plnyyanks
12-05-2013, 18:55
Tell me what you will do with your team, not what you think other teams you don't know anything about may do. Otherwise this discussion here is meaningless.
1124's current build schedule:
We meet Monday-Thursday 6:30-9, Saturday 8-5, Sunday 12-5
This schedule runs from kickoff until we're done competing. The only changes happen when our school is on break (when we meet more often and for longer) and the Wed-Thurs after bag/ship day (which we take off to recover). Team members show up as they're needed and are pretty much free to make their own schedules and can choose their own time commitment; most members are there 3-4 days a week, but can be there more or less at their own discretion.
If we had an open build season, what would change? Probably nothing, or very little. We're already at the ceiling of the required commitment, and our existing schedule already burns us out (you should have seen me after CTR this year - I was an exhausted mess, but I digress). If anything, our stress levels would drop significantly. Not having to build a second robot would reduce budgetary and emotional strain. We'd get more practice time with the actual robot.
Now, I don't know if an open build holds all the answers, but I see some problems it would reduce (however, not being a mentor, I can't speak to all the unintended side effects that might arise, nor how it would affect mentors specifically). But with strict regard to 1124's meeting schedule, I think not much would change from the way it is now.
dtengineering
12-05-2013, 19:26
Well, apparently not everyone is "burned out"...
A) You're still surfing Chief Delphi
B) 90+ teams have signed up for IRI
While the title of the thread is relating the six week build period to mentor burnout, I think Jim's posts have really helped me refocus my opinions on the six week build period to consider the teams with lower performing machines... many of whom are not on CD.
I'll go so far as to say that whether the build period is six weeks, or 52 weeks, some teams will continue to put in more time than others, and some mentors will continue to feel "burned out".
But if we look at how altering the six week build period might give higher performing teams more time to mentor and assist lower performing teams, and focus on making everyone better... well, the best antidote to burnout is success!
Jason
I have one question for EVERYBODY who is advocating an open build season. And I do mean EVERYBODY. Let's see who can answer it before they get to the answer.
Let's assume for a minute, that an FRC build season allows everyone an equal time to build their robot (give or take a few hours due to time zones, etc), as it is set up now. I think we can agree on that--setting aside the practice robots, which of course any team can build in the time between bag and ship, or build during build and play with in that timeframe. Now, let's extend the build season--no bagging, no tagging, just show up with your robot. You are in a Week 2 event--your first. You are competing against a team from Alaska, a team from Hawaii, and 2-3 teams from Mexico, and the event is in Arizona. Which of those teams is at a DISADVANTAGE in terms of time in an open build season, given that nobody bothers to build a practice robot when they have their competition robot in their ship to work on?
I would bet you even money that the team from Alaska and the team from Hawaii had to crate their robots and ship them before the Week 1 events just to make sure that they arrived at their destination on time. The Mexico teams would not need to ship, presumably (though they might choose to if the distance was far enough), so they have no disadvantage over travel time.
In other words, I think the real purpose of the bag deadline is to help the international/long-distance traveling teams, of which there are quite a few, have even time with the rest of us. Remember, they have to ship their robots. Most teams don't. Compete in HI or Israel instead of building a practice robot, and I think you'll agree that maybe it would be a good idea to have everybody at the event bag up their robot at about the same time.
So, here is a proposal: Extend the build deadline ONLY to the date that teams who ship their robots to Week 1, or whatever the first week someone will need to ship to an event is, will need to have their robots in the crate. FIRST presumably knows, or can be informed, of that sort of date, give or take a day in either direction. Now, I'd say that MI, MAR, and Israel would be exempt, except that MI and MAR would then proceed to kick the rest of our butts even worse than before (sorry, guys, I like the district concept, but could you ease off on the rest of us until we get our own? :p ), and I'd rather not have only one area exempt.
Speaking of which, someone asked about how those opposed to this change stood on the district model. I was not opposed to the district model, per se. I was opposed to certain elements, namely the secrecy and the fact that other areas who had wanted to do something like this for a while were not allowed to do something similar (now the former is a moot point and the latter is more of a "they're going that way, but foot-dragging is popular").
However, the removal of a bag day is something that I don't see happening. Not yet. Extended build time, or an access period, sure. Complete removal? Give it a couple of years after the extension and access period type of changes to see how that goes over--just like the districts took some time to get rolling, and now there are 2, with rumors of anywhere between 1 and 5 more being explored for 1-3 years down the road.
ehfeinberg
12-05-2013, 21:40
So, here is a proposal: Extend the build deadline ONLY to the date that teams who ship their robots to Week 1, or whatever the first week someone will need to ship to an event is, will need to have their robots in the crate.
Isn't that when our stop build day already is? :D
Isn't that when our stop build day already is? :D
When it was, you mean? Or did you get the memo that you don't have to put the robot in the crate and ship it to week 1 anymore? :p :rolleyes:
Actually, I don't quite think so. You could probably sneak a couple more days in for a close event. That's part of why I'm suggesting that bag day be whenever the first team that needs to ship to an event has to be in the crate to make it there. Whether that's Week 1, or Week 6/7! Imagine what havoc a variable-between-years bag date could cause!
ehfeinberg
12-05-2013, 21:52
When it was, you mean? Or did you get the memo that you don't have to put the robot in the crate and ship it to week 1 anymore? :p :rolleyes:
Actually, I don't quite think so. You could probably sneak a couple more days in for a close event. That's part of why I'm suggesting that bag day be whenever the first team that needs to ship to an event has to be in the crate to make it there. Whether that's Week 1, or Week 6/7! Imagine what havoc a variable-between-years bag date could cause!
Lets ask 359 how many days ahead they have to ship their robot for a competition in the states. I bet if you figure out when they would have to ship their robot for a week 1 competition, it would be the day or two after stop build day. Almost as if FIRST did that on purpose. :D
I'm sorry I have to admit that I haven't read this entire thread, so maybe I've missed this part of the discussion. But it seems to me that one of the biggest "field-unequalizers" is the extra time that teams have to work on their competition bot, when they attend multiple competitions. Some of the teams we compete against have the resources to attend two or three regionals; we can't raise the $30,000 or so (maybe more) extra it would cost to attend an additional regional (we have to fly everywhere).
Now don't just say we should get out there and raise more money. We are in a small, poor rural community and are doing our best to try to expand our fundraising using the internet and other innovative ideas.
Even setting aside the extra robot driving time, competition practice, and the learning and motivating experiences of competitions, a team that can attend 2 or 3 regionals gets many extra days to work on their robot. By the time they get to their 3rd regional or Champs, they may have had the equivalent of an extra week or more of build/improve time. By being able to afford the extra entry fees and travel costs, they are "buying" more time with their competition bot unbagged.
Is this fair? Is there any way to mitigate it? Could teams that are attending only one competition get an extra "unbagged" day at their (only) competition, kind of like the extra hours given for the 2-day events? Has anyone suggested that?
For that matter, as we go to more districts, we may want to look at giving some advantage to teams that can't compete in more than one pre-champs event, to compensate for all the benefits of multiple competitions. More building time, more practice time, or something.
Oh, and for the record, I think that limiting the build time MORE than it is currently (e.g., leaving the 6-week build, removing the withholding allowance or cutting off firmware operability after SBD) would just result in even MORE inoperable robots, disheartened participants and other icky stuff. Bad idea (IMHO).
Tetraman
13-05-2013, 07:48
Is this fair? Is there any way to mitigate it? Could teams that are attending only one competition get an extra "unbagged" day at their (only) competition, kind of like the extra hours given for the 2-day events? Has anyone suggested that?
I think it's fair as it is. I know what you mean, I would have liked an extra day back when we chose to only play one event. But that was a week 1 event, so it gives an uneven advantage against everyone else at their week 1 event too.
pfreivald
13-05-2013, 09:20
As things have moved in the direction of "what would *your* team do", I'd like to state for the record the school rules require that any time any part of the team meets, the coach (that would be me) is required to be there... So it doesn't matter if it's the programming team only and I know nothing about programming, or if other students and mentors want to work with their groups in shifts, or a group wants to get together and make buttons when I'd rather be writing or reading or resting or doing yard work; if they're there, I have to be there. Every. Single. Minute. First in the door, last to leave.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I look at the blessing of the withholding allowance (without which our robot would not have done nearly as well as it did this year) with a certain amount of seething, maniacal hatred, whereas others see it as nothing more than increased opportunity...
------------------
So, that's a side note. What I meant to post was this:
What this discussion comes down to is, "what is the purpose of extending the build season?" And follow-up questions should be, "are there other ways to fulfill those purposes?" Pros and cons, priority charts, etc, etc could be made, storms could be brained, data could be collected, and multiple solutions to perceived problems could be presented.
I'm not naive enough to presume that any group of this size will come to full agreement, but if we all got to thinking about what the perceived problems are, and what the possible solutions to those problems are, then we wouldn't be going round and round about extending build -- because I don't think we're even to the point where many agree on what the build extension is meant to accomplish, much less the negative side effects such as mentor burnout.
For example, when it comes to those teams that build nothing of use, I think there are a lot of things that can be done to help them become better... The bot in a box, where teams leave kickoff with a functioning drive train, is a fantastic resource, and any kickoff areas that are not currently doing this should absolutely be doing so, starting next year. If you start with a drive train wired up with a control system on day one, that gives you six full weeks to make some kind of useful manipulator... and if that's not enough time, then I don't see how eight or ten or twelve weeks will be, because whatever your problems are, they're much bigger and more critical than time. And thus, extending the build season is not a viable solution to this problem--and that means that arguments about do-nothing robots aren't good arguments for extending the build season.
On the other hand, when it comes to elite teams spending unnecessary money on practice robots and expedited shipping, I think extending the build season is a much more viable solution to these problems -- and indeed, I don't see any other way to make practice robots and expedited shipping unnecessary (though I'm opposed to doing it anyway).
...but if we can't agree on what the intended pros are, we aren't even at the place where we can discuss whether the cons are worth it.
sanddrag
14-05-2013, 01:28
I'll add one more personal tidbit about why we should not extend the build season, and maybe that will help some of you understand why many of us are against it.
My profession is a full time high-school teacher, teaching 5 classes with about 150 students total. I also like to help with mentoring a Lego robotics team at a local elementary school one day per week for much of the school year. I am also a Tech Leader for the school district which has about 6-8 meetings per year. Along with the teaching job, I am often wearing the hat of computer technician, machine maintenance technician, machinist, welder, procurement specialist, high altitude balloon chaser, and now auto mechanic and detailer (all associated with the teacher job).
In the fall and in the spring, I am a professor at the local community college two nights a week. This conveniently falls just before and just after the FIRST build season (by a matter of a couple days). Post-bag (like the day after) and before and during competition season, I'm teaching in a second job two nights a week. I already turned down teaching another class at both the high school and at the college, because I want the time for FIRST.
As a college professor, I make about $52/hr. As a teacher, even with the additional college class, I already don't make enough to afford a house in the area I work. Doing FIRST Robotics, I make about $1 an hour (stipend), but I do it because I want to, not for the money. I've already turned down a 20% pay increase at the high school (to do another class there) and $52/hr for about 4 hours a week to do another class at the college. So, you could say my future ability to own my own home has been hampered by my commitment to FIRST Robotics. Participating in FIRST Robotics costs me money. Lots of it. Even if I flipped burgers for the time I spent doing FIRST Robotics, I'd be at least $5000/year more wealthy. I don't necessarily mind because I love doing it, but let's be realistic here. To extend the build season any more, I would no longer be able to teach the one college class I do, which would cost me about $3500/yr, not to mention the mental and physical toll it would take. I'd like to retire someday.
There's only so much one person can give. Everything I do, I like to do well. I never like to give a half-hearted effort at anything. If I do it, I'm all in. There's no cutting back time in any of it to balance it all. Not in my world. If I can't do something well, I don't do it at all. The problem becomes that there are only so many hours in each week, month, and year.
I wasn't going to mention this to avoid starting any rumors, but I feel it's relevant so I will. At the Inland Empire regional, Frank Merrick spent a while talking to my team in our pit, and one of the questions he asked was "What would you think of a longer build season?" to which I replied "No! Please don't! We want to see our families!" I hope he heard me. Of course my students were all for a longer build season. I guess that's why we have teachers like me to set them straight. :D
Anyhow, I bet my case is not all that unique.
Ian Curtis
14-05-2013, 01:51
I'll add one more personal tidbit about why we should not extend the build season, and maybe that will help some of you understand why many of us are against it.
I am a big fan of the extended build season because I am reasonably confident I will spend an equal amount and in all likelihood less time working on the robot. What's the more efficient way to study, a 10 hour cram session right before the exam or 5 2 hour sessions spread out over the week?
"No! Please don't! We want to see our families!" I hope he heard me. Of course my students were all for a longer build season. I guess that's why we have teachers like me to set them straight. :D
The people in favor of an extended season I've talked with about this outside of this thread feel exactly the same way. We want to see our friends and families. Spreading the build season out over more time will let us put in as many hours without disappearing from our social lives (or least let us go home and take a nap occasionally).
I think there are very few people that want an extended build season so that they can put in more time. With the witholding allowance, FIRST basically gives you a permit to go nuts working for the whole competition season as is.
Navid Shafa
14-05-2013, 01:56
I'll add one more personal tidbit about why we should not extend the build season, and maybe that will help some of you understand why many of us are against it.
My profession is a full time high-school teacher, teaching 5 classes with about 150 students total. I also like to help with mentoring a Lego robotics team at a local elementary school one day per week for much of the school year. I am also a Tech Leader for the school district which has about 6-8 meetings per year. Along with the teaching job, I am often wearing the hat of computer technician, machine maintenance technician, machinist, welder, procurement specialist, high altitude balloon chaser, and now auto mechanic and detailer (all associated with the teacher job).
In the fall and in the spring, I am a professor at the local community college two nights a week. This conveniently falls just before and just after the FIRST build season (by a matter of a couple days). Post-bag (like the day after) and before and during competition season, I'm teaching in a second job two nights a week. I already turned down teaching another class at both the high school and at the college, because I want the time for FIRST.
As a college professor, I make about $52/hr. As a teacher, even with the additional college class, I already don't make enough to afford a house in the area I work. Doing FIRST Robotics, I make about $1 an hour (stipend), but I do it because I want to, not for the money. I've already turned down a 20% pay increase at the high school (to do another class there) and $52/hr for about 4 hours a week to do another class at the college. So, you could say my future ability to own my own home has been hampered by my commitment to FIRST Robotics. Participating in FIRST Robotics costs me money. Lots of it. Even if I flipped burgers for the time I spent doing FIRST Robotics, I'd be at least $5000/year more wealthy. I don't necessarily mind because I love doing it, but let's be realistic here. To extend the build season any more, I would no longer be able to teach the one college class I do, which would cost me about $3500/yr, not to mention the mental and physical toll it would take. I'd like to retire someday.
There's only so much one person can give. Everything I do, I like to do well. I never like to give a half-hearted effort at anything. If I do it, I'm all in. There's no cutting back time in any of it to balance it all. Not in my world. If I can't do something well, I don't do it at all. The problem becomes that there are only so many hours in each week, month, and year.
I wasn't going to mention this to avoid starting any rumors, but I feel it's relevant so I will. At the Inland Empire regional, Frank Merrick spent a while talking to my team in our pit, and one of the questions he asked was "What would you think of a longer build season?" to which I replied "No! Please don't! We want to see our families!" I hope he heard me. Of course my students were all for a longer build season. I guess that's why we have teachers like me to set them straight. :D
Anyhow, I bet my case is not all that unique.
This post is likely the single most compelling anecdote in the entire thread. It would be hard for anyone to argue against it...
Kudos to Sanddrag for all his hard work!
waialua359
14-05-2013, 02:26
Participating in FIRST has forced me to stay at my part-time (second job) for almost 24 years and counting.:ahh:
**would've quit a long time ago**
Chris Hibner
14-05-2013, 07:22
In the fall and in the spring, I am a professor at the local community college two nights a week. This conveniently falls just before and just after the FIRST build season (by a matter of a couple days). Post-bag (like the day after) and before and during competition season, I'm teaching in a second job two nights a week. I already turned down teaching another class at both the high school and at the college, because I want the time for FIRST.
Is it possible that the 6 week build season is costing you money right now? If the college teaching job is 2 nights a week, then wouldn't going to an unregulated build season allow you more time during the week so you can teach those 2 nights instead of working on FIRST? That is why I'm arguring for extending the build season, so teams can go from meeting 6 days a week to a more managable 3 or 4 days per week.
pfreivald
14-05-2013, 09:20
Is it possible that the 6 week build season is costing you money right now? If the college teaching job is 2 nights a week, then wouldn't going to an unregulated build season allow you more time during the week so you can teach those 2 nights instead of working on FIRST? That is why I'm arguring for extending the build season, so teams can go from meeting 6 days a week to a more managable 3 or 4 days per week.
As a person who also teaches community college night classes (and is president of our local beekeeping association, and is on my local school board), I'm not sure how I can say NO NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO without people understanding it.
I am one of the busiest human beings I know. The moment build season ends, I'm doing other things with my nights. Community colleges will not adjust their semester schedule to accommodate additional weeks of FIRST. The school board will not reschedule meetings. The bee club will still meet the second Monday of every month; the officers the first.
Reducing FIRST to "only" 3-4 days a week, but extending the number of weeks, will create MORE conflicts which will cause MORE exhaustion and MORE burnout, not less. It will render us unable to put in the concentrated time necessary to do the other things we want to do well.
...And that's not even considering the "keeping up with the Joneses" work ethic that many of us middle-tier FIRST teams have--we want to become elite teams, and as I said before, I have a very hard time betting against the work ethic of the likes of Wildstang, Simbotics, Miss Daisy, and other such top-tier teams. I assume that most of them will not moderate their work schedule, but will instead squeeze every minute out that they can--and those that don't will probably stop being top-tier teams in a matter of years.
Burnout became a problem when FIRST added the withholding allowance. "To address problem A, we added X. It caused problem B. So let's not remove X and figure out better ways to address A, let's tinker with Z instead." Um, what?
Jared Russell
14-05-2013, 09:40
I travel for work. Often.
For the past five years I have been fortunate in that I've been able to avoid lengthy business travel during build season. As it is looking right now, I will be out of town for 3-4 weeks in January/February of 2014.
We have had a number of similar issues with mentors (and key students) over the years. Travel that falls during a build season. Hectic situations at work requiring lots of overtime. Illnesses and deaths in the family that require undivided attention. Weather calamities. School strikes. Emergency situations at sponsors that delay making key parts. Critical components on back order.
When you only have 6 weeks of full robot access, losing a week or more because of any of these unfortunate, but very common, real-life situations is disastrous.
If you have unlimited robot access, you can lessen the hit or re-plan around your constraints. You can also continue to utilize the "6 week grind" model, if that is what works for you and your team. Nobody is taking that away from you! And I wouldn't worry about the "arms race" escalating too much to the point that a 6 week robot can't be competitive. Even here, on a forum that over-represents the top tier of FRC teams, I don't see mentors for former World Champions salivating over the thought of being able to pour even more time into their robot than they do currently. In the case of Miss Daisy, we are at our limit as it is.
Arguments that basically amount to, "I can't/don't want to balance my life if build season is longer than six weeks, therefore nobody should be allowed to" just do not make sense to me.
Rich Kressly
14-05-2013, 09:41
As a person who also teaches community college night classes (and is president of our local beekeeping association, and is on my local school board), I'm not sure how I can say NO NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO without people understanding it.
I am one of the busiest human beings I know. The moment build season ends, I'm doing other things with my nights. Community colleges will not adjust their semester schedule to accommodate additional weeks of FIRST. The school board will not reschedule meetings. The bee club will still meet the second Monday of every month; the officers the first.
Reducing FIRST to "only" 3-4 days a week, but extending the number of weeks, will create MORE conflicts which will cause MORE exhaustion and MORE burnout, not less. It will render us unable to put in the concentrated time necessary to do the other things we want to do well.
...And that's not even considering the "keeping up with the Joneses" work ethic that many of us middle-tier FIRST teams have--we want to become elite teams, and as I said before, I have a very hard time betting against the work ethic of the likes of Wildstang, Simbotics, Miss Daisy, and other such top-tier teams. I assume that most of them will not moderate their work schedule, but will instead squeeze every minute out that they can--and those that don't will probably stop being top-tier teams in a matter of years.
Burnout became a problem when FIRST added the withholding allowance. "To address problem A, we added X. It caused problem B. So let's not remove X and figure out better ways to address A, let's tinker with Z instead." Um, what?
Agreed here ... wholeheartedly.
If I ever step back into FRC it needs to somehow fit with my job/travel schedule, other robotics programs we run for younger kids, baseball coaching I do, and generally being able to support/be there for other activities that I'm not running or helping to run, but my kids participate in which currently include: hockey/skating classes, band, church youth, school talent shows and plays, on and on. This all is not to mention other "tugs" I get from folks who'd like me to be on the board of their organizations, run for school board, etc - All worthwhile causes.
I suppose there are two lenses to look through on this issue:
1. Looking at FRC as "the" place I volunteer my time
2. Looking at FRC as "one of the many places" I volunteer my time
It also matters how wide a team's mentor base is.
...and, if you set mentor burnout aside for a second - impact on the students. Eat up more of the year where a student is "obligated" in some way to the team, that's one more chunk of time they can't pursue other interests. Gotta be a balance somewhere and some teams do this better than others.
For me, if I were a single young professional without kids of my own and without other activities I'm passionate about and involved in, I think I'd be more supportive of a position like my friend Mr. Hibner puts forth.
With the place I'm at in my life now, however, an extended "build" in FRC is something that I'm really not in favor of.
What Sanddrag and Patrick said.
One thing I've noticed about this thread - and this is a generalization - is most folks who are against extending the build season are on teams with <6 mentors, and most folks who are for extending the build season are on teams with >6 mentors.
We are spread exceedingly thin as it is. We don't just meet 6 days a week during build season - we also meet at least once a week the rest of the year (summer excluded) for training, outreach, other STEM initiatives, etc. While some mentors lay dormant for 46 weeks of the year, descending on their teams for those six weeks of build, we don't have that luxury. We are here, all the time, and we're barely getting by as it is.
Also, the 6-week aspect is a challenge I happen to very much enjoy. With the urgency created there, the team is able to truly learn prioritizing, scheduling, making tough decisions quickly but intelligently - all the real lessons learned in an abbreviated build schedule.
mathking
14-05-2013, 09:53
Agreed here ... wholeheartedly.
If I ever step back into FRC it needs to somehow fit with my job/travel schedule, other robotics programs we run for younger kids, baseball coaching I do, and generally being able to support/be there for other activities that I'm not running or helping to run, but my kids participate in which currently include: hockey/skating classes, band, church youth, school talent shows and plays, on and on. This all is not to mention other "tugs" I get from folks who'd like me to be on the board of their organizations, run for school board, etc - All worthwhile causes.
I suppose there are two lenses to look through on this issue:
1. Looking at FRC as "the" place I volunteer my time
2. Looking at FRC as "one of the many places" I volunteer my time
For me, If I were a single young professional without kids of my own and without other activities I'm passionate about and involved in, I think I'd be more supportive of a position like my friend Mr. Hibner puts forth.
With the place I'm at in my life now, however, an extended "build" in FRC is something that I'm really not in favor of.
I agree with you completely Rich. And I think that your point has implications for the stability of FRC as well. I can get away with spending as much time as I do at FRC (and not with my family or doing other things) largely because so much of that time is concentrated in January and February. If the build season were extended, I would have to be less involved. I am sure my co-leader would have to be less involved as well. But we are the two more or less "permanent fixtures" on the team, and this would have implications for our teams stability long term.
I know that 1712 has some excellent young professionals as mentors, as does 1014. But it takes a while for young mentors to be ready to lead a team and to be accepted by the students and other mentors as a team leader. And I think that in an extended build season you run even more risk than you currently have of mentors having to step away when they start to have families and more responsibilities, precisely at the time when they become the most capable as leaders.
I also think that extending the build season runs a real risk of scaring off teachers. For now at least, most FRC teams are based in our at least around schools. And starting a team often requires having someone at the school willing to take on a very daunting task. One way I have been able to sell the idea of starting an FRC team to teachers is by saying "It is a lot of work, but the majority of it is concentrated in the six weeks of the build season."
pfreivald
14-05-2013, 09:56
Arguments that basically amount to, "I can't/don't want to balance my life if build season is longer than six weeks, therefore nobody should be allowed to" just do not make sense to me.
What are your thoughts on FIRST and parity?
Chris Hibner
14-05-2013, 10:04
One thing I've noticed about this thread - and this is a generalization - is most folks who are against extending the build season are on teams with <6 mentors, and most folks who are for extending the build season are on teams with >6 mentors.
This is an interesting finding since I would think that teams with more mentors would favor the 6 week schedule since with their human resource advantage they are more likely to build a more competitive robot in less time.
BTW, I woudn't put team 51 in the > 6 mentor category.
Rich Kressly
14-05-2013, 10:10
<snip>
When you only have 6 weeks of full robot access, losing a week or more because of any of these unfortunate, but very common, real-life situations is disastrous. <snip>
Jared,
There are very few people in FIRST I respect more than you, but I couldn't disagree more. I'm sure there are lots of other folks I really respect in FIRST who I disagree with on this issue as well.
I thought, at least at one time, that the situations you describe above were exactly WHY FIRST - more specifically FRC - existed to begin with. Don't people learn a LOT about themselves in these situations even if/when the robot doesn't win?
All,
Focusing on winning robots and focusing on the development of young leaders is NOT the same thing.
You know, there are teams out there that only meet 2-3 times a week with the six week build season. Some of them are turning out INCREDIBLE alumni in spite of "not keeping up with the Robot Jonses."
What's our goal?
namaste, all.
mathking
14-05-2013, 10:15
Arguments that basically amount to, "I can't/don't want to balance my life if build season is longer than six weeks, therefore nobody should be allowed to" just do not make sense to me.
What are your thoughts on FIRST and parity?
Good point pfreivald, but I think it goes beyond questions of equity or parity. If enough mentors can't or don't want to balance their lives with a big increased time commitment then you will have more teams dropping out of FIRST.
As it happens, I have a lot of experience addressing this question in another context: sports. Ask any of the people here in CD who have experience as youth or high school coaches over the past decade or two and you are likely to find a lot of people dealing with the effects of ever-expanding seasons. "Volunmandatory" off season conditioning and practices, club seasons and seemingly endless numbers of tournaments lead to kids spending ever more time on a team. Which leads to a lot of student burnout as well.
286 Posts and still going. I've held back posting till now. Burnout is something we individually and the teams collectively do to our selves. We make the CHOICE to over burden ourselves and the team. First only provides the medium for us to do it. The First program tends to draw hard charging driven mentors. They tend to be highly intelligent self motivated successful people. They are the people that solve the problems for their company and society. The problem is many of us could be labeled as obsessive and compulsive. We have to beat the game and will drive our selves crazy in the quest. We also get real foul if the game beats us. Hundreds of negative posts on several topics since the competition end. We also hate limits. We revile at rules and artificial restrictions. We want to beat the game any way we can. When I first started mentoring team 104, We could use what came in some crates, a few additional raw materials and anything in a catalog from a company called Small Parts. A very limited and restrictive activity. Ever year since then teams collectively have been screaming at First to open up the program. First listened and has more or less made this competition wide opened. It has turned into a monster of a design build compete activity. First gave us what we the the consumer wanted and demanded. Now that we have gotten what we wanted we are up set that it is driving us crazy. It was the collective choice of the First community that lead to the current state. In stead of pulling back and making the First competition more restrictive and limited. Not such a resource hog. We are demanding First remove the last major restriction - Build time. This could destroy the program. We do not have discipline. We can not limit our time investment. Make this thing wide opened time wise and we will destroy our selves. We can not discipline our selves. Others have to do it for us.
Please do not remove the build time restriction. I do not want to have a personal meltdown next year. First corporate please listen to me. Save me from myself.
Just my opinion.
Chris Hibner
14-05-2013, 10:20
Burnout became a problem when FIRST added the withholding allowance.
Sorry to keep posting, but I disagree with this. Burnout has existed since I've been doing FIRST.
For me, the burnout level greatly increased starting in 2003 with the introduction of autonomous mode. That added 1 - 3 weeks of development and testing work (depending on the game) but the build season stayed at 6.5 weeks.
sanddrag
14-05-2013, 10:29
Here's another element. Some teams are fortunate to have their student membership comprised primarily of students who do FIRST Robotics as their only extracurricular activity outside of class. Our students are not this way, and it often is a problem. Many different commitments are competing for their time. They are playing sports, running track, racing mountain bikes, debating in mock trials, playing musical instruments, completing senior projects, writing newspapers, publishing yearbooks, and taking as many as 5 AP classes.
The issue is simple. When the build season is extended, those of us who do more than just FIRST robotics cannot compete with those who have nothing else going on. We all can sideline our normal responsibilities for a few weeks and play catchup later, but there's no way we can sustain that for months.
It's silly to think we would pace ourselves, because I know there are teams that aren't. This is a competition. If you're not in it to give the absolute best effort you can, why even bother? If the rules let you work 7 days a week for 10 weeks, I'll be working 7 days a week for 10 weeks, and it will be everything else that suffers as a result, not the FRC team.
I don't want to see the day where winning in FIRST means losing at everything else.
nuggetsyl
14-05-2013, 10:35
Question if we had an open build and your team does not want to work more then 6 weeks then why do it? Just set your team up to only work 6 weeks. Making the season longer will massively reduce costs, which is what's needed to grow FIRST.
BrendanB
14-05-2013, 10:57
Also, the 6-week aspect is a challenge I happen to very much enjoy. With the urgency created there, the team is able to truly learn prioritizing, scheduling, making tough decisions quickly but intelligently - all the real lessons learned in an abbreviated build schedule.
And I'm sure FIRST views it similarly. 6 weeks is part of the challenge! I know in reality most of us build practice robots and utilize the 30 lbs withholding to the max amount possible (our team especially this season) but there won't be a perfect scenario that works for everyone.
If build season is extended I know for most of us the following will shake out. The first 2-3 weeks we will probably meeting 3-4 days a week increasing to 4-5 during week 4. Then weeks 5-6 will be back to the crazy end of build schedule we all do (if I mentioned some of our team's schedule during these weeks I doubt most people would believe the time we put in the final weeks. I don't know how we stayed alive). Now the robot is done and its off to week 1 events. Robot comes back good but never good enough (if you are lucky) but for most of us the robot isn't what we want. Now commence another 2-3 weeks of craziness to prepare for the next event.
While this topic has remained mostly on mentors the students need to be address too in this thread. Extending the build season has implications on their lives as well. For us, right after our Week 1 is when spring sports begin tryouts of which we saw a large drop in attendance along with other activities and work starting in the spring. For our team I don't see our team really functioning past our first regional aside from the driveteam and a few programmers meeting to debug the robot. Most of us just can't give that much extended time up. For us that stems from the fact that we are a school based team. Meetings begin at 2pm when school gets out and finishes around 5:30pm. This is the standard meeting time mainly used outside of build season. Typically during build season we meeting Mon Tues Fri 2-8, Wed Thurs 2-5:30, and Sat 9-6. Occasionally we meet Sundays during the crunch time weeks 11-4. These were not the hours our team met during the last two weeks of build season. Those hours would have allowed us to keep most of our sanity! ;)
If the build season were to be extended I know my involvement would drop as the season drew longer. Yes the main build season would be more manageable with school and work (this past season I worked two jobs 6 days a week), however in order to make meetings I and other adult mentors/engineers on our team have to work out special schedules to make our teams 2pm meeting. I have an easier time working this out than others who work until 6pm which is why most of our meeting go until 8pm so we can have more adults involved teaching and working with students. We also can't start meeting later and do what most teams do: 6-9:30/10 because that would instantly burn out our head coach who teaches at the school and needs to be present in order for our team to meet.
For me the burnout comes in weeks 5 and 6 when we realize exactly where we are and how ineffective we were in weeks 2-3. Do I wish we had more time? Somewhat. But more importantly I regret how we operated and continue tweaking the machine for next season.
I'm our team captain, but in this topic I do not represent the opinion of our team, or that of our mentor. Although being restricted to 6 weeks can be very stressful for all people involved, it is part of what makes this competition "The hardest fun you'll ever have". Our team started four years ago, and has been desperate to catch up to the elite teams of our state, for those 6 weeks our students come in every day after school from 3:20pm to around 9:45pm or 10:00pm, we also come in on both Saturdays and Sundays at around 11:00am and stay till 10:00pm (often 11:00 in the last week), and finally this work may finally be paying off in putting us up in the elite. I understand that this is a lot to ask of our mentor, and he does put up with it to much, but we also have about five or so dedicated parents that often come in after they are done at work and help out, and although they aren't as technically skilled as our mentor, they are very helpful and help alleviate the pressure put on him. After the 6 week season ends we take a short break to recuperate, and then ease back into our work, this year I missed a total of about 4.5 days (work and illness) and although at the time I may have felt burnout, I knew that this was a necessary evil to accomplishing a working robot in 6 weeks, I say that because I believe in this case my mentor has the same opinion. As a final note I believe that "removing" the 6 week limit is detrimental and would steer new people away when they see the commitment required, it also takes half the fun out of the competition. 6 weeks is the way to go!
Holtzman
14-05-2013, 11:38
In my professional life, I work for a company that builds custom automated systems for the food industry. When the jobs get handed off to our engineering department we’ve got our budget, the design constraints, and a ship date. The design constraints can, and do often change along the way, but rarely does the ship date get pushed back. Sound familiar?
When we quote a new system to a customer, the customers are looking at how much we’re going to charge them, the quality of our work, and how quickly we can deliver the equipment. There are often many cases where we are not the cheapest quote, but since we can deliver a quality product faster, we win the contract.
Once our ship date comes around, if we’re not ready, we face financial penalties, and potential loss of future contracts. If something breaks or doesn’t work 100% on startup, we often fabricate warrantee replacement or upgrade parts (at our cost), and travel to the end users facility to install and troubleshoot the new components. Sound familiar?
I look at our 6 week build season as exactly the same situation. It’s not just who can build the best robot, but who can build the best robot in 6 weeks. I have a real appreciation for the teams that can come out in week 1 or 2 guns blazing, and set the bar for the rest of the season. The 6 week season is a great analogy for real world design projects, and I feel it is a must for FIRST. The withholding allowance is also very realistic, although I’d personally like to see it reduced to about 10 lbs or so, and exclude spare parts from it. Teams could still repair mechanisms that become damaged, but not replace or add entire mechanisms, minibot launchers, ball magnets, Frisbee pickups, etc.
In regards to mentor burnout, we are a very competitive team and we take our on field performance very seriously. If FIRST were to open the season wide open, we would work every bit as hard as we do during the current build season, right up until the championship. Any team who wanted to be a contender would be forced to do the same.
We would approach the season in one of two ways. Don’t compete at any early season events in order to maximize our testing and debugging time. Or build two completely different robots, one that was good enough to win an early regional and qualify, and another potentially completely different one designed and built for the championship. The second one would probably not be started until after week 1 of regionals, and would never compete before the championship.
I would be forced to seriously reconsider my involvement in FIRST as a result of the toll it would take on my health, and personal/professional lives. This is largely because of my competitive personality, and complete inability to lead a balanced lifestyle. My take on the whole idea, the FIRST season is great the way it is. Don’t change a thing.
If you want to see the most competitive and capable robots battling it out at the championship, open it up more, but be prepared to see some negative side effects as a result. If you want less mentor burnout, keep it at 6 weeks or less, get rid of the withholding allowance, and don’t allow any fabrication or software development after bag day, but don’t be surprised when we have lots of brave little toasters taking the field.
Michael Corsetto
14-05-2013, 11:58
We would approach the season in one of two ways. Don’t compete at any early season events in order to maximize our testing and debugging time. Or build two completely different robots, one that was good enough to win an early regional and qualify, and another potentially completely different one designed and built for the championship. The second one would probably not be started until after week 1 of regionals, and would never compete before the championship.
Really interesting point. Now I have more things to think about...
I still believe as it currently is set up, "build season" is from Kickoff to CMP. I agree with Tyler's closing thoughts on what next year could look like...
If you want to see the most competitive and capable robots battling it out at the championship, open it up more, but be prepared to see some negative side effects as a result. If you want less mentor burnout, keep it at 6 weeks or less, get rid of the withholding allowance, and don’t allow any fabrication or software development after bag day, but don’t be surprised when we have lots of brave little toasters taking the field.
If this is the choice put in front of FIRST, what would they choose? I think we'll see a change next year, I just don't know in what direction.
-Mike
"It's silly to think we would pace ourselves, because I know there are teams that aren't. This is a competition. If you're not in it to give the absolute best effort you can, why even bother? If the rules let you work 7 days a week for 10 weeks, I'll be working 7 days a week for 10 weeks, and it will be everything else that suffers as a result, not the FRC team. "
So, because someone is unable/unwilling to set a work schedule that decreases their chance of burnout, we should limit every other team's options? As you may have surmised, my team is in it to give the best effort that we can (which is why we adopted a reduced work schedule to maintain our sanity and productivity) and we don't work 7 days a week for 6.5 weeks anymore (see my earlier post)...and we seem to be able to maintain a high degree of competitiveness. It's not the total number of hours worked that determines a program's success, it is the quality of the time spent. For me, working no more (and maybe even less) hours but spreading the hours/days out more would serve to reduce stress and allow for a better balance of personal-competitive life.
Jared Russell
14-05-2013, 12:39
This has become one of my favorite CD threads of all time.
It is not often that you get to gain so much insight into the thought processes of others, the inner workings of so many types of teams, and so many rational and well-stated arguments on all sides of the issue. Although I continue to come down on the side of unlimited machine access, I do sympathize with the concerns many have (Parkinson's law and burnout, keeping up with the Joneses, cloning of effective designs, the life lessons of a hard deadline).
Here's another element. Some teams are fortunate to have their student membership comprised primarily of students who do FIRST Robotics as their only extracurricular activity outside of class. Our students are not this way, and it often is a problem. Many different commitments are competing for their time. They are playing sports, running track, racing mountain bikes, debating in mock trials, playing musical instruments, completing senior projects, writing newspapers, publishing yearbooks, and taking as many as 5 AP classes.
The issue is simple. When the build season is extended, those of us who do more than just FIRST robotics cannot compete with those who have nothing else going on. We all can sideline our normal responsibilities for a few weeks and play catchup later, but there's no way we can sustain that for months.This argument plays exactly both ways. Our team is filled with students--and mentors--like this. And I've noticed a trend: particularly in students, but also some in mentors, the ones that don't want a longer build tend to have activities that would conflict more if so, usually because there's no/less overlap currently. (The trend seems to somewhat hold in this thread, though not entirely.) Most everyone else views a longer season as the ability show up less often, do more other activities, and still actively participate in FIRST. Why? Because we set that schedule, and that's what we want.
FIRST is about nurturing students to become these amazing leaders: how does making them put their lives on hold--their Boy Scout work, their FBLA, their music, etc--for 2 months of the school year help that? In reality, many of our kids don't do this, and it mitigates what they get out of FIRST. It drives many, many, many students away. I've lost count of the number of students who come in excited, and then dart to VEX when they find out how time-concentrated FRC is. Why? Because they have things to do 2-4 nights a week. Because they have lives, homework, work...just like the mentors we lose do. This ends up burdening the students and mentors who stay even more, which is what brings us close to burn out.
For 7 years, I've watched great students and adults walk out the door at the explanation "6 weeks". And not that I don't like VEX, but I want those people! Our only electrical mentor (too many have been scared off) is in a similar boat--not available for FRC as much as he'd like. Every year we have electrical problems, and we always struggle to mentor students interested in the field the way they'd like. We've lost a lot of them.
This year, we got a great mechanical engineer--awesome guy, great with the kids, did our first FEA analysis ever--but he's just not available enough to stay with a 6 week sprint. We haven't been able to engage him because he always feels behind when he comes. I end up doing basically everything he could be doing--that he wants to do--instead of concentrating on how to mentor my strategy team. Now both of my fields aren't up to snuff, and it's cost us a lot of inspirational opportunities. Not competitive opportunities. (Very different, and we basically got the competitive opportunity this year.) Inspirational: I know my students aren't growing the way they could be with more downtime, more mentorship, more one-on-one availability, more money left for other activities. I know I've lost a lot of students because of it.
As a non-school team, many of our mentors and families have rather long commutes: one our key mentor + student families drives an hour each way, every day in build. Their story is far from unique--I drive 3 hours each way over the weekend and back & forth on Wednesdays for build seasons I spend on campus. Wouldn't I love to just come down weekends? Not building a practice bot would have freed up at 3 weeks throughout this full season.
In short, a more open build season would allow us to set our schedule based on our team's needs. I am confident that we can enforce with discipline (though Gary may want to give back his key) and actually save ourselves the practice bot time. Because we already do set our schedule, we already send people home, and we understand the benefits:
- Recruit more students who shy from the intense time commitment
- Retain and positively impact students who want to do other activities in build
- Recruit, retain and fully utilize mentors who cannot commit to 4-7 days/week.
- Cut down on commutes and concentrated commitment for just about everyone
- Save loads and loads of money on the practice bot, expedited shipping, and just-in-case-buying that can be put towards more inspirational efforts
- Teach our kids (and mentors) further discipline! How to stay on schedule and not kill yourself with FIRST.
- More time to practice and help other teams, both during the season (collaborative weekends) and at events when we're not scrambling to update the competition bot.
- More opportunity to help other teams at on-season scrimmages, and all in all just "raise the floor" of FIRST.
EDIT: All that said...yeah, basically what Jared said.
Hjelstrom
14-05-2013, 13:05
Really interesting point. Now I have more things to think about...
I still believe as it currently is set up, "build season" is from Kickoff to CMP. I agree with Tyler's closing thoughts on what next year could look like...
If this is the choice put in front of FIRST, what would they choose? I think we'll see a change next year, I just don't know in what direction.
-Mike
I think they'll pick something in-between. Keep the 6 weeks but allow an un-bag day and some reasonable withholding allowance so people can do minor improvemnents/repairs, practice and programming. Bots get a little better but we don't open pandoras box of cloning and the robot design meta-game where you have to build a second completely new robot in order to compete at worlds.
I *like* that teams 1986, 1114, 254 benefited by coming up with such incredible "do-almost-everything" designs. With the limited build, they are able to feel confident to freely share what they came up with. When you go to a team's pit, most teams are happy to show you any detail of their robot. If we make the build season wide open, teams will all just take the best ideas and bring completely new robots to worlds.
No-one who wants to have a chance in the competition will be working "less" if we have a wide open build season. We will all be designing our "worlds" robot and building it in the final weeks. Tyler described it very well in my opinion.
thefro526
14-05-2013, 13:29
I've been thinking a lot about this thread lately, and figured I'd post up some of my more recent thoughts/experiences.
Since 2011, my employer has been nice enough to sponsor whatever robotics team I've been affiliated with. The exact details vary a bit from season to season, but one thing that has always remained the same was a sort of 'unlimited' access to our sister companies resources as a machine shop. In 2011, we (at the time, we = 816) used them for a few small parts during the early build season and then not again until maybe week 3 or so of competition season, then in 2012 we outsourced a large portion of our robot to them and in 2013 after making the transition to 341, we had them run a lot of the sheet parts that you see on our robot this year - along with some of the 1/4" Plate Work.
In all three of those years, I was put in a very interesting position with my employer and my co-workers. To someone who didn't know the exact circumstances of the sponsorship agreement, it would appear as if I was shirking my responsibilies at work to play robots - when in reality robotics had become part of what I was 'supposed' to be working on while at work. (Protecting an investment sort of thing.)
Things get deeper from there, but to spare you much of the details here's the short and sweet... In both 2012 and 2013 there were parts orders that were sent to the machine shop through me that needed to be done on a schedule that would allow enough time for us to get the subsystems they were intended for done in time to ship the robot. This meant that the machine shop had to turn them around quicker than they usually would for nearly any customer and of course, if one thing needs to be done sooner than something else, that other thing is going to slip by the amount of time that the first takes.
In my case, the robot parts 'bumped' parts for a project that I am responsible for during my day job and things got really, really ugly for a bit. Much of what followed was the result of poor understanding at different levels and my failure to communicate exactly what was going on to my superiors and has since been resolved, but I can honestly say that weeks 5 and 6 of build season in both 2012 and 2013 have been two of the most stressful periods of my 'adult' life.
I guess the TLDR here is that the 6 week build season can really strain relationships between teams and sponsors - especially when employees of a sponsor are members/mentors/associates of the team.** Reducing the strain is possible through proper planning and a more 'structured' team/sponsor relationship I'm sure - but another more easy way to do this would be by relaxing the deadlines given to these people in an effort to reduce the amount of situations where we (teams) are asking for 'So Much' in 'So little time.'
** An interesting (annoying) thing that I have seen is that more often than not, the team that an employee is working with is referred to as 'Their Team' - when in reality, it should be something like 'The Team' or 'Team XXX'. This sort of reflects how a robotics team is thought of from an Employers Standpoint when that Employer Sponsors a team and Employees are involved. The Employees working with the team can often be held responsible for the teams actions since it is 'Their Team'.
Hello Again -
First, thank you to everyone for sharing their opinions. This is a very good discussion!
So, once again, I'm hearing that extending the build season will have the some positive effects:
1. Reduce mentor burnout by allowing mentors to schedule less frequent meetings - spreading out the same amount of work over a longer period of time. If you are calling for an extended build season so that you can reduce the number of hours you are working during the 6.5 week build, why not simply reduce those hours anyway? There is nothing stopping you - it is your choice - you can set your own schedule. If the 6.5 week schedule is too intense, make it less so.
2. An extended build season will reduce costs. No more overnight shipping, no having to build a practice robot. I can understand this argument, but it leads to more questions: Why not limit your materials to what you can obtain locally? Why do you have to build a practice robot? You are not required to build a practice robot, so you don't need to incur those added expenses.
The answer to these questions is "to remain competitive". That's not going to change.
While extending the season to reduce burnout and costs might make sense "on paper" I don't believe that in application it will come out that way. The drive to be competitive will push teams to meet with the same intensity for a longer period of time.
There is already a stop work day, and yet hundreds of teams have found ways to work around it - at great expense, but they feel it is worth it. Many have already admitted that they are in a 4-month build season as it is.
So, I ask the mentors of those teams: Have you found that you are less stressed, have more free time, are able to commit to the other elements in your life more now that you have already extended the build season?
- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox
PS - I miss the days of whatever came in the kit, extruded aluminum, 1 sheet of plywood, wire and Small Parts...
EricLeifermann
14-05-2013, 14:09
Hello Again -
First, thank you to everyone for sharing their opinions. This is a very good discussion!
So, once again, I'm hearing that extending the build season will have the some positive effects:
1. Reduce mentor burnout by allowing mentors to schedule less frequent meetings - spreading out the same amount of work over a longer period of time. If you are calling for an extended build season so that you can reduce the number of hours you are working during the 6.5 week build, why not simply reduce those hours anyway? There is nothing stopping you - it is your choice - you can set your own schedule. If the 6.5 week schedule is too intense, make it less so.
2. An extended build season will reduce costs. No more overnight shipping, no having to build a practice robot. I can understand this argument, but it leads to more questions: Why not limit your materials to what you can obtain locally? Why do you have to build a practice robot? You are not required to build a practice robot, so you don't need to incur those added expenses.
The answer to these questions is "to remain competitive". That's not going to change.
While extending the season to reduce burnout and costs might make sense "on paper" I don't believe that in application it will come out that way. The drive to be competitive will push teams to meet with the same intensity for a longer period of time.
There is already a stop work day, and yet hundreds of teams have found ways to work around it - at great expense, but they feel it is worth it. Many have already admitted that they are in a 4-month build season as it is.
So, I ask the mentors of those teams: Have you found that you are less stressed, have more free time, are able to commit to the other elements in your life more now that you have already extended the build season?
- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox
PS - I miss the days of whatever came in the kit, extruded aluminum, 1 sheet of plywood, wire and Small Parts...
Not to keep beating a dead horse, but with no end build day we wouldn't have to make a practice robot, which would save alot of money and time when it comes to our sheet metal sponsor. It would save the team alot of time and money when it came to buying spare motors, gears, wire, etc. Then having to put together 2 robots, then having to program and teak 2 robots(1 we have unlimited access to and can prefect and another that we have about 8 hours on practice day of competitions or 4 hours if at Championships to perfect). The overall quality of robots *should/would* increase if build season didn't have a solid end date. Want examples see VRC, FTC, and FLL.
Speaking on just 2826 if we had unlimited access to our robot this year would have been, I believe, much different for us. I believe that we would have won both regionals we went to instead of being finalist(I believe this because our auto mode would have been "perfect" and led to us being 1st after qualifications at both competitions) Our championship experience robot wise would have been different as well, not saying we would have done better in the elims, but I believe we would have seeded better in quals(again due to getting auto down on our comp bot like we had it perfect on our practice bot).
The fact of the matter is, is that no matter what the "schedule" teams are given from FIRST there will always be those people/teams who work harder and longer hours than others. Increasing the length of build season will just allow those who don't work non stop to have more time with their robots to perfect them, or those who do work non stop a chance to have a day or two off a week during build and see their family and friends or relax.
Mark Sheridan
14-05-2013, 14:23
I have to agree with Dustin. The 6 week build is a burden on our sponsors. The build season is during the last leg of the fiscal year, so a lot of companies are expediting to finish projects including my own. It takes up a lot of my own time but also shop time that were able to procure. Often our parts are being made in over-time. This makes determining part value tricky because of we were to report the overtime cost, it would be huge. hence, we are often forced to have an mentor to make the part to make its value zero, adding to burn-out. At this point we are begging machinists, engineers and technicians to come in to see the robot and talk about their jobs in an effort to add them to our mentor list.
To give use more time with our resources, it would be nice to make parts in November "at risk." We could then have extra time during the build season, time to have students present/operating the machines, and a chance to start CAD models earlier. Also this would prevent us from getting to carried away, because everything is at risk, so we would limit ourselves to common parts or risk making an obsolete part once the game is announced. Of course every year we compete with the pros and cons of the kit-bot frame because it could give us the same savings in time. However, drive trains have not been the bottle neck in our builds.
I should add, I don't think I would give up the practice bot even with a extend season. It has been very nice to have it around for spare parts. Also having a second data point has been nice to catch a few technical issues.
BrendanB
14-05-2013, 14:35
Not to keep beating a dead horse, but with no end build day we wouldn't have to make a practice robot, which would save alot of money and time when it comes to our sheet metal sponsor. It would save the team alot of time and money when it came to buying spare motors, gears, wire, etc. Then having to put together 2 robots, then having to program and teak 2 robots(1 we have unlimited access to and can prefect and another that we have about 8 hours on practice day of competitions or 4 hours if at Championships to perfect). The overall quality of robots *should/would* increase if build season didn't have a solid end date. Want examples see VRC, FTC, and FLL.
Speaking on just 2826 if we had unlimited access to our robot this year would have been, I believe, much different for us. I believe that we would have won both regionals we went to instead of being finalist(I believe this because our auto mode would have been "perfect" and led to us being 1st after qualifications at both competitions) Our championship experience robot wise would have been different as well, not saying we would have done better in the elims, but I believe we would have seeded better in quals(again due to getting auto down on our comp bot like we had it perfect on our practice bot).
The fact of the matter is, is that no matter what the "schedule" teams are given from FIRST there will always be those people/teams who work harder and longer hours than others. Increasing the length of build season will just allow those who don't work non stop to have more time with their robots to perfect them, or those who do work non stop a chance to have a day or two off a week during build and see their family and friends or relax.
True, but how will the international teams handle an unlimited build season?
For teams like 3132 and 359, if the 2013 build season were extended how much time would you realistically have your robot if you competed at the same events?
...The answer to these questions is "to remain competitive". That's not going to change...Forgive me, but this is making a number of assumptions that do not hold true for me.
1. Our schedule in build (and otherwise) is not such as it is simply to remain competitive. The world of FIRST is not all relative. We set a certain standard each year that we want to achieve. It's absolute. This year, it was 3pt pyramid shooting and a 30 point climb. We worked our tails off because we wanted that climb. If we'd gotten it sooner, which I guarantee we would have in a more open season (because it works beautifully on our practice bot...), the schedule would not have been as intense.
Yes, this is true even if we'd gotten trounced at our events by a couple of 1986s. We wouldn't have stopped dead in our tracks, of course, but we were more than prepared to dialed it back. Because it's not all about competition, it's about achievement. At some point, a point we're pretty much at now, our design plateaus. And we're cool with that. When we discussed trying to get full court shooting abilities and/or floor pickup--this was when we'd only been 2nd pick district semifinalists, mind--we decided against it, because we had lives.
2. This answer's shorter. We buy things we have to ship because we want our students to have experience with those real-world items. For instance, this year we bought material to mold our own polyurethane wheels. Yes, it helped us competitively (well, kinda), but we did it because the kids wanted to try it and because we wanted that climb. The same goes for the things we ask our sponsor mentors to machine--it's just great experience for the students.
In short, my answer is not to be competitive. It's to be inspirational. In many ways, this is an absolute, and in terms of robot function, it realistically plateaus (unless you're one for a total rebuild, which we're not). More time gives me more of an opportunity to do that: to gather more mentors to help more students, to engage more students for a meaningful time, to reach out to more teams in more ways, to save more money for other efforts, and yes, to 'cram' less.
In terms of competition though, I seem to have forgotten how we determined more time would change relative competitiveness of the top 1/2-1/3rd. The bottom rising I get: more time to cross-team mentor, maybe more mentors signing on...but the top? We seem to have spent most of this thread talking about how the elite and pursuing-elite teams work through the 4 months anyway, and how we all don't want to work harder than we already do. How many people actually think the Jones' would get untouchably better in an open season, or would even force us to work much harder? The Jones' I've seen here seem in favor (whether they're for the concept or not) of spreading out in an open season just as much as others. We've already heard from 67 that they don't even work the schedules we're talking about, we see Daisy's at their limit, and we know 1114's mentors are mostly weekenders. I guess I just forgot, because the gap hadn't occurred to me before.
@Brandon: I agree, there are certainly logistical issues in an open season. No argument. They may even be intractable, though I doubt it. (Are you sure this doesn't fit in the overhead bin, Sir? :P Perhaps we should be sponsored by American Airlines instead of FedEx.) I don't think anyone's timeline for opening the season is January 2014. It may even have to wait for more districts, but I still think it's worth talking about.
This topic has been hard to get off my mind... I read Van and Sanddrag's post and agree so strongly. Then I go back to Jim's post and I also agree with him as well.
So guess what. FIRST should do what is in FIRST's mission.
- If they want to keep the feel of a 6-week build - mimicking real world engineering challenges - then go for it... Keep it 6 weeks, no withholding allowance. Some without enough mentor support or experience, may field robots that are limiting. The Jones' will continue to inspire and amaze.
- If they want to involve more students in robot building and develop a robot competition that is exciting to watch. Then open up the season. More teams will find success and the Jones' will still continue to inspire and amaze.
What I can't stand is this half way stuff. We call it 6 weeks - but it is really 3-4 months. FIRST needs to decide what direction do they want FRC to go. Which experience do they want students to have?
Personally, I think the 6 week experience is like no other experience kids face and it many ways it is a great opportunity for them to learn skills that have nothing to do with robotics. To meet an almost impossible deadline, with minimal and insufficient resources, and not a how-to-book within sight. Aren't these the characteristics employers want these days? In the end, isn't that what is most important?
As far as my burn out goes... If they go with an open build season, it will force me to cut back. I'd like to think that I can do this, but in the back of my mind, I'm afraid I might not be able to follow through. Perhaps go to set work days or mandatory days off as others suggest. It will sure test me.
...And that's not even considering the "keeping up with the Joneses" work ethic that many of us middle-tier FIRST teams have--we want to become elite teams, and as I said before, I have a very hard time betting against the work ethic of the likes of Wildstang, Simbotics, Miss Daisy, and other such top-tier teams. I assume that most of them will not moderate their work schedule, but will instead squeeze every minute out that they can--and those that don't will probably stop being top-tier teams in a matter of years.
By and large the "elite" teams are already milking the 16 weeks for all it's worth. There wouldn't be any change in that regard if we went to an open competition.
AllenGregoryIV
14-05-2013, 16:50
In terms of competition though, I seem to have forgotten how we determined more time would change relative competitiveness of the top 1/2-1/3rd. The bottom rising I get: more time to cross-team mentor, maybe more mentors signing on...but the top? We seem to have spent most of this thread talking about how the elite and pursuing-elite teams work through the 4 months anyway, and how we all don't want to work harder than we already do. How many people actually think the Jones' would get untouchably better in an open season, or would even force us to work much harder? The Jones' I've seen here seem in favor (whether they're for the concept or not) of spreading out in an open season just as much as others. We've already heard from 67 that they don't even work the schedules we're talking about, we see Daisy's at their limit, and we know 1114's mentors are mostly weekenders. I guess I just forgot, because the gap hadn't occurred to me before.
The few posts I think that have real merit to the top 1/3rd of teams getting much better with an open season are those that believe they would build entirely new robots for championship. We see this in VEX a lot yet rarely is it the team that copies someone that is winning the World Titles but I guess the meta-game of trying to beat the current fad copy machine could be a bad thing.
However I just don't think this will happen in FRC or at least not at the scale that it happens in VEX. It's just much harder and resource intensive to copy most mechanisms in FRC and get them right. If the game allows for something very simple to be copied that dramatically improve effectiveness then teams will do it and already are Minibots, ball magnets, etc. However I just don't think many teams would see something like 1114's climb in Week 2 and have a duplicate/improved machine ready to go for championship. There are teams that are good enough, have the machining capabilities and drive to do this sort of drastic overall and rebuilds and some of them do it now. However since you can't build an entire FRC robot in a weekend or at least not one that can compete for a world title like you can in the smaller robot competitions I don't think you will see nearly that many direct copy robots or even complete rebuilds.
nicholsjj
14-05-2013, 16:53
Let's look at this from a pure competition standpoint because I believe that much "burnout" occurs in competition due to the fact that many teams want their students to at least field a competitive robot so that their team does not lose say 125-10 and feel that their efforts ment very little as far as being competitive playing the game. So now let me ask a question to either alliance captains or their first pick that had won regionals this year.
Did any team end up winning a regional as an alliance captain or first round pick while not building a practice robot or keeping their withholding allowence under 5 lbs.? For teams in a district setting I would ask the teams this same question for those that qualified for championships based on robot performance.
If the total amount of teams that answer yes to this question is over 60% of the total amount of regional winners and district qualifers then I say we keep bag and tag. If it is under 60% I would say that we eliminate bag and tag to give us underfunded teams a chance.
waialua359
14-05-2013, 17:02
In regards to mentor burnout, we are a very competitive team and we take our on field performance very seriously. If FIRST were to open the season wide open, we would work every bit as hard as we do during the current build season, right up until the championship. Any team who wanted to be a contender would be forced to do the same.
I would be forced to seriously reconsider my involvement in FIRST as a result of the toll it would take on my health, and personal/professional lives. This is largely because of my competitive personality, and complete inability to lead a balanced lifestyle. My take on the whole idea, the FIRST season is great the way it is. Don’t change a thing.
If you want to see the most competitive and capable robots battling it out at the championship, open it up more, but be prepared to see some negative side effects as a result. If you want less mentor burnout, keep it at 6 weeks or less, get rid of the withholding allowance, and don’t allow any fabrication or software development after bag day, but don’t be surprised when we have lots of brave little toasters taking the field.
Of the last several pages, this stood out to me the most.
This is every bit true for me and I'm sure many others!
I dont live a balance lifestyle. For me, I have to add my 4 year old daughter, wife and immediate family to that list of things that get neglected.
I do blood tests every 3 months, and my diet is at its worst, during build season and while we travel.
During any event, I ignore the lunch and dinner schedules. All that matters is when our next match is!
Sounds bad, but this is reality.
On the other hand, Joe brought up some good points about working smarter and NOT harder. I think in general, our team does that. However, if we plan to take the next step and make those hard decisions to take greater chances in robot design, we'd have to be even smarter about it.
sanddrag
14-05-2013, 17:03
For all of your arguing that we should go to an open season and for the purposes of spreading out the work, since many of us have already commented that we wouldn't, what about going back to my original idea of mandating a "FIRST Teams may work 6 (or 5) days per week, and must declare a consistent non-work day".
I'd be more inclined to be in favor of a longer build season if there was no legal way to work more than 5 or 6 days per week. So long as teams are free to work as many days and as many hours as you can, teams will, and we will to remain competitive.
AllenGregoryIV
14-05-2013, 18:40
For all of your arguing that we should go to an open season and for the purposes of spreading out the work, since many of us have already commented that we wouldn't, what about going back to my original idea of mandating a "FIRST Teams may work 6 (or 5) days per week, and must declare a consistent non-work day".
I'd be more inclined to be in favor of a longer build season if there was no legal way to work more than 5 or 6 days per week. So long as teams are free to work as many days and as many hours as you can, teams will, and we will to remain competitive.
I just don't see how this is any different from it is now. There are a few teams that already work 7 days a week for 4 months and most of them aren't world champions. Yet there are teams that work 4 or 5 days a week and constantly produce top 25 robots in the world. I strongly believe there is a limit to how much time can really help in terms of getting from 90% to 99% in terms of robot quality. You could give some teams half as much time as everyone else and they would still build a world class robot, they have been doing it longer and just are better at than other teams.
However, getting from the bottom 20% to the middle of the pack, time can make a huge difference.
My team meets nearly everyday, but that's not because we think we have to if we want to compete to be world champions. It's because we like seeing each other and I believe it's good for the program. Every team has their reasons for doing what they do.
pfreivald
14-05-2013, 19:01
By and large the "elite" teams are already milking the 16 weeks for all it's worth. There wouldn't be any change in that regard if we went to an open competition.
Indeed. That's why I'm also for a severe limitation (or elimination) of withholding allowance.
Bob Steele
14-05-2013, 19:30
Of the last several pages, this stood out to me the most.
This is every bit true for me and I'm sure many others!
I dont live a balance lifestyle. For me, I have to add my 4 year old daughter, wife and immediate family to that list of things that get neglected.
I do blood tests every 3 months, and my diet is at its worst, during build season and while we travel.
During any event, I ignore the lunch and dinner schedules. All that matters is when our next match is!
Sounds bad, but this is reality.
On the other hand, Joe brought up some good points about working smarter and NOT harder. I think in general, our team does that. However, if we plan to take the next step and make those hard decisions to take greater chances in robot design, we'd have to be even smarter about it.
I can certainly confess to this Glenn, It has gotten so bad that the parents have actually assigned someone to make sure that I eat.
It is simply in my nature to be competitive and to give my students 100% of my effort.
It isn't so much about the winning... it is about the competing.
I can tell you that the key to having more balance in the mentor/coaches lives is to create a really good parent/mentor/coaching system by giving everyone something of value to do and to celebrate that.
I don't think switching a few hours/days/regulations here or there or forcing change on the FIRST system will do anything to reduce the "mentor burnout". It will always be there no matter how much time is allowed. Of course it might help individuals one way or the other... but it is not a real solution to this "problem"
Our team has been blessed with a wonderful group of mentors and parents...it allows us to do things that other teams have difficulty doing. If everyone gets the same amount of time... teams that have this kind of support are going to do better. It is really that simple.
Invest your off season time... gain support from somewhere...find people who want to volunteer... make them part of your team... Time spent doing this will solve so many problems that you have..
What you are doing is incredibly interesting and it has great value.. and its a great deal of fun for mentors and students alike... let it shine... make it loud... reap the benefits... How many times have you heard
" I wish they had a program like this when I was in school..."
Well NOW they can be in this program....
Don't just say " Our team has no mentors.... we can't find any more"...go out and tell people about your team... you will find supporters... once you have a few... getting more will be easier and easier...
The one thing you can't do is just sit back and wait for them to appear.
Or expect someone else to do it for you.
Make it happen...
sorry for the soap box... You may now return to your scheduled broadcasting...
You could give some teams half as much time as everyone else and they would still build a world class robot, they have been doing it longer and just are better at than other teams.
However, getting from the bottom 20% to the middle of the pack, time can make a huge difference.
I am not sure I agree. I believe the top 5% or 10% of teams already make significant use of the time between build and competitions so they may not see as much of a benefit. But there will be some, and I know these teams would find even more ways to take advantage of the extra time. Probably the top 20% or even 30% could benefit more from a longer season, and are also likely to be in a position to take advantage of it. But from what I have seen of the bottom 20% or perhaps even the bottom 40 or 50% is that many of these teams are mostly resource and mentor limited. These teams are in the worst position to take advantage of any extra time. I believe that making the season longer is more likely to cause them to fall further behind the pack and become less inspired. If you really want FIRST to become more competitive this is the area that really needs to be addressed.
Abhishek R
14-05-2013, 19:47
I just don't see how this is any different from it is now. There are a few teams that already work 7 days a week for 4 months and most of them aren't world champions. Yet there are teams that work 4 or 5 days a week and constantly produce top 25 robots in the world. I strongly believe there is a limit to how much time can really help in terms of getting from 90% to 99% in terms of robot quality. You could give some teams half as much time as everyone else and they would still build a world class robot, they have been doing it longer and just are better at than other teams.
However, getting from the bottom 20% to the middle of the pack, time can make a huge difference.
My team meets nearly everyday, but that's not because we think we have to if we want to compete to be world champions. It's because we like seeing each other and I believe it's good for the program. Every team has their reasons for doing what they do.
In my opinion, I think Mr. Gregory summed it up pretty nicely. It's not so much time that teams need, (although I think a 7th week might help quite a bit, rarely do I see even from the top FRC teams a bot ready to go week 1) but it's the motivation to want to be better that is required. FRC is a serious time commitment, and I'm having a tough time believing that teams won't make efforts to squeeze every bit of time out that they can. Again, it's a choice, but I think more teams will try to use it all rather than use it effectively.
pfreivald
14-05-2013, 20:11
Invest your off season time... gain support from somewhere...find people who want to volunteer... make them part of your team... Time spent doing this will solve so many problems that you have..
What you are doing is incredibly interesting and it has great value.. and its a great deal of fun for mentors and students alike... let it shine... make it loud... reap the benefits... How many times have you heard
" I wish they had a program like this when I was in school..."
Well NOW they can be in this program....
Don't just say " Our team has no mentors.... we can't find any more"...go out and tell people about your team... you will find supporters... once you have a few... getting more will be easier and easier...
The one thing you can't do is just sit back and wait for them to appear.
Or expect someone else to do it for you.
Make it happen...
I've been doing this for years, with mixed success. I'm not sure that the vast majority of people appreciate what living twenty miles from a stoplight really means in terms of running an FRC team.
BrendanB
14-05-2013, 20:17
Of the last several pages, this stood out to me the most.
This is every bit true for me and I'm sure many others!
I dont live a balance lifestyle. For me, I have to add my 4 year old daughter, wife and immediate family to that list of things that get neglected.
I do blood tests every 3 months, and my diet is at its worst, during build season and while we travel.
During any event, I ignore the lunch and dinner schedules. All that matters is when our next match is!
Sounds bad, but this is reality.
On our team the students have figured out that when I'm sick our team has an amazing competition/wins awards. I typically skip breakfast/lunches at events because food isn't the priority at the moment!
Pat Fairbank
14-05-2013, 20:48
Indeed. That's why I'm also for a severe limitation (or elimination) of withholding allowance.
This argument reminds me of what Karthik is fond of saying, though -- that you can increase your relative competitiveness either by raising your own team up, or by dragging the best teams down.
This argument reminds me of what Karthik is fond of saying, though -- that you can increase your relative competitiveness either by raising your own team up, or by dragging the best teams down.
It's not dragging the best down - their absolute performance might be worse than it is with the current ruleset or a official longer build period, but they're still going to win. It's not like proposed (as in, often proposed in whiny threads on CD) rules against spending, tools, sponsors, or shop-built robots that would disproportionately hit elite teams. 1114 was great in 2003 (I was there) when there was no withholding allowance, and they're great now. Their relative performance would almost certainly not change. But everyone's mentors and teachers would see their families more, and you'd have an easier time retaining teachers (having been on several teams where the massive time commitment has put a strain on the teachers involved).
To put it another way:
-A build season that was actually 6 weeks long would remove exactly the same amount of build time from every team rich or poor, big or little. We all get the same amount of time.
-Rules against spending or tools or sponsors or high-end COTS components or software disproportionately fall upon top-end teams, and would more fall under the quote of "trying to drag others down".
Part of the hard part in being competitive in nearly everything has been getting myself to trust the other mentors on my team who do not share in the same philosophies with respect to designing for and playing an FRC game (CAD first, we only have self-imposed restrictions, #35 chain on the drive train IS ok, etc). My wife has been paramount in helping me let go of decisions that shouldn't matter to me to begin with. That type of thing definitely helped reduce stress when thinking pessimistic thoughts out loud concerning the smaller robot size constraints while CAD'ing at home.
For the first time in 5 seasons, we will have a significant amount of our students returning next year. I hope it will help reinforce lessons learned with the adults come next year.
New mentors are sometimes a mixed bag the first season (especially with alpha-types). It also helps (I think) that I am finally no longer mistaken for a student by new mentors* :rolleyes: In retrospect, after everyone survives a season with others' personalities, new mentors can definitely become the people us competitive vets lean on at critical times in future years.
*Still happened once this year, even though I just turned 30 in St. Louis...
...
It is simply in my nature to be competitive and to give my students 100% of my effort.
It isn't so much about the winning... it is about the competing.
I can tell you that the key to having more balance in the mentor/coaches lives is to create a really good parent/mentor/coaching system by giving everyone something of value to do and to celebrate that.
I don't think switching a few hours/days/regulations here or there or forcing change on the FIRST system will do anything to reduce the "mentor burnout". It will always be there no matter how much time is allowed. Of course it might help individuals one way or the other... but it is not a real solution to this "problem"
Our team has been blessed with a wonderful group of mentors and parents...it allows us to do things that other teams have difficulty doing. If everyone gets the same amount of time... teams that have this kind of support are going to do better. It is really that simple.
Invest your off season time... gain support from somewhere...find people who want to volunteer... make them part of your team... Time spent doing this will solve so many problems that you have..
What you are doing is incredibly interesting and it has great value.. and its a great deal of fun for mentors and students alike... let it shine... make it loud... reap the benefits... How many times have you heard
" I wish they had a program like this when I was in school..."
Well NOW they can be in this program....
...
No soapbox there -- that's genuine inspiration.
It's not dragging the best down - their absolute performance might be worse than it is with the current ruleset or a official longer build period, but they're still going to win. It's not like proposed (as in, often proposed in whiny threads on CD) rules against spending, tools, sponsors, or shop-built robots that would disproportionately hit elite teams. 1114 was great in 2003 (I was there) when there was no withholding allowance, and they're great now. Their relative performance would almost certainly not change. But everyone's mentors and teachers would see their families more, and you'd have an easier time retaining teachers (having been on several teams where the massive time commitment has put a strain on the teachers involved).
To put it another way:
-A build season that was actually 6 weeks long would remove exactly the same amount of build time from every team rich or poor, big or little. We all get the same amount of time.
-Rules against spending or tools or sponsors or high-end COTS components or software disproportionately fall upon top-end teams, and would more fall under the quote of "trying to drag others down".I'm lost in the comparison. Isn't the argument that tool/sponsor limits affect top teams because such teams take advantage of them currently? If so, isn't that the exact same case with the withholding allowance? It removes the exact same potential time from all teams, just like limiting tools remove the exact same tool options from all teams. Could you explain further?
I'd also like to point out that pulling the top down is not inherently relative to competitiveness. It could well be absolute: what if no one (ok, fewer, some miracle workers didn't need the extra time/allowance) had pulled off a 7 disc auto? Or a 12 second climb? It might not cut the competitiveness, but it cuts the inspiration. What if Einstein had looked more like Week 1?
To answer nicholsjj, no, we never have. We've been second pick for all our wins except Philly 2011 (alliance captain), made semis as first pick and got skipped in MAR points since we won--every single one involved a practice bot, most involved 10+ lb withholding allowances. We might have pulled Philly off without a practice bot (we basically rode the minibot), but every other one needed it.
rick.oliver
14-05-2013, 22:22
I have read every post in this thread and have already posted. Nothing I have read compels me to change my perspective. My first preference is to eliminate the bag and tag requirement; provide teams with a voucher which they may choose to use to ship their robot to and from the championship on a date of their choosing.
To the question of what would 4028 do differently under the circumstance I described? As I am the lead mentor, not the dictator, I will share what I would strongly advise our team to do. Our work schedule would not change in the first 6.5 weeks – we have not proven we can get it completely done in 6.5 weeks, so until we demonstrate we are more efficient, no schedule change. We would continue to select two events from the same Regional events which are relatively close and we would work around any major school events. We would avoid back-to-back events and likely target weeks two through six; ideally three and five. We would continue to build prototype subsystems and more effectively assemble them to ensure that they work together as designed. We would complete our design, fully test, debug and practice. If I can find the resource close, I would pursue the idea of getting pre-inspected.
Net, we would come to our first event complete, practiced and ready to inspect. I know from experience that when a team can do that, the competition is better and everybody has a much better time.
To the comments concerning the value of the 6.5 week deadline and its representation of real world requirements. I have been an engineer in the chemical process industry for 35 years. I understand that deadlines and commitments are real and students need to learn how to meet them. I also know that some deadlines are hard and fast while others are soft and may be renegotiated at times. For the past 23 years I have worked for a consumer product company. I have designed manufacturing processes for new-to-the-world products; redesigned manufacturing processes for major reformulations of products; modified existing process subsystems to work more effectively and remove “issues”. Here is one thing I know for sure – we can never stop innovating or we will be buried by the competition. Sure, we push hard and keep schedules to get the product out as fast as possible. Then we continually improve the product and the manufacturing process to provide new and better benefits and lower costs. This is my reality and this is what I want to help our students experience. We will do it under the current rules; we could do it more cost effectively without the bag requirement.
Concerning the relative competitiveness. I want no parts of constraining anybody from executing an excellent design to near perfection. I want to see highly effective machines fully playing the game compete on Einstein every year. If we could be one of them, great … I am not going to kill myself trying or lose any sleep when we don’t make it. I will celebrate the success of those who win and learn from them.
Concerning burnout. I get exhausted by the end of build (is that burned out, perhaps). But I recover quickly. Without the bag requirement, I know that the stress and frustration of not being complete would be at best eliminated and at worst postponed. Certainly no worse. The stress at competition would depend upon performance and reliability. I believe we would be more reliable and perform better. We would meet more during the build season as needed, but I believe under less stress and more effectively with access to the competition robot.
Finally, to those who express the concern about burnout, I will offer the following wisdom which has been shared with me over the years. The first is live your life based on priorities, balance is a trap and invites you to always compromise. It makes you feel like you are cheating one of your priorities. Another is to ensure that you manage your time such that you have margin (time which is unscheduled so that you may respond to the emergencies and opportunities in life). The last one I learned recently, limit yourself to five roles. These are my five roles in priority order:
1. Disciple of Jesus Christ
2. Husband
3. Father/Grandfather
4. Engineer at Procter & Gamble
5. Lead Mentor of FIRST FRC Team 4028
mathking
14-05-2013, 22:37
For those arguing that extending the build season will make the disparity between the most well funded and least well funded teams smaller, I have to ask "Are you really sure about that?" Yes, being able to make a practice robot is an immense advantage, but is it more of an advantage than being able to attend multiple regional competitions? Will being able to attend more regional competition be an even bigger advantage with the unlimited build season?
My team just completed our 11th season. I would call us a moderately well funded team. We have built a practice robot the past couple years, but this was the first year where we built a fully functional one. (Thank you Denso for the grant!) But before that we were able to build most of a practice robot with the accumulation of spare parts from years of doing FRC. This year was the first in which we could afford to attend a second regional competition. It was an eye opening experience. We had a pretty good robot by the end of the build season, but multiple little issues kept it from really performing well until the elimination rounds at Queen City. But this year we were able to take our now fully functional robot to Buckeye. The advantage of the teams that routinely go to two or three regional competitions will be magnified by an unlimited build season.
I guess my view on this question comes down to asking "Which choice will provide the most benefit?" I know that for my team at least (and I strongly suspect for other teams) the extension of build into the spring will push away more students due to other season commitments than we will gain by spreading out the time commitment. And I feel strongly that an unlimited build cycle will pose an existential threat to more than a few teams who rely on teacher participation. So I think there is a not inconsiderable risk of there being fewer students and fewer teams in FRC if we switch to an unlimited build season.
AllenGregoryIV
14-05-2013, 23:04
For those arguing that extending the build season will make the disparity between the most well funded and least well funded teams smaller, I have to ask "Are you really sure about that?" Yes, being able to make a practice robot is an immense advantage, but is it more of an advantage than being able to attend multiple regional competitions? Will being able to attend more regional competition be an even bigger advantage with the unlimited build season?
My argument is that you won't need to go to multiple events to gain the same advantage. If instead you spend Saturday at a nearby school with your competition robot competing against another team, you can gain a similar advantage to a team that is at an event that week.
118 hosts small scrimmage type things from time to time and those are some of the best days we have during all of build season to learn about our robot. Only teams with practice bots can go though.
waialua359
15-05-2013, 00:39
I can certainly confess to this Glenn, It has gotten so bad that the parents have actually assigned someone to make sure that I eat.
It is simply in my nature to be competitive and to give my students 100% of my effort.
It isn't so much about the winning... it is about the competing.
I can tell you that the key to having more balance in the mentor/coaches lives is to create a really good parent/mentor/coaching system by giving everyone something of value to do and to celebrate that.
I don't think switching a few hours/days/regulations here or there or forcing change on the FIRST system will do anything to reduce the "mentor burnout". It will always be there no matter how much time is allowed. Of course it might help individuals one way or the other... but it is not a real solution to this "problem"
Our team has been blessed with a wonderful group of mentors and parents...it allows us to do things that other teams have difficulty doing. If everyone gets the same amount of time... teams that have this kind of support are going to do better. It is really that simple.
Invest your off season time... gain support from somewhere...find people who want to volunteer... make them part of your team... Time spent doing this will solve so many problems that you have..
What you are doing is incredibly interesting and it has great value.. and its a great deal of fun for mentors and students alike... let it shine... make it loud... reap the benefits... How many times have you heard
" I wish they had a program like this when I was in school..."
Well NOW they can be in this program....
Don't just say " Our team has no mentors.... we can't find any more"...go out and tell people about your team... you will find supporters... once you have a few... getting more will be easier and easier...
The one thing you can't do is just sit back and wait for them to appear.
Or expect someone else to do it for you.
Make it happen...
sorry for the soap box... You may now return to your scheduled broadcasting...
Bob,
I couldnt have said it any better. Spot on!
The real work as you have mentioned is finding the right mix of mentors/volunteers/supporters for your team, and NOT trying to do it all by yourself........because "its just too much work to find help."
MooreteP
15-05-2013, 06:27
Like most of you, I have been watching this thread closely, as my addiction to this program has affected my personal life.
1998, Ladder Logic, Rutgers "regional", with my newly formed Team 195, I began to cry seeing three of my passions, engineering, education, and sports, altogether under one roof. I was hooked.
Back in the day, we put the Robot in a crate, and it was laded in between competitions, at great expense.
To reduce monetary costs, the program has evolved to "bag and tag", with multiple regionals and "withholding allowances". This is bad for an addict.
Three teams later, I have to keep reminding myself: "It's not about the Robot".
pfreivald
15-05-2013, 07:16
This argument reminds me of what Karthik is fond of saying, though -- that you can increase your relative competitiveness either by raising your own team up, or by dragging the best teams down.
I don't see why it should in any way remind you of that quote. FIRST already has a great deal of rules--that is, artificial restrictions--designed to create some level of parity. I'm all for money and motor and pneumatic limits, too... and I don't see how that makes me in any manner anti-Kanagasabapathian.
I want FIRST to grow; to expand to other schools and communities with sustained, awesome programs where kids do awesome things. The three major barriers I see to that are (a) mentor burnout, (b) brave little toasters (which, let's face it, aren't terribly inspiring to those who built them or to anyone watching them), and (c) money.
(a) and (c) are both impacted by extending build--(c) is definitely helped, while (a) is definitely hurt (I know, I know, people are free to disagree with me on that and be wrong :p ).
What I do not see as a major problem in FIRST right now is the top-tier and high-middle-tier teams fielding non-competitive robots.
I don't see why it should in any way remind you of that quote. FIRST already has a great deal of rules--that is, artificial restrictions--designed to create some level of parity. I'm all for money and motor and pneumatic limits, too... and I don't see how that makes me in any manner anti-Kanagasabapathian.
I want FIRST to grow; to expand to other schools and communities with sustained, awesome programs where kids do awesome things. The three major barriers I see to that are (a) mentor burnout, (b) brave little toasters (which, let's face it, aren't terribly inspiring to those who built them or to anyone watching them), and (c) money.
(a) and (c) are both impacted by extending build--(c) is definitely helped, while (a) is definitely hurt (I know, I know, people are free to disagree with me on that and be wrong :p ).
What I do not see as a major problem in FIRST right now is the top-tier and high-middle-tier teams fielding non-competitive robots.
If FIRST got rid of the witholding allowance, as many in this thread seem to favor, you would absolutely see the ceiling come down.
We definitely would not have designed a 30 point climber if we knew there was no witholding allowance. We made substantial changes to the functionality of every system on the robot post build. Very few of those changes could have been done at the event with no witholding allowance.
I imagine many others would have designed different robots with less functionality as well. It may not be about the robot, but it's definitely inspiring seeing the robots that manage to do everything well, or be the absolute best at a few things. With less chances to tweak/upgrade/fix things, a lot of that goes away.
If FIRST got rid of the witholding allowance, as many in this thread seem to favor, you would absolutely see the ceiling come down.
We definitely would not have designed a 30 point climber if we knew there was no witholding allowance. We made substantial changes to the functionality of every system on the robot post build. Very few of those changes could have been done at the event with no witholding allowance.
I imagine many others would have designed different robots with less functionality as well. It may not be about the robot, but it's definitely inspiring seeing the robots that manage to do everything well, or be the absolute best at a few things. With less chances to tweak/upgrade/fix things, a lot of that goes away.
...so? All of a sudden, a two-level climb would be the amazing thing at the regional. The amazingness of a 30pt climb isn't simply because it is a 30pt climb, it's because it was very rare and very difficult to pull off under the current build-season ruleset. Shorten the season, and something slightly less amazing would become the amazing thing that'd get people off their feet (and, of course, the 1-2 teams that managed a 30pt climb in a 6-week strict build would be even more amazing).
If they extended the build season, you'd see more 30pt climbers, which would reduce the specialness of a 30pt climb, and then the inspiring thing would be someone doing it in like 4 seconds.
Of course, if they limited the build season or extended it, I'm sure the GDC would change the game rules slightly to make things a little easier or a little harder, and so the "most amazing" thing you could do on the field would still only be doable by 3-4% of teams.
I'm lost in the comparison. Isn't the argument that tool/sponsor limits affect top teams because such teams take advantage of them currently? If so, isn't that the exact same case with the withholding allowance? It removes the exact same potential time from all teams, just like limiting tools remove the exact same tool options from all teams. Could you explain further?
I'd also like to point out that pulling the top down is not inherently relative to competitiveness. It could well be absolute: what if no one (ok, fewer, some miracle workers didn't need the extra time/allowance) had pulled off a 7 disc auto? Or a 12 second climb? It might not cut the competitiveness, but it cuts the inspiration. What if Einstein had looked more like Week 1?
I believe the withholding allowance is used by far more mid-tier teams than the other things I listed. Particularly in the context of whiny CD threads, that are always like "111/1114/254/987/25's ROBOT IS BUILT WITH SUPER-TOOLS BY ADULTS AT THEIR SPONSOR-DONATED METAL SHOP CAMPUS. BAN EVERYTHING THEY USE SO MY TEAM IS CLOSER". I've been on teams that always did pretty poorly with just one mentor and still used the withholding allowance and the added time that came with it. The withholding allowance is nowhere near being something only elite teams use. And in any case, unlike tons of money, big sponsors, or amazing tools which are harder to acquire, it is something that is available to every team equally. Removing it thus removes the same opportunities from every team equally.
As for the inspirationalness of 12-second climbs, see what I said above. There isn't anything inherent in a 30pt climb that makes it amazing, it's the fact that only a few percent of teams managed to pull it off. In a shorter build with somewhat-less-capable robots, whatever other thing that was only pulled off by 5% of teams would become the inspirational/aspirational things for teams to chase. If we gave every team a year, a 30pt climb would be an expected feature and wouldn't be inspirational at all.
[QUOTE=Bongle;1275017]...so? All of a sudden, a two-level climb would be the amazing thing at the regional. The amazingness of a 30pt climb isn't simply because it is a 30pt climb, it's because it was very rare and very difficult to pull off under the current build-season ruleset. Shorten the season, and something slightly less amazing would become the amazing thing that'd get people off their feet (and, of course, the 1-2 teams that managed a 30pt climb in a 6-week strict build would be even more amazing).
If they extended the build season, you'd see more 30pt climbers, which would reduce the specialness of a 30pt climb, and then the inspiring thing would be someone doing it in like 4 seconds.[/QOUTE]
I disagree. 20 point climbing is the same thing as 30 point climbing, from a climber design standpoint. 30 point climbing just repeats the first motion. We would not have 20 point climbed either. I think very, very few teams would have 30 point climbed if they knew they absolutely had to get it right the first go around. I can't speak for 1114, but if I were them and were deciding between floor pickup and 30 point climbing I'd probably pick floor pickup because there's far less risk of not having it perfected in six weeks.
It was so hard to do that I don't think you would have seen many teams adding one. You could certainly scrap everything above your base and make a 30 point climber, if you had an open competition, but it would be very, very difficult to retrofit one around your existing design. Maybe some more teams would have built one, but there'd still be no more than a handful that would be worth the time they took to align and get to the top.
Regardless, it's one small section of the point I was trying to make. If the best robots aren't as good and do less things in a less impressive fashion, it hurts all of FIRST because students on other teams aren't as inspired by the amazing things the really good teams are able to do.
Perhaps it's the lack of parity that makes the uberbots so compelling.
If we all had unlimited time and budget to design and build robots, we'd all have designs that score 15 discs autonomously from the top of the pyramid.
But we don't, so the teams that can do that are few, far between, and a-m-a-z-i-n-g.
The 6-week restriction is a big part of what makes FRC great, what makes it different. Using "we can't do it because we didn't have enough time" isn't a valid excuse - we've all got the same amount of time.
Also - the notion of teams arbitrarily self-limiting their schedules in a longer build season paradigm is laughable. We're engineers, scientists, teachers. We don't do things that are arbitrary. We do whatever it takes to try to be the best at accomplishing our goals.
Perhaps it's the parity that makes the uberbots so compelling.
If we all had unlimited time and budget to design and build robots, we'd all have designs that score 15 discs autonomously from the top of the pyramid.
But we don't, so the teams that can do that are few, far between, and a-m-a-z-i-n-g.
Surely you don't believe this is true?
The great teams are pretty close to the upper limit on performance. They can't get that much better. Maybe 5-10%.
The pretty good teams can probably get a lot better. Most of them probably not quite to the level of the great teams, due to resources, mentors, design skill, etc, but pretty close.
40% of teams have no hope of ever getting anywhere near the great (or even pretty good) teams, IMO. The best hope would be that if you make build an open process the teams in the first two categories could have the ability (through more time) to help those "lower tier" teams to at least build functional robots that could meet some minimum standard of competitiveness.
I'm not going to comment on what we should do with the withholding allowance or if we should keep the 6.5 weeks or not. I think there's a bigger problem.
I'm not trying to pick on either one of you, you're just the two most recent posts saying this.
During any event, I ignore the lunch and dinner schedules. All that matters is when our next match is!
Sounds bad, but this is reality.
I can certainly confess to this Glenn, It has gotten so bad that the parents have actually assigned someone to make sure that I eat.
It is simply in my nature to be competitive and to give my students 100% of my effort.
This is part of your problem.
I'm reasonably confidant that any mentor worth his/her salt would NOT let a student do that. We make sure our students eat, that they're drinking lots water, that we send them home at a reasonable hour, and that (if we're in a hotel) we make sure to send them to their rooms at a time that allows them to get a decent amount of sleep. (Whether or not they sleep at that point is out of our hands.) Why don't we do the same for ourselves? Just like your students, your body cannot give you 100% if you're not taking care of it. And that includes doing trivial things like eating. Even if all you're doing is taking five minutes to inhale a sandwich or slice or two of pizza and chug a bottle of water.
Part of the reason why so many people get burned out is because they're not taking care of their body. You need to eat, you need to stay hydrated, and you need to sleep. To take it a step further, sit down for a moment or two every hour. Take some of the strain off your feet and back. Spending all day running around on concrete/wood floors does NOTHING to help you feel better.
Surely you don't believe this is true?
The great teams are pretty close to the upper limit on performance. They can't get that much better. Maybe 5-10%.
The pretty good teams can probably get a lot better. Most of them probably not quite to the level of the great teams, due to resources, mentors, design skill, etc, but pretty close.
40% of teams have no hope of ever getting anywhere near the great (or even pretty good) teams, IMO.
You said what I said. My question, poorly phrased, was "why is that inherently bad?"
I, for one, have added admiration for the greats because they were able to do so much in so little time. That separation, that parity, is what makes them incredible.
We're historically firmly entrenched in that 40%. We're graduating students, getting them scholarships, hooking them up with internships and work experiences, spreading the Gospel According to Dean, slowly but surely getting better as a team - I'm okay with being in the 40%. What I'm not okay with is making myself (more) exhausted, straining my relationships with my family, friends, career, and ask others on the team to do the same - just to maybe get to the bottom part of the 60%.
Our competitive limitations are not a direct result of the 6-week period. They're a result of a larger set of issues - ones we're working toward resolving.
Jared Russell
15-05-2013, 09:30
Also - the notion of teams arbitrarily self-limiting their schedules in a longer build season paradigm is laughable.
Please go back and read the posts from Joe Barry (987) and Adam Freeman (67) in this thread. They are among many teams that already have self-imposed time off on their build calendars. On 341 we generally avoid meeting on Wednesdays and Sundays, at least until a final push is necessary. We have learned over the years that a bunch of fatigued and stressed out team members working around the clock is not the preferred way to build a robot, regardless of what your team's capabilities are.
Brandon Holley
15-05-2013, 09:54
I, for one, have added admiration for the greats because they were able to do so much in so little time. That separation, that parity, is what makes them incredible.
I don't want to speak for the 'greats' but MANY of these teams are not accomplishing their amazing designs in 6.5 weeks. What Cory was describing earlier is that these very elite teams are already near the peak of robot performance. These teams are working for 4 months, using withholding allowance and practice bots to reach an unbelievable level of play.
Opening the build season will not dramatically change the level of play these teams are already achieving...
-Brando
pathew100
15-05-2013, 10:06
Just a few thoughts after reading the latest posts on here.
* The top/uber teams will work from kickoff until championship regardless of any rules limitations. Even with no withholding, they will perfect a practice robot, dial in their autonomous, and spend lots of time figuring out how they upgrade the competition robot at their next event.
* Being able to build and test code and "driver's training" on a practice robot is a huge advantage. Why not let all teams have that chance by letting them at their competition robot?
* FIRST made a big push this year and for the past few years to make the game and competitions spectator friendly. We now have the "Make it Loud" award, etc... What would the competition be like if we cut back access to the robots? Not nearly as exciting, especially at the early regionals. And it would hurt the middle tier teams the most.
* Over time, the game challenges/tasks (especially autonomous) have become more difficult. The software is a lot more complicated than the old IFI days. The mechanical side has gotten maybe a little easier with AndyMark and Vex, etc... But I can't imagine what it would be like to be a rookie team now. Cramming all that into 6 weeks has added to burnout.
* If robot access or the season were expanded, project management and time management skills would be a must for all teams. These are good lessons to learn as well as technical skills.
KrazyCarl92
15-05-2013, 10:09
There are diminishing marginal returns to increased time put in. Past a certain point, spending a given amount of time AWAY from robots is optimal to success. So this means that the top teams stand to gain the least by opening build season from a competitive stand point, whereas less competitive teams stand to gain the most. I recognize that there are other factors involved in the opinions expressed here, but this is why I'm surprised by the lines that have been drawn and where people tend to fall on this issue.
To Jared's point, we took off Fridays through and including week 4, and if not for a big snow storm, probably could've continued to take them off all season. That's another thing that an open build season would self-accommodate: it would allow for more resilience despite problems completely beyond teams' control like bad weather. Bad weather can cancel meetings for the better part of a week, significantly delay shipments, and cause other issues that require the immediate and undivided attention of FRC participants. An open build season will help alleviate these issues.
An interesting thing about this thread: usually when somebody says "our team can't do xyz," people tell them to go out and find a way to do it anyway (recruit more sponsors and mentors, work in the offseason, etc). People jump all over that type of thing. But when a team says "we can't stop ourselves from overworking," there are more people agreeing than criticizing the "I can't" claim. I've already been critical of that, so I'll just say that I experience the same problem to a degree and empathize.
The people posting are largely a bunch of overachievers and people who, when told "you can't do that," will go out and figure out a way to do it out of spite. The overachieving culture is a big reason why so many teams bite off too much in their design process and end up not finishing the robot properly. Maybe this is something all of us should think about more when we decide our overall approach to an FRC season, whatever the length. Our ambitious, overachieving selves push us to make irrational decisions. That includes choosing fanciful robot strategies and choosing 7 day schedules for 20+ hours a week (or 30, 40...).
This thread has me dreaming of what we could accomplish in a longer build season, but I am also thinking about what I can do to make next year's 6.5 weeks more efficient and less stressful. It has been a very thought provoking thread.
pfreivald
15-05-2013, 11:21
40% of teams have no hope of ever getting anywhere near the great (or even pretty good) teams, IMO. The best hope would be that if you make build an open process the teams in the first two categories could have the ability (through more time) to help those "lower tier" teams to at least build functional robots that could meet some minimum standard of competitiveness.
Extending the build season is very far from the only manner in which this can be done. You're right that it is a possible solution to this problem, but it's only one of many, and I can think of quite a few that I would call better.
Chris Hibner
15-05-2013, 11:34
This may sound like a stupid question, but I'd like some serious responses.
What about shortening the build season to 4 or 5 weeks, with no witholding?
notmattlythgoe
15-05-2013, 11:39
What are some ways teams can use to lower mentor burn out with the way the season is currently set up? What are some techniques that teams have used to reduce work loads early in the season?
Nate Laverdure
15-05-2013, 11:57
This may sound like a stupid question, but I'd like some serious responses.
What about shortening the build season to 4 or 5 weeks, with no witholding?
If I were to start my own high school robotics competition:
-- I'd want my build season to start the first weekend in January, so that college-age alumni can attend kickoff before they go back to school. This lets the high school students capture a little bit of the alumni's institutional knowledge, but it also (1) challenges the students to make their own decisions that will (2) establish themselves as the new team leaders and (3) push the envelope of the team's capabilities.
-- I'd want my build season to have a defined "stop build" date, even if it means that the date must be chosen arbitrarily. This is essential in order to teach the concepts of project management.
-- I'd want my build season to end before the college students have a chance to come home on their spring break.
By these criteria, my build season ends up being ~6 weeks long.
Chris Hibner
15-05-2013, 13:31
Since my previous question didn't generate much traffic (yet), here are some of my thoughts behind asking it:
- Many people on this thread argue that extending the build season will create more stress on the mentors. Then finding a way to pull the season back to 4 weeks might be better for everyone. If 8 weeks is worse than 6, then 6 must be worse than 4 (or not?).
- Shortening the build season forces more design tradeoffs - "do everything" robots will become exceedingly difficult to pull off. Maybe forcing some more design tradeoff through time limits is not a bad thing.
- It might force FIRST to simplify some of the design challenges so teams can build competitive robots in 4 weeks. The game could still be exciting, so maybe that's not such a bad thing.
- We've discussed lengthing the season, but haven't at all talked about shortening it. Why not?
- If you feel that 4 or 5 is simply not enough time, then why exactly is it not enough?
During kickoff, Woody always makes a speech along the lines of, "we give you a hard challenge, and not enough time to do it." What is enough time? What is definitely too little? Does your answer depend on if you feel that scaling back your design ambitions is a good or bad thing?
(I know some of this is in the "Is 6 weeks a perfect number" thread, but: a) I hate multiple threads discussing the same topic, and b) I'm looking for answers along the lines of how it pertains to mentor burnout. At this point, I'm up for hearing anything. A lot of people on this thread have stated, "if FIRST does XXX, then I'm going to think about limiting my involvement." Let me say that if FIRST doesn't do something, I'm thinking of limiting my involvement. Then again, I've been saying that every year for the last 12 years.
What are some ways teams can use to lower mentor burn out with the way the season is currently set up? What are some techniques that teams have used to reduce work loads early in the season?
Matt and I are mentors on the same team, so our focus regarding this issue is similar. The general topic of this thread has been on changing the length of the season to reduce mentor burnout. What if we make the likely assumption that the rules are not going to change, and discuss ways teams can "work smarter, not harder" to reduce mentor burnout? Triple Helix is trying our utmost to get better without killing our mentors or going broke. I'll share some of the things we've done, or are working on doing.
- First, like a lot of teams, we don't meet every day. We meet three evenings during the week and all day Saturday. This allows both students and mentors time to breathe and handle non-robotics related life issues.
- A well run sports team would never show up to their first game without practicing first. In FRC, "game season" starts on kickoff day. We use the time between when school starts and kickoff day for robot building practice. The electronics team practices wiring. The software team writes the code to control a robot, from scratch. The mechanical team trains on the tools and machines in our shop, and works on pit and robot building projects. During the off season we meet one evening a week, and everyone can work on projects outside of meeting times. On kickoff day, the team is used to working together as a team, and has the skills necessary to build a robot.
- Be smart and pre-order as many COTS supplies as possible before the season even starts. If you neglect to do this, you are dooming yourself to parts shortages and high stress during the build season. During our summer development activities, we realized that hex bearings were critical to our drive train, and hard to come by. Also, the tolerances on the hexes vary enough that a good portion of an order don't fit the hex shafting. So we pre-ordered enough hex bearings for two robots and pre-sorted them into good and bad batches. The good ones fit unmodified shafting. The bad ones have to have the hex shafts hand worked to fit. We used the good batch on the competition drive train and set the others aside for the practice bot. When other teams started posting about shortages of hex bearings during the build season, we got to say, "Whew, that was close." rather than being stressed.
- Build your practice bot drive train as a training exercise in the fall. No, it probably won't be exactly what is perfect for the game. But if you design and build it smartly, it will be easy to modify. Even if you guess completely wrong, your team will have practiced their robot building skills, and you will have a working drivetrain which can be used for scoring device prototyping. Even better, find an area rookie team and help them get on their feet by letting them work with you while you build it. One caveat, be sure to be scrupulous to segregate any parts you might fabricate or COTS parts you modify, as these may not end up in a competition robot.
- Invest in a 3D printer. This is going to be one of the biggest time savers for us next year. We bought one right at the beginning of the build season, and it helped enough that we wouldn't want to go without it. Right now we are redesigning and rebuilding our pickup arm. Many of the secondary components and brackets are all designed in CAD and printed on the printer. This moves "fabrication" time outside of meeting time. Parts can be printing overnight, and during school/work hours, to be ready at meeting time.
- Recruit mentors! For the past three years we have had two primary mechanical mentors. It looks like this year we will have at least four. This will be a huge help in reducing our "burnout factor". Again, a caveat: be sure the people you bring on are compatible with the team. Bringing in an incompatible mentor creates stress rather than reducing it. Another again, working on projects during the off season is when you want to try out new mentors, not in the heat of build season.
Does anyone else have something to share about how your team does things, working within the existing rules, to reduce "mentor burnout"?
scottandme
15-05-2013, 13:57
This may sound like a stupid question, but I'd like some serious responses.
What about shortening the build season to 4 or 5 weeks, with no witholding?
Would certainly exacerbate many of the previously listed problems - paying for expedited shipping, stress on sponsors to manufacture parts in a shorter timeframe, fewer days "off" for teams.
I would love to see an effort by FIRST (or the community) to compile some data on FIRST norms, so we can get a sense of where we stand as a community on some of these big issues. I have a feeling we're overestimating the "average" FIRST team.
Build Season Schedule/Time Commitment - our team meets from 6:30-9:30PM on weekdays and ~1PM-9PM on weekends, with that schedule expanding in the final weeks. Our team policy is to take Fridays off for as long as we can, this year we took Fridays off weeks 1-4. We use RFID tags to track attendance - in the end I spent 260+ hours working in the lab, we had 12 students exceed 180 hours (~30/hrs a week). We logged a little over 5,000 "person-hours" of work from ~45 students. The numbers might be a little low if anything (students forgetting to sign out, work done at home, etc). I figure we must be on the high end of the continuum, but I honestly have no idea what the average team looks like here.
Practice Bots - we were planning on building one for the 1st time this year - eventually made the conscious choice to abandon that after taking a realistic look at our build schedule. Being in MAR, we had the benefit of unbagging windows, so it wasn't a huge issue. Maybe 5% of teams (~125) are making these?
Withholding Allowance/Competition Season - Mainly used for spare parts that we don't have time to make during build season. 3D printed some hopper inserts to solve a jamming issue before world CMP. We're usually too burned out after 6 weeks to do any major changes within the 30 lbs, so it's minor iteration of exisiting systems.
I think if the goal is to bring up the bottom end, simply extending the build season isn't going to cut it. Those teams that are disadvantaged in mentor support or resources aren't going to be able to fix those issues with more time.
A bunch of pages back everyone was talking about the 2nd event being a big equalizer for lower-tier teams. From looking at the MAR data this season (OPR), that's doesn't seem to be the case. For all MAR teams the 1st event average was 15.5, which increased to 22.9 at their 2nd event (7.4 pt average increase). Here is the average increase in OPR based on OPR after their 1st event.
Rank 01-20: 7.33 points (OPR range from 67 to 25.5)
Rank 21-40: 8.21 points (OPR range from 25.3 to 17.7)
Rank 41-60: 7.45 points (OPR range from 17.3 to 10.7)
Rank 61-109: 7.24 points (OPR range from 9.6 to -3.5)
The good but not great teams had the biggest gains - likely teams that have adequate mentorship and resources, had lots of headroom to improve, and were able to make tweaks and changes to improve their performance. Overall though, not a significant difference, and the worst teams failed to make up any ground on the rest of the field.
Taking a closer look at the teams ranked 61-109, their average OPR at their first event was 4.0, which improved to 11.25 at their second event. At that point, I don't think more time is the answer - in performance after 6 weeks of build, or after 1 week of competition and 12 hours of unbag time.
Perhaps it's the lack of parity that makes the uberbots so compelling.
If we all had unlimited time and budget to design and build robots, we'd all have designs that score 15 discs autonomously from the top of the pyramid.
But we don't, so the teams that can do that are few, far between, and a-m-a-z-i-n-g.
The 6-week restriction is a big part of what makes FRC great, what makes it different. Using "we can't do it because we didn't have enough time" isn't a valid excuse - we've all got the same amount of time.
Also - the notion of teams arbitrarily self-limiting their schedules in a longer build season paradigm is laughable. We're engineers, scientists, teachers. We don't do things that are arbitrary. We do whatever it takes to try to be the best at accomplishing our goals.A few questions:
1) Do you really believe that we could "all" have designs to score 15 discs in auto from the top? Who is "all"? (I find it uncompelling to attribute on-field success solely to money and time, and I'm not sure that's what you intended.)
2) I don't understand the assertion that we all have the same amount of time. In addition to practice bots, we can glance back at Jim's awesome charts (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=14812&d=1368195960). One of the biggest benefits that would come out of a more open build season is the removal of this disparity, even if it just meant everyone could unbag on competition weekends (e.g. for scrimmages). It's never been about time per say, it's about time to bring resources to bear. The more time we all have, the more resources we can all share. Yes these lower teams could raise more money and travel more, but if they haven't been inspired yet, is it really a realistic expectation?
3) I agree with Jared on your last statement. Virtually every team I know already limits themselves to prevent burnout during the season. They may not succeed in avoidance, but how many teams actually work every day of build? The same long hours every night and weekend? How many work every day of those 4 months? Do you? To be honest, if someone doesn't limit themselves or their students, that their own problem, and I hope they learn quickly. We've all learned, most of us the hard way, that working harder/longer after a point quickly leads to diminishing returns. That's why we call it burnout in the first place. I stop because I know I'm not supposed to burn myself or my students out. Because I know it has negative consequences on everything we're trying to do. Self control. Honestly, the applies in now just as much as in open season.
I'm fired up on this, but I've waited and come back to it, and I'm ready for the consequences.
This will anger a lot of people, but I cannot abide by the idea that a season designed to protect the top/middle for ourselves is somehow more important than a season that allows us to bring the bottom up: hold scrimmages, save money for rookie workshops, consistently cross-mentor more teams, etc. Self-discipline. VEX manages it. FTC manages it. FLL manages it. We manage in our work lives, and we expect students to manage in their own. Don't cram for your exams, work on the long term schedule even when there's nothing breathing down your neck, be responsible for your own health. I can understand other reasons behind the 6 week bag, if you want to talk about teaching quick deadlines (disagree, but ok), international logistics, etc, but not that one.
Chris, good question. I don't have a definite opinion besides the fact that shortening would result in the same problems that not lengthening it does (no scrimmaging, etc...unless you left the off weeks there as ran more events, which is intriguing). Ignoring 4 weeks vs. open and concentrating on 4 weeks vs. 6, the issues I see are this:
- Even assuming the game is correctly designed for 4 weeks, I stand by the assertion that inspiration is not solely relative to competitive performance. Some absolute things are simply inspiring and an of themselves, based on the work put in rather than how many other people do it. With less time, there's less opportunity to do things like this.
- It burdens sponsors (and shipping costs) more. This can be avoided in design, but it then also avoids giving students the opportunity to work with such things, and teams the opportunity to build as strong sponsor relationships.
- In some ways, less time inherently means fewer students and mentors can come. Whether or not teams meet more often, it's simply a smaller target: if you're traveling, catch another bad blizzard, or get sick, it's basically over. Already true in a 6 week season, just made worse.
There are probably some others. I don't know that I would walk out if it happened, but I don't see what problems it solves. I like design tradeoff debates as much as the next person, but I think it's possible to work them into the game--this year did well.
Pendulum^-1
15-05-2013, 14:19
Our team is not one of those that anyone would ever consider "elite." But we strive to improve. The "Firebird," for us, is fitting, as we constantly strive to improve our team from the ashes of the previous season. It started when the team went 0-7 at Chesapeake as rookies in 2006. Indeed, you would be stretching things a bit to call our 2006-2011 robots anything other than the "Brave Little Toasters."
But in 2012, we actually managed to score at everything. Not well, but we could shoot and actually score. But with a few strategic robot changes, enabled by the 30 pound allowance, between Chesapeake in week 2 and DC in Week 5, we could hit 10 points with layups in teleop and balance very well, indeed. The students felt that they were active participants in the matches. We still did not do well in the standings. That was not too important, from students' viewpoint. They were quite psyched up, that they had moved on from the Brave Little Toaster category. Maybe even to the Small Toasters That Maybe Could category. And we did off season events last autumn. We were an alliance captain at Battle of Baltimore, and, as alliance captains at IROC, actually won the event. In 2013, after a disasterous showing at Palmetto, with us not scoring at all, we put on a shooter and a lifter, that, at the DC regional, could give us 12 points in auto and hang for 10. (Provided that we had our network cable plugged in properly, of course. Doh.) At the end of DC, with us having a robot that could reliably score some, the students were asking to go to Baltimore in two weeks. Sure, we were now in our eighth year of not being even seriously considered for an elimination pick, but the students were seriously inspired to work even more in this off season to improve the team.
Our ability to improve out of the Brave Little Toaster category in both of the last two years has been directly attributable to the 30 lb allowance. The (self-perceived) move out of the Brave Little Toaster category has had a HUGE impact on the inspiration impacting our team members. They have more confidence, they want to do more off season activities, including training. We have no delusions that we can build Super Shiny Hot Rods or even Cool Golf Carts. Yet.
If we had the ability to work on the robot some, after the end of Build Season, it would have a positive impact on our team and a reduction in Mentor load. If we were authorized to work on the robot, outside of the bag, in our shop, for about 12 hours a week, with a ~30 lb limit for improvable components/assemblies, the following would change for us:
1) We would no longer attempt to build robot two. We tried to build robot two in 2010 and 2012, and it was a huge waste of resources and time, as we did not get it finished in time for us to do any good.
2) We would reduce the need to build prototyping stands. We built prototyping stands for our 2012 shooter and 2013 shooter and lifter. All three stands were a waste of time, in my book, that did little to directly inspire the students. These stands were only necessary due to the bag restrictions. Yes, engineers do this sort of thing all the time, when access to the real thing is limited. But FIRST should be in the business of reducing mentor work load to get more inspiration into the students. I hate busy work. For me or anyone else.
3) Our students could practice driving and playing the game at home. Invaluable. Test, break, repair, practice.
4) As we would have a more complete robot on Thursday morning, we would have a better chance to do practice rounds before the field closed at 4 PM.
The students on my team have been more inspired the past 15 months than the previous 6 years combined. It has had little to do with the capabilities of other teams, even the elite teams. In my opinion, the inspiration of our students has everything to do with how well our own team achieves the game objectives. As simple as they may be, it is our robot's ability to do score some that inspires our students.
simplyTired
15-05-2013, 16:54
40% of teams have no hope of ever getting anywhere near the great (or even pretty good) teams, IMO. The best hope would be that if you make build an open process the teams in the first two categories could have the ability (through more time) to help those "lower tier" teams to at least build functional robots that could meet some minimum standard of competitiveness.
I find this slightly upsetting that you would believe 40% of the teams have no ambition to strive for the excellence you compete at. As a member of said 40%, despite not reaching greatness so easily, we still have an ultimate goal of reaching it at some point. It can be extremely difficult to believe in when year after year you don't reach simple goals like eliminations, but that doesn't take us away from striving to compete with every team including the top tier ones.
As a mentor on a lower tier team, I assume that removing a 6 week barrier would basically spread our current schedule over a greater time period rather than increasing the total time spent significantly. Although, considering mid-tier teams would choose to use their extra time to be better, I can see creating a massive gap between those teams that choose to milk the extra time for everything its worth and those that choose to spread it out and take more breaks.
I realize that its a choice a team has to make, but it creates a situation where a team somewhat has to choose between burning their mentors out and having a chance at winning or taking breaks and settling for a sub-average robot.
I think your proposal would raise half of the teams and entrench the other half even further in a position where its extremely difficult to break out of.
I find this slightly upsetting that you would believe 40% of the teams have no ambition to strive for the excellence you compete at.
He didn't say that 40% of teams have no desire to be excellent -- he said 40% will not achieve excellence. If excellence is defined as playing in elimination rounds, in a field of 50 teams, more than 50% won't achieve excellence. At a Championship with 100 teams in a division, 75% won't achieve excellence. Winning the championship? 6 each year do that; 1.5% of teams at the event.
This is reality and I don't think it's meant as a dig against anyone. In this case, I think Jim Zondag's metric -- a team contributing positively to the outcome of each of its matches -- is a good judge of how excellent a team is on the field. Giving teams more time should, in nearly every universe, allow them to produce something that is more effective at achieving that than if they had less time.
waialua359
15-05-2013, 17:19
This may sound like a stupid question, but I'd like some serious responses.
What about shortening the build season to 4 or 5 weeks, with no witholding?
Chris,
we could do it and usually do anyways, due to other logistical factors being from Hawaii. Can we build a top teen robot? I think we have the past few years.
But top 10? Probably never in a shortened season.
Brandon Holley
15-05-2013, 17:20
I realize that its a choice a team has to make, but it creates a situation where a team somewhat has to choose between burning their mentors out and having a chance at winning or taking breaks and settling for a sub-average robot.
This is a choice already being made by every single team. Removing the 'stop build date' doesn't change the fact that a choice still needs to be made by everyone's own team on how much time should be committed to the build.
Teams that do not build practice robots or use the withholding allowance are already choosing not to work past the deadline. Granted, some of these choices are made for financial reasons, others are made for 'burnout' reasons and I'm sure there are plenty more reasons teams do or do not do it.
The fact remains that this choice is actively happening every single season.
-Brando
The fact remains that this choice is actively happening every single season.
But with a longer season, the consequences of choosing the less burnout-inducing option become much more harmful. A team choosing to not withhold right now has their competitors working on a 30lb subset of their robot (or having to build a practice robot, then work on that). The still-working competitors get a boost relatively, but not an insurmountable one.
A team choosing to stop at 6 weeks (or to only do 6 team-weeks of work) in an open build season has its competitors working on their entire robot without restriction. That's a much bigger opportunity cost for choosing to avoid burnout, and so it is a stronger pressure to continue working.
I would argue that you need a "Stop Build Day" for a reason slightly different han what most are calling for. I have been involved in a lot of project related actitivites, and a lot of project related teams. Almost to a rule, there is a "last minute push" on the projects to meet deadlines. Sometimes the project is small, and the last minute push is a long day of effort. Sometimes an all-nighter. Sometimes a hard week. Sometimes a long tiring month.
Currently Build season is a 6 week push, and at the end of 6 weeks, msot teams have a fairly reasonable prototype that generally has some functionality. Giving them additional access points and time will imrpove the quality useability of that prototype, to an extent. If the access is too universal, and if the access is too open, then there will be a shift towards teams "changing the due date". While many argue this would be better, I actually think for a large portion of teams, this would be significantly worse.
There is a ton of proof in FRC that going to additional events and having more time post "stop build" will improve virtually every teams competitive performance. Many will argue (and have excellent proof) that more is better. I agree, but to an extent. My argument that the more is only better because you are leveraging a "stop build" to ensure a certain level of completion at that particluar date. While many would improve from an open season, I actually think an even larger chunk would do wo0rse at their first event. My proof of this are a lot of other design/build competitions that do not have such deadlines that just don't get done in time for the first event. I see this in OCCRRA, I see it in Vex. I see it at work. I saw it in solarcar. I saw it (and still do) in FSAE*. I think have an initial hard deadline, with some limited time afterwards actually improves the overall quality of submission and competition. I would like to see some improvements to the B&T system however.
I would personally keep the deadline as is, and do a "hands off week". Hug you family, feed the dog, ... hands off the robot in the bag. If you make a practice bot, go crazy, but for everyone else, get some rest.
I would then allow for 6 hours each week of unbag time weeks 1-7. This time can be used for practice, test and tune, fix what got broekn in the finals at the last event.. Whatever you choose. It is just that the robot can only be out of the bag 6 hours (or 4 or 78 or 12 or...), and no blocks shorter than 1 hour. FiM uses 2 hours, and it is a bit of a pain. 1 hour minimum would be more flexible and allow for practice.
In short, keep the "Stop Build", but allow for more test and tune windows. Test and tune windows should make it very hard to decide whether or not to do a practice bot. I personally believe 6 hours each week would be right around the level necessary to make it a hard decision.
*Less than 41/104 finsihed the endurance event. 15 did not compete in any of the dynamic events. There have been years with a much lower completion rate than those listed above.
BrendanB
15-05-2013, 18:15
How do you think open season would effect the competition season? Would we see an increase in teams scrambling for week 4-6 events? How do you think week 1 would change? Would we see more copy cats? Do you think we might have teams hold out on really building their robots until the elite teams come out to play? I think back on 469 in 2010 and how many of us wished we could redesign our robot in an open build season you can. Would this play a role in how elite teams build and compete with their machines to come out late and not show all of their cards to avoid copies?
These are just some of the questions I see swirling around in the scenarios that play out if an open build season started. To a degree we do have clones like the minibots and ramp style deployment that swept 2011 but the minibots did have an open season policy on them and the witholding allowed for the cloning of the effective device. I would hate to see this spread to entire robots.
DampRobot
15-05-2013, 19:27
I would argue that you need a "Stop Build Day" for a reason slightly different han what most are calling for. I have been involved in a lot of project related actitivites, and a lot of project related teams. Almost to a rule, there is a "last minute push" on the projects to meet deadlines. Sometimes the project is small, and the last minute push is a long day of effort. Sometimes an all-nighter. Sometimes a hard week. Sometimes a long tiring month.
Currently Build season is a 6 week push, and at the end of 6 weeks, msot teams have a fairly reasonable prototype that generally has some functionality. Giving them additional access points and time will imrpove the quality useability of that prototype, to an extent. If the access is too universal, and if the access is too open, then there will be a shift towards teams "changing the due date". While many argue this would be better, I actually think for a large portion of teams, this would be significantly worse.
There is a ton of proof in FRC that going to additional events and having more time post "stop build" will improve virtually every teams competitive performance. Many will argue (and have excellent proof) that more is better. I agree, but to an extent. My argument that the more is only better because you are leveraging a "stop build" to ensure a certain level of completion at that particluar date. While many would improve from an open season, I actually think an even larger chunk would do wo0rse at their first event. My proof of this are a lot of other design/build competitions that do not have such deadlines that just don't get done in time for the first event. I see this in OCCRRA, I see it in Vex. I see it at work. I saw it in solarcar. I saw it (and still do) in FSAE*. I think have an initial hard deadline, with some limited time afterwards actually improves the overall quality of submission and competition. I would like to see some improvements to the B&T system however.
I would personally keep the deadline as is, and do a "hands off week". Hug you family, feed the dog, ... hands off the robot in the bag. If you make a practice bot, go crazy, but for everyone else, get some rest.
I would then allow for 6 hours each week of unbag time weeks 1-7. This time can be used for practice, test and tune, fix what got broekn in the finals at the last event.. Whatever you choose. It is just that the robot can only be out of the bag 6 hours (or 4 or 78 or 12 or...), and no blocks shorter than 1 hour. FiM uses 2 hours, and it is a bit of a pain. 1 hour minimum would be more flexible and allow for practice.
In short, keep the "Stop Build", but allow for more test and tune windows. Test and tune windows should make it very hard to decide whether or not to do a practice bot. I personally believe 6 hours each week would be right around the level necessary to make it a hard decision.
*Less than 41/104 finsihed the endurance event. 15 did not compete in any of the dynamic events. There have been years with a much lower completion rate than those listed above.
You put this far better than I ever could. Changing the build season length will just "change the due date." I really like the unbag period idea, it lets people take a step back, breathe a bit, and then improve. The problem isn't that teams don't have enough time, it's that they usually finish the robot on the last day and have no time to iterate when their design goes south, as it enviably always does.
omgnocomms
15-05-2013, 20:17
Adding cannon fodder without a direction...
http://web.archive.org/web/20000919171248/http://www.usfirst.org/1998comp/minutes.html
There is a section titled "Stress/Burnout" - all from around 15 years ago. All in all, this document is actually an interesting read.
artdutra04
15-05-2013, 20:26
This may sound like a stupid question, but I'd like some serious responses.
What about shortening the build season to 4 or 5 weeks, with no witholding?I don't think I would enjoy that at all.
It would probably be an insane sprint to the finish line with little room for errors, setbacks, iteration and prototyping, weather delays, or non Next Day Air shipping. It would probably involve the same amount of man hours of work, just compressed into the shorter time frame, thus ending up with more all-nighters, which would thus cause more physical health issues and burnout.
You'd be pretty much forced to randomly take a shot in the dark as to what the best design would be, and if you choose wrong you'd be screwed for the rest of the season. You can't prototype for 2-3 weeks in a 4 week build season. Thus, the general quality of robots at the competition would plummet. Autonomous would be nearly non-existent.
You can also pretty much write off any outside machine shop/powder-coating/anodizing sponsor unless they REALLY love helping your team. The only teams with more than a handful of CNC parts will be ones that own their own CNC mill.
Mother nature and blizzards may be a huge problem now, but imagine with a 4 week build season would be catastrophic to loose a week with no withholding. Catastrophic as in throwing in the towel, cutting your losses, and making a super drivetrain defense robot weighted down with cinder blocks because you'll have no hope of honestly fixing or completing any scoring mechanisms.
If a situation arose such as what occurred to me this past build season (I was in China for business for the first three weeks), I'd have no real impact in a 4 week build season.
You can probably forget going through a comprehensive engineering design process in a 4 week build season. Forget iteration and fully CADding everything, just grab random scrap, bolt it together, and hope it works. Think Junkyard Wars. While it may have been fun to watch on television, the less time you have to build, the less time you have to teach and inspire.
// Side comment:
One interesting idea to reduce how much teams could scrap and rebuild from scratch a new robot with an eliminated ship date and bag-n-tag is to use a non-resetting BOM for the entire season. E.g. if you show up to a Week 1 event with a BOM totalling $2500 of parts, you only have $1500 left over for new parts for the remainder of the season unless you reuse parts from your original robot. If the BOMs have to be submitted to TIMS and are locked into a read-only status after a regional (with only the ability to add new items, not delete any old ones), then this effectively limits the scope of how much you can scrap and start over.
artdutra04
15-05-2013, 20:32
I would argue that you need a "Stop Build Day" for a reason slightly different han what most are calling for. I have been involved in a lot of project related actitivites, and a lot of project related teams. Almost to a rule, there is a "last minute push" on the projects to meet deadlines. Sometimes the project is small, and the last minute push is a long day of effort. Sometimes an all-nighter. Sometimes a hard week. Sometimes a long tiring month.
Currently Build season is a 6 week push, and at the end of 6 weeks, msot teams have a fairly reasonable prototype that generally has some functionality. Giving them additional access points and time will imrpove the quality useability of that prototype, to an extent. If the access is too universal, and if the access is too open, then there will be a shift towards teams "changing the due date". While many argue this would be better, I actually think for a large portion of teams, this would be significantly worse.
...What if all teams had to attend a mandatory* "Week Zero" event to go through initial inspection and to do a "functional test" on a real field with maybe a few practice matches to help teams sort out their bugs?
Real world projects have intermediate deadlines with through aspects like design reviews or engineering prototypes. And with large areas looking to expand to Districts, keeping nearly all teams within reasonable driving distance of a "week zero" event is fairly reasonable.
Or what if there was a "Blackout date" from the current ship date extending for one week, after which you could unbag your robot again?
* Unless explicitly waivered as being too difficult to attend due to travel distances.
I would argue that you need a "Stop Build Day" for a reason slightly different han what most are calling for. I have been involved in a lot of project related actitivites, and a lot of project related teams. Almost to a rule, there is a "last minute push" on the projects to meet deadlines. Sometimes the project is small, and the last minute push is a long day of effort. Sometimes an all-nighter. Sometimes a hard week. Sometimes a long tiring month.
Currently Build season is a 6 week push, and at the end of 6 weeks, msot teams have a fairly reasonable prototype that generally has some functionality. Giving them additional access points and time will imrpove the quality useability of that prototype, to an extent. If the access is too universal, and if the access is too open, then there will be a shift towards teams "changing the due date". While many argue this would be better, I actually think for a large portion of teams, this would be significantly worse.
I would personally keep the deadline as is, and do a "hands off week". Hug you family, feed the dog, ... hands off the robot in the bag. If you make a practice bot, go crazy, but for everyone else, get some rest.
I would then allow for 6 hours each week of unbag time weeks 1-7. This time can be used for practice, test and tune, fix what got broekn in the finals at the last event.. Whatever you choose. It is just that the robot can only be out of the bag 6 hours (or 4 or 78 or 12 or...), and no blocks shorter than 1 hour. FiM uses 2 hours, and it is a bit of a pain. 1 hour minimum would be more flexible and allow for practice.
In short, keep the "Stop Build", but allow for more test and tune windows. Test and tune windows should make it very hard to decide whether or not to do a practice bot. I personally believe 6 hours each week would be right around the level necessary to make it a hard decision.
I really like this idea. However I don't think it should become a hard decision whether to build a practice robot or not. It should be a easy decision for most teams but for the super competitive people, they will decide to build one anyway. I would like to modify a little. After the stop build date, have the one week of hand off time for everybody on the competition robot. Then if a team has no event in a given week, they will be given 9 hours in one hour increment. If a team has an event to attend, they will be given 6 hours because they will be able to access their robot during competition. This will even the playing field a little for teams who does not have the resources to attend multiple events and registered for a late week event. If I have 9 hours a week, I will not build a practice robot which as I said before will allow me to reduce the number of meetings from 5 to 4 per week. Putting some limit will prevent people from building a brand new robot for championship after watching week 1 or 2 events. There should still be a 30 pound limit or higher to prevent completely new robot.
Let me expand on the reason behind this proposal.
1) There is no change in the deadline, 6 1/2 weeks. FIRST can continue to advertise that this is a 6 1/2 week program. People who like a deadline because it is how it works in the real world and they want students to learn that will get what they want.
2) One week of hands off time will force everybody to take a break from the competition robot and rest. This will also allow international and teams that have to ship their robot to register for a week 1 event with no disadvantage. Supercompetitive teams and individuals can continue to work on their practice robots. Some teams can concentrate on their awards submission and preparation during this week.
3) 9 hours of access in weeks that teams do not have events will give them enough time to not have to build a practice robot. This saves time and money and makes some people happy. This gives teams more time during build season. Some will choose to meet less and some will choose to do more with that extra time. It also allows room to use those extra time to catch up due to snow days for some unfortunate people. This 9 hours access time will also help rookie teams and less resourceful teams to get help from other veteran teams to get their robot to work as it was designed to. This will raise the bottom like Jim said earlier.
4) 6 hours of access in weeks that teams have events is the same as what we do in Michigan and MAR. It works well and reduce stress because it is more efficient use of time when you are at your own shop and practice facility. This increases the number of teams ready for inspection on the first day.
5) Keeping withholding allowance and maximum access time per week will prevent teams to copy other designs and build a completely new robot. That will alleviate some people's concern.
6) For those people who do not want an extended build season. They can register for a week 1 or 2 event and finish their season early. If they qualify for world championship, it is up to them whether they want to continue to improve their robot or not. If they want to improve their robot, they can only work 9 hours a week on the robot. That will keep them from working on the robot nonstop for those who do not have self control. If they don't qualify which most teams don't, their season will be over and they can go back to doing other things.
Feel free to propose anything and modify these if this proposal does not make you happy. If you are neutral about it, please support it so other people can be happy, okay?
I really like this idea. However I don't think it should become a hard decision whether to build a practice robot or not. It should be a easy decision for most teams but for the super competitive people, they will decide to build one anyway. I would like to modify a little. After the stop build date, have the one week of hand off time for everybody on the competition robot. Then if a team has no event in a given week, they will be given 9 hours in one hour increment. If a team has an event to attend, they will be given 6 hours because they will be able to access their robot during competition. This will even the playing field a little for teams who does not have the resources to attend multiple events and registered for a late week event. If I have 9 hours a week, I will not build a practice robot which as I said before will allow me to reduce the number of meetings from 5 to 4 per week. Putting some limit will prevent people from building a brand new robot for championship after watching week 1 or 2 events. There should still be a 30 pound limit or higher to prevent completely new robot.
This is the best proposal I've seen yet. Sign me up.
BrendanB
15-05-2013, 23:22
I really like this idea. However I don't think it should become a hard decision whether to build a practice robot or not. It should be a easy decision for most teams but for the super competitive people, they will decide to build one anyway. I would like to modify a little. After the stop build date, have the one week of hand off time for everybody on the competition robot. Then if a team has no event in a given week, they will be given 9 hours in one hour increment. If a team has an event to attend, they will be given 6 hours because they will be able to access their robot during competition. This will even the playing field a little for teams who does not have the resources to attend multiple events and registered for a late week event. If I have 9 hours a week, I will not build a practice robot which as I said before will allow me to reduce the number of meetings from 5 to 4 per week. Putting some limit will prevent people from building a brand new robot for championship after watching week 1 or 2 events. There should still be a 30 pound limit or higher to prevent completely new robot.
I really like this proposal. It gives everyone a chance to access their robots later in the season on a uniform basis and can give lower resource teams who can't build a practice robot the time they need to practice/tune code and make any necessary changes.
It steps toward an open style season while still keeping the 6 week project like deadline but doesn't keep every team pressured to stay working constantly like an open season would.
I wouldn't mind seeing this in 2014!
I'm with Ed (and anybody else who has proposed a similar "limited access" period).
It gives teams a reason not to build a practice robot (saving money/time) while not restricting the use thereof (you want to use extra time to build an extra robot, that's your call).
It gives a hard deadline, while still allowing for "warranty support".
Now, will the burnout continue? If teams let it (see my note about the practice robot), yes. However, I hope that such a schedule will help teams learn self-discipline. You get 6-9 hours of time with the robot each week, schedule wisely and maybe do some work ahead of time to prep (say, tune the 30-point climber again).
My one issue is the 30-lb withholding (no battery or bumpers) remaining at that level. As teams will have a minimum of 6 hours with their competition robot before their first event, I would propose decreasing the withholding to 15 lb, plus whatever happens to be in the bag as far as parts that you didn't quite have time to put on the robot. (Shipping teams get 30 lb plus crate contents, to make up for the 6 hours.)
I'm with Ed (and anybody else who has proposed a similar "limited access" period).
It gives teams a reason not to build a practice robot (saving money/time) while not restricting the use thereof (you want to use extra time to build an extra robot, that's your call).
It gives a hard deadline, while still allowing for "warranty support".
Now, will the burnout continue? If teams let it (see my note about the practice robot), yes. However, I hope that such a schedule will help teams learn self-discipline. You get 6-9 hours of time with the robot each week, schedule wisely and maybe do some work ahead of time to prep (say, tune the 30-point climber again).
My one issue is the 30-lb withholding (no battery or bumpers) remaining at that level. As teams will have a minimum of 6 hours with their competition robot before their first event, I would propose decreasing the withholding to 15 lb, plus whatever happens to be in the bag as far as parts that you didn't quite have time to put on the robot. (Shipping teams get 30 lb plus crate contents, to make up for the 6 hours.)
I see your reasoning to reduce from 30 pounds since you have more access. I can go with that unless there is a big snow storm. Isn't that why they increased it to 30 pounds that year?
I see your reasoning to reduce from 30 pounds since you have more access. I can go with that unless there is a big snow storm. Isn't that why they increased it to 30 pounds that year?
Actually... They didn't. I looked it up; it went from 40 to 65 in 2010 due to the storm. 2009, 40. There is no CD discussion that I can find from before 2009; I believe the 30 lb was a response to the large amounts teams brought in in 2010. (I don't quite remember, but wasn't 2011 the first year of Bag-and-Tag for non-MI teams? If so, that would also explain some of the drop.)
I suggest that if there's a snow storm and teams can't get to their robots, they get all the out-of-bag time that they missed "credited" so that they don't miss any out-of bag. Whether they take the time before or after the initial bagging is up to them.
Ed,
Very nice. I like where you are going wtih that. I have been holding up writing a recommendation to FRC waiting for the add on ideas you put in. I will probably wait another week to see if any other powerful ideas come out in this discussion.
Chris Hibner
16-05-2013, 08:46
// Side comment:
One interesting idea to reduce how much teams could scrap and rebuild from scratch a new robot with an eliminated ship date and bag-n-tag is to use a non-resetting BOM for the entire season. E.g. if you show up to a Week 1 event with a BOM totalling $2500 of parts, you only have $1500 left over for new parts for the remainder of the season unless you reuse parts from your original robot. If the BOMs have to be submitted to TIMS and are locked into a read-only status after a regional (with only the ability to add new items, not delete any old ones), then this effectively limits the scope of how much you can scrap and start over.
I think this is a pretty cool idea.
Pendulum^-1
16-05-2013, 10:02
I would personally keep the deadline as is, and do a "hands off week". Hug you family, feed the dog, ... hands off the robot in the bag. If you make a practice bot, go crazy, but for everyone else, get some rest.
I would then allow for 6 hours each week of unbag time weeks 1-7. This time can be used for practice, test and tune, fix what got broekn in the finals at the last event.. Whatever you choose. It is just that the robot can only be out of the bag 6 hours (or 4 or 78 or 12 or...), and no blocks shorter than 1 hour. FiM uses 2 hours, and it is a bit of a pain. 1 hour minimum would be more flexible and allow for practice.
In short, keep the "Stop Build", but allow for more test and tune windows. Test and tune windows should make it very hard to decide whether or not to do a practice bot. I personally believe 6 hours each week would be right around the level necessary to make it a hard decision.
I like this. A lot. Exact numbers (hours, increments, limits, etc) are details that could be adjusted year to year. I suggest that there be total limit(s) with respect to how much you can modify the -as bagged- robot during the competition season. These limits could be in terms of money/BOM and/or weight. For instance, with a 30 lb limit, if you started with a 20 lb shooter, removed it, and replaced it with a 10 lb shooter you could alter it multiple times, and that would still only be counted as a 10 lb change. And you could add 10 lbs of climber, to give a total change of 20 lbs. But you could not also make 25 lbs of changes to a drive train or add 25 lbs of disc vacuum.
When you submit that proposal to FIRST, if you need anecdotes (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1275112&postcount=357), etc., feel free to include me/us in a petition.
Any circumstance that limits our access to a robot to some period less than what we have now with our practice robot will cause us to build a practice robot.
The limited access means we'd have some time to work on our competitive machine simultaneously, so that'd be helpful and means we'd be more prepared to compete on competition days, but I don't anticipate it doing anything to save cost for us.
For me -- for my team -- I don't anticipate it doing anything to fundamentally change how we operate or how exhausted I am at the end. I spend about 10% of my time working on manufacturing and assembly of real robots. The rest of the time is spent working in CAD, handling administrative tasks, awards, etc.; hands-off time doesn't do anything for me.
It's pretty clear that we all approach FRC differently and are exhausted for different reasons. I'd like to see something that allows me to more meaningfully include mentors that cannot provide the same level of commitment as I currently do. It'd allow me to spread the burdens I currently carry around a bit, build experience and knowledge among other people on my team, and maybe not be a raving, crazy person by the time competitions roll around. 9 hours a week isn't going to do that. Two days a week isn't going to do that. In my case, really, any limit that requires me to spend additional time outside of meetings creates an additional burden on me.
rick.oliver
16-05-2013, 11:57
I would welcome the changes outlined by IKE and Ed. I agree that it preserves the value of a defined build season while also offering the opportunity to pursue continual improvement (or, in some cases, completion :) ). It provides everybody with an opportunity to become more competitive at a lower overall cost while preserving the ability of teams to choose to invest as much or as little as suits their program and goals.
Having continued to listen to the arguments and think about my personal objectives for our program, this would be my preferred outcome. This process more accurately models my "reality". We deliver a manufacturing process; it starts up and produces product. We use virtual models, prototypes and pilot facilities to solve issues and make improvements. We strive to minimize the time we need to install these improvements on the "real" process so that we minimize our lost production time.
To me, this is a very accurate representation of how it works in real life and is worthy of serious consideration by FIRST.
Well done, IKE and Ed.
I must say that Ed's proposal is definitely better than what is in place now and I will be all for it.
[QUOTE=Doug G;1275357]I must say that Ed's proposal is definitely better than what is in place now and I will be all for it.[/QUOTE
Include me in Ed's camp too:D
Mark Sheridan
16-05-2013, 14:35
I would personally keep the deadline as is, and do a "hands off week". Hug you family, feed the dog, ... hands off the robot in the bag. If you make a practice bot, go crazy, but for everyone else, get some rest.
I would then allow for 6 hours each week of unbag time weeks 1-7. This time can be used for practice, test and tune, fix what got broekn in the finals at the last event.. Whatever you choose. It is just that the robot can only be out of the bag 6 hours (or 4 or 78 or 12 or...), and no blocks shorter than 1 hour.
I would like to modify a little. After the stop build date, have the one week of hand off time for everybody on the competition robot. Then if a team has no event in a given week, they will be given 9 hours in one hour increment. If a team has an event to attend, they will be given 6 hours because they will be able to access their robot during competition. This will even the playing field a little for teams who does not have the resources to attend multiple events and registered for a late week event. If I have 9 hours a week, I will not build a practice robot which as I said before will allow me to reduce the number of meetings from 5 to 4 per week. Putting some limit will prevent people from building a brand new robot for championship after watching week 1 or 2 events. There should still be a 30 pound limit or higher to prevent completely new robot
I am on board for these proposals. I inclined to have Ed's variation of Ike's idea. Both are really good. 9 hours is great, 6 hours would still work. I think if I had 6 hours in between LA and LV this year, the competition robot kinks could have been worked out.
I've read quite a bit of this thread, and off the top of my head there are several issues that have come up with respect to mentor burnout and student inspiration. The variables we've talked about thus far which change the FRC Student Inspiration to Mentor-Burnout ratio (SI:MB)
Witholding Allowance, 10 <= ALLOWANCE <= 60, avg=30
- MB Inverse Proportional to ALLOWANCE ?
- SI = Direct Proportional to ALLOWANCE ?
Deadline Adjustments, DEADLINE = 45 + N, 0 <= N <= 42
- MB proportionality mixed --some think MB increases, yet some think MB is the same or less
- SI Unaffected
Post-Bag Access Hours, 0 <= ACCESS <= 9 * # of weeks to competition
- MB Inversely Proportional to ACCESS
- SI Proportional to ACCESS
# of events attended, EVENTS = 1 + M, 0 <= M <= 3 (teams attending 5 events don't seem to do it multiple seasons)
- MB proportional to EVENTS
- SI proportional to EVENTS
Number of mentors, 1 <= MENTORS <= 20-ish? Anyone know the average?
- MB Inverse Proportional to MENTORS
- SI Proportional to MENTORS ?
Number of Students, 3 <= STUDENTS <= 100-ish?
- MB Proportional to # of students, or unaffected
- SI affected?
Cost per Match, $667 (1st Regional, no elims) <= CPM <= $267 (MSC/MAR, with elims)
- MB Proportional to CPM
- SI Unaffected ?
Cost of Sponsorship Stress (e.g. 341's sheetmetal sponsor), quantified by how much the employee will not get a end-of-year raise by? Or % chance to lose the sponsor the following year?
Cost of Shipping? % of costs reduced?
MB = (Time Under Stress - Time Under Eustress) divided by Time Invested? This nullifies the 'save me from myself' argument. What is max(MB)? How many hours did mentors put in this year? My personal was 40-hrs in weeks 1-4, 30 in 5-7, then 20-ish 8-17 except for 3 competition weeks which were 50-ish.
SI = [some calculation of]
- Team student population
- % of students who go to college
- % of 1-year students who change to doing any STEM field because of FRC
In formulating a model, we'd try to maximize SI:MB subject to these and other conditions. If we forget about what the top 1% are going to do (let the Poofs, Simbots and OP go nuts -- they already do) what does the rest of FRC stand to gain from making adjustments?
In formulating this model, we don't have to get the exact numbers right -- just whether something increases or decreases with respect to a constraint. Then we can see how to maximize Inspiration while decreasing Burnout (maybe).
Alpha Beta
16-05-2013, 16:06
Feel free to propose anything and modify these if this proposal does not make you happy. If you are neutral about it, please support it so other people can be happy, okay?
Love the idea. This helps level the playing field for those who cannot afford extra tournaments to improve their robots. It also recognizes the advantageous district teams now enjoy (of working in their own shops and practice areas during the week) and provides that for all teams.
Might consider adding the ideas:
No witholding allowance. Put the changes on the robot at home before you come to the tournament during an unbag window. Come to the tournament ready to inspect! (Do allow identical spares, and on-site modifications.)
Don't start the tournament until 4:00 in the afternoon on Thursdays. (Maybe allow load-in after 2:00 on Thursday for a skeleton crew.) Allows local teams to go to school on Thursday before the tournament and possibly allows a cheaper venue rental with a little less time. (Plus non-local teams can sample some of the local culture on a Thursday morning, or save a nights stay by traveling Thursday morning.)
Neither one of those are deal breakers for me. I love the idea just as presented.
Jared Russell
16-05-2013, 16:14
I think the ideas presented by Ed and Isaac are awesome compromises.
AllenGregoryIV
16-05-2013, 16:51
I like Ed's plan but I would like to see a bit more than 9 hours. I think at 9 hours we would have to be conscious of exactly what we did out of the bag. Something like 12 or 15 would seem better to me, that way we would probably not build a practice bot. About an 1 hour each weekday than 5 hours, Saturday and Sunday.
The week break at the end of build season would that be Tuesday to Tuesday? I think that hurts week 1 teams. What about just Tuesday to Friday so we could have pre-inspection events the Saturday before week 1 events?
I like Ed Law's Proposal. Our team would love rule changes like that.
Admittedly, 9 hours is a lot of time to play with. The one hour increments would make it possible to unbag the robot every day of the week, which is at odds with the goal of reducing the incentive to work to death.
Two hour minimum increments might be part of a more agreeable compromise for people who don't want to be in the shop every day. The number of hours per week is an important variable in a system like this, too.
I don't think this type of rule change would have a huge impact on the amount of time our team meets after the build season. But it would have some very attractive benefits.
I like Ed's plan but I would like to see a bit more than 9 hours. I think at 9 hours we would have to be conscious of exactly what we did out of the bag. Something like 12 or 15 would seem better to me, that way we would probably not build a practice bot. About an 1 hour each weekday than 5 hours, Saturday and Sunday.
The week break at the end of build season would that be Tuesday to Tuesday? I think that hurts week 1 teams. What about just Tuesday to Friday so we could have pre-inspection events the Saturday before week 1 events?So you're suggesting that teams work 7 days a week throughout the entire season? With the robot out of the bag every day? With a total break of 4 days? Sorry, how exactly are we reducing burnout again?
AllenGregoryIV
16-05-2013, 20:35
So you're suggesting that teams work 7 days a week throughout the entire season? With the robot out of the bag every day? With a total break of 4 days? Sorry, how exactly are we reducing burnout again?
I'm not, we're solving different problems now. Teams that aren't burned out can work when they want. I'm trying to reduce practice robots. Spectrum won't build a practice robot at 12 or 15 hours at 9 we still might.
Not everyone has a problem with burnout. I might at some point in my life but right now I have the opposite problem, and am going through a bit of withdrawal from the season being over.
I like Ed's idea. The only 'tweak' I'd like to see would be for teams with a long ship time. Perhaps the total hours could be shifted from week to week (like 'rollover minutes')? So if you have 5 weeks from bag day until your competition, you could unbag for a total of 45 hours - but if you had to ship 3 weeks before the competition, you could use those 45 hours all in the first two weeks.
This would still be a problem for teams shipping to early events. Perhaps the "pit access time" at early events could be longer for those teams? I'm thinking of 359, if they have to ship right after bag day for a week 2 event, the 6 or 9 hours per week won't be available to them at all - but it would be for the other teams at their event, who drive their robots to the competition.
I know our robot was bagged several weeks before they came to pick up our crate to ship it to Oahu. Having time during those weeks to work on the bot, instead of building a practice bot, would have been much more efficient, and great for us. But others at our competition - the international teams from Australia and China - probably had to ship their bots weeks earlier. There should be some way to equalize the 'hands on' time for such teams. I would not mind if they had an extra few hours of pit time, based on when they had to 'bag'. Or a slightly larger withholding allowance. (Say, give us 20 lbs. and them 30; there could be a sliding allowance scale, based on how many total hours of 'out of bag' time you have had from bag day to your competition. Maybe you lose a few pounds for every 10 hours of time. Then, you could choose whether to take the time or the higher allowance. Just another idea...)
We have built a practice bot each year for the past few years. It would certainly be more efficient and a great savings of cost and time to not have to do that. We (and other teams) could decide between building a full practice bot (probably not), building just a copy of the basic drive "mule" for driver practice (possibly - the drivers would like this), or simply planning to share the "out of bag time" between the builders, programmers and drivers (also possible).
C.
BrendanB
16-05-2013, 21:01
So you're suggesting that teams work 7 days a week throughout the entire season? With the robot out of the bag every day? With a total break of 4 days? Sorry, how exactly are we reducing burnout again?
One team's burnout is another teams normal. There is no option that perfectly suits everyone's needs.
So you're suggesting that teams work 7 days a week throughout the entire season? With the robot out of the bag every day? With a total break of 4 days? Sorry, how exactly are we reducing burnout again?We'd probably use it 6 hours each weekend day. No practice bot, but probably some subsystem analogs. To each their own.
67 built a 30 point climbing FCS on a schedule some teams use in off-season. If you think those <=20 hours spread over 2 months will make a net positive impact on your team, it's there. Otherwise, we're probably not falling too much farther behind.
Glad to see this has come full-circle back to the unbagged sessions. I think it's really a very elegant way to achieve a lot of the floor-raising aims we have here. So who's up for an on-season scrimmage? ;)
So you're suggesting that teams work 7 days a week throughout the entire season? With the robot out of the bag every day? With a total break of 4 days? Sorry, how exactly are we reducing burnout again?
No, and please do not put words in my mouth. I'll rephrase.
On one hand, my team would operate fine under Ed's proposal. We would not choose to work 7 days per week (more like 3-4 after bag, as we do now).
On the other hand, some people aren't going to like the fact that it's possible to unbag the robot every day with 9 hrs/week and 1 hour increments. Therefore, maybe two hour increments would be better since that would not allow a 7 day schedule.
Edit: Sorry, my mistake. My addled mind thought you were quoting me.
AllenGregoryIV
16-05-2013, 23:22
No, and please do not put words in my mouth. I'll rephrase.
On one hand, my team would operate fine under Ed's proposal. We would not choose to work 7 days per week (more like 3-4 after bag, as we do now).
On the other hand, some people aren't going to like the fact that it's possible to unbag the robot every day with 9 hrs/week and 1 hour increments. Therefore, maybe two hour increments would be better since that would not allow a 7 day schedule.
I think he was talking to me and that was definitely what I was suggesting. We work with our practice bot 7 days a week, I would like to do the same with the competition robot.
Tetraman
17-05-2013, 07:23
If you include the ability for teams to work on their robot throughout competition season, then a withholding allowance of additional fabricated parts is necessary. Otherwise you'd have to put everything onto your robot after the 9 hours is up for bagging and have no additional time to tweak that part if you wanted to the night before you leave for the event. For fairness sake, a withholding allowance of some kind makes more sense for that scenario than it even does now.
I will echo bduddy's comment that this really doesn't have anything to do with mentor burnout and for some teams (read: the team I mentor) could make it worse. Not saying it will, but it can.
Pendulum^-1
17-05-2013, 08:17
If you include the ability for teams to work on their robot throughout competition season, then a withholding allowance of additional fabricated parts is necessary. Otherwise you'd have to put everything onto your robot after the 9 hours is up for bagging and have no additional time to tweak that part if you wanted to the night before you leave for the event. For fairness sake, a withholding allowance of some kind makes more sense for that scenario than it even does now.
I will echo bduddy's comment that this really doesn't have anything to do with mentor burnout and for some teams (read: the team I mentor) could make it worse. Not saying it will, but it can.
Good point about the withholding allowance. But I'd change the nature of how we regulate robot changes altogether. Right now, you could swap out 30 pounds of shop-built/assembled mechanisms, plus COTS parts, plus event-built parts, at every event. (Bumpers are not included in the 30 lbs.) (Theoretically, you could change out the whole robot in 4 events.... practically impossible, for sure.)
I recommend that the new bag rules limit the total of the items added to the robot since the robot was initially bagged. If the total changes (by weight and/or cost) were limited, a withholding allowance, as we know it now, would be irrelevant and unnecessary. Bring as many spare parts/improved parts as you wanted to the event. Make the changes in the pits. But the overall changes to the robot would have to be within the limit in the rules.
As far as burnout is concerned, personally, a factor in burnout is the frustration of having to do busy work (build robot two and/or test stands) to work around the bag restrictions. For me, less frustration == less burnout. If the students are working with the robot, practicing, testing, getting enthused, I feel much better. The burnout is less to do with time than frustration, for me. And a big factor in this proposal has to do with getting marginal teams better able to achieve the game objectives. The proposal put forward by Ike and modified by Ed preserves the imperative of getting things done by the end of build season, yet allows teams to get their designs better refined to get things done on the field, without having to do multiple events.
Justin Shelley
17-05-2013, 09:23
This is such a hard thing for me to decide on. I love the challenge of the six week build season and I learn so much real life engineering skills from this. Though it also puts a massive strain on my team and really makes it hard for us to compete against better funded teams with more mentors and money. Our team does not have near the amount of funding or people to build a practice bot and this makes it hard to compete against teams that do. Then again that is part of FIRST and that is what has driven me to look into fundraisers and recruitment that way we may one day become an "ELITE" team. Bottom line though FIRST is just way to expensive. FIRST for sure needs to do something about cost that way lower funded teams can be more competitive. Though again this is what drives under funded teams to do fundraising. I think that instead of having a year round build season or a six week build season FIRST should have a twelve week build season! This would allow more time to build for the lower funded teams; though honestly I think we will always feel the need for more time. Tough Choices :ahh:
Brandon Holley
17-05-2013, 09:44
You can sign me up for Ed/Ike's proposals. I've been campaigning a similar type of proposal for a while now to friends in FIRST.
I think (in this theoretical world we've started debating in) this a fair compromise for teams who say additional access will less then load, as well as teams who say any more will push them over the edge.
-Brando
Lots of good points, let me add a different tangent
Elite teams are in the upper 5%. In the early days that was 10 teams, now to be in the top 5%, you are the upper 170 teams.
Elite teams don't work harder, they think harder. Karthik tells FRC that year after year after year. FRC robot construction is THINK, PLAN, BUILD, COMPETE. I watch Team 1640 from my VEX loft (we are on the second floor). They have gone from a bottom 10% team (no formal design, no CAD, nearest 1/2" on construction, minimal scouting, etc) to a top team (pre-kickoff simulation, kickoff with a plan (read the rules!, think about design, etc), nothing built that's not in CAD, nearest 0.001 construction (Yay Ben!), scouting team, checklists, etc.) They build a second robot (called Duex) because if you CAD it, you can build 2 with minimal second effort. And frankly that rocks since there are roboteers that may not work on Prime, but do work on Duex) its a win for lots of people.
People have issues. Mentors have issues. My name is Foster, I'm a 100%holic. Things that I'm passionate about I put 100% effort in. If you are not all in why do it. Force me onto a 1 week break, fine, I'll work on stuff at home. It's not a conscious choice "Hey lets go burn out over here", but it's who I am. Others have learned other methods and they now eat, drink water, don't fall asleep on the drill press table, etc. You are not going to change me by a small rule change.
FRC isn't about the robot. Look at HOF. Look at the resume. We did x, y, z, q, p, t and oh yea we built a nice robot. I'm convinced you can be a Chairman's award winner and not build a robot. I'm convinced Woody and Dean went "Our goals are to .... whats the cheese?" "Yea, Build a robot is the cheese."
Too late to make a long post short:
FRC, VEX, and all the other programs are about inspiration and some really core life skills. I want that. Mentors that are going to burn out are going to burn out. I can only fix that by making them work smarter not harder. The champion / elite teams have figured that out.
So the rule change I propose is: "If you are a regional winner in a year then in the next year you must work with a rookie team. At least 50% of your student roboteer and mentor time from last season must be spent on the efforts of the rookie team. " Finances are hard, so that's not part of this.
Pick up the bottom. Mentors will cope, roboteers will cope. Be the start of a new vanguard of teams.
AdamHeard
17-05-2013, 12:49
So the rule change I propose is: "If you are a regional winner in a year then in the next year you must work with a rookie team. At least 50% of your student roboteer and mentor time from last season must be spent on the efforts of the rookie team. " Finances are hard, so that's not part of this.
Pick up the bottom. Mentors will cope, roboteers will cope. Be the start of a new vanguard of teams.
Every area within 50 miles of us is already saturated with teams. What would we do for a rookie there?
Every area within 50 miles of us is already saturated with teams. What would we do for a rookie there?
Rookies aren't the only ones that need help. 27 and 254 are apparently in the same boat, as are hundreds of others.
Elite teams don't work harder, they think harder.This.
"Yea, Build a robot is the cheese."And this.
Mentors that are going to burn out are going to burn out.
"If you are a regional winner in a year then in the next year you must work with a rookie team."
Be the start of a new vanguard of teams.And this. And all the other stuff. Watch out FRC, VEX Mentor of the Year is in Adage Mode.
Adam, it's true. We track down rookies (and are available remotely), but often times the teams we help aren't actually rookies, just people that would like a little help. Maybe lower-resourced, maybe new or less experienced mentors, maybe just a lot of underclassmen...this year we had a couple good teams that just couldn't work it out alone this time, specifically that wanted a pyramid. I was almost as proud watching them climb as I was us!
Even collaborating with another mid-level team can bring us both up and strengthen the whole community.
Every area within 50 miles of us is already saturated with teams. What would we do for a rookie there?
Happy problem to solve!
So the rule change I propose is: "If you are a regional winner in a year then in the next year you must work with a rookie team or the lowest ranked team in your 15 mile radius. At least 50% of your student roboteer and mentor time from last season must be spent on the efforts of the rookie team. " Finances are hard, so that's not part of this.
pfreivald
17-05-2013, 13:14
So the rule change I propose is: "If you are a regional winner in a year then in the next year you must work with a rookie team or the lowest ranked team in your 15 mile radius.
What about those of us that don't have any other schools in a 15-mile radius? :)
What about those of us that don't have any other schools in a 15-mile radius? :)Skype. ;)
pfreivald
17-05-2013, 13:53
Skype. ;)
I'm being silly. I spent every Sunday with a second-year team this past year; they're the next closest school at 20 miles. :D
AdamHeard
17-05-2013, 15:20
Happy problem to solve!
So the rule change I propose is: "If you are a regional winner in a year then in the next year you must work with a rookie team or the lowest ranked team in your 15 mile radius. At least 50% of your student roboteer and mentor time from last season must be spent on the efforts of the rookie team. " Finances are hard, so that's not part of this.
Zero teams ;)
That was easy. Our towns are spaced out quite a bit here.
50% is an impractically large amount of time, you're talking about thousands of hours for another team. That's likely more than that team even works.
We have helped most local teams, and will always helped when asked. I don't think mandating it is helpful or necessary; especially since winning a regional doesn't at all imply you're capable of helping someone else.
So the rule change I propose is: "If you are a regional winner in a year then in the next year you must work with a rookie team. At least 50% of your student roboteer and mentor time from last season must be spent on the efforts of the rookie team. " Finances are hard, so that's not part of this.
Pick up the bottom. Mentors will cope, roboteers will cope. Be the start of a new vanguard of teams.
This is a horrible idea and wouldn't be effective. You can mandate things like this, they need to happen naturally.
Plus pretty much every team that is capable of helping other teams is already doing so.
AllenGregoryIV
17-05-2013, 15:41
This is a horrible idea and wouldn't be effective. You can mandate things like this, they need to happen naturally.
Plus pretty much every team that is capable of helping other teams is already doing so.
I am a huge proponent of helping teams but I agree with Cory. I wouldn't want to work with a team that is being forced to help. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Teams spend a long time building programs that work for them and finding ways to do the most for their students, their community and the greater robotics community. I wouldn't want to do something like this if it drives away elite team mentors or even makes their robots slightly worse on the field (robot performance is one way to inspire students). Teams should decide how they weigh the values of their teams, FIRST encourages certain ones and awards explanatory examples of them. There are teams that value Safety, Spirit, Coopertition, GP, and a whole list of other things.
Also 50% is just way to high, I give a lot of time to other teams during build season but nowhere near 50% of my time. This year that would have been well over 200 hours, that's just not possible (most other teams aren't even awake during a lot of the hours we work).
I am a huge proponent of helping teams but I agree with Cory. I wouldn't want to work with a team that is being forced to help. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.I'm not sure "rule" was supposed to mean as in Section 4.5.1* of the 2014 Administrative Manual. More of a norm. While I agree every regional winner may not be up to this, I have to say we were surprised by the help we could give when we started. Some days I still think of my coach's button as being from the team that went 2-9 at Pittsburgh '07.
I'd say the take-home is more to push yourself outside your comfort zone (your team), even if it's just a little. You might be as surprised about what you can do for the community as you are what the community can do for you.
*I didn't check what this actually is now.
AllenGregoryIV
17-05-2013, 16:19
I'm not sure "rule" was supposed to mean as in Section 4.5.1* of the 2014 Administrative Manual. More of a norm. While I agree every regional winner may not be up to this, I have to say we were surprised by the help we could give when we started. Some days I still think of my coach's button as being from the team that went 2-9 at Pittsburgh '07.
I'd say the take-home is more to push yourself outside your comfort zone (your team), even if it's just a little. You might be as surprised about what you can do for the community as you are what the community can do for you.
*I didn't check what this actually is now.
I completely agree, you can go through our Chairman's stuff (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2770) and see what we do for other teams, it's a pretty huge amount. I'm just saying that if a team decides that their time is better spent working at food pantries in their community or petitioning their state senate or something else that is fine. I strongly believe every team should work to improve the greater FRC community but I'm just saying there are other ways to do it besides helping rookie teams. There are way more teams than there are rookie teams so we can all find different ways to help. Spectrum does make it our main mission to help young teams, but that doesn't mean we should force that on other teams.
I've been thinking more about the specifics of a limited "out of bag" experience after "bag day". Here are some ideas:
- give all teams X hours 'out of bag' between the first 'bag day' and their first event. (I'm not dealing with the district model here, since I have no experience with that; I assume a team competes at one or more regionals, and possibly champs.)
- Those X hours can be used anytime (there can be a minimum, such as one hour or two hours, but no weekly maximum. This allows a team competing in week 1 the same number of hours before their first competition as a team competing for the first time in week 5; they may have to use them in a more concentrated manner, but the same would be true of a team competing in week 4, that had to ship their robot in week 1). This helps to equalize things for teams that have to ship, and for teams competing for the first time in different weeks. (Of course there is an advantage to having extra weeks before competition, even with the robot in the bag, but I don't think that can be avoided.)
- No 'out of bag' time after the first competition (except at the event itself). This helps to equalize things for teams that compete more than once.
Another idea would be to give teams X out of bag hours, which could be used any time (even after the first competition), but count pit hours at competition in some way against the total. So a 3-day competition would count as 18 hours "out of bag", a 2-day competition as 12 hours (or lesser amounts, these are just examples). This would help equalize things between teams that can afford to compete in multiple events, and those that cannot.
Another idea would be to allow teams to swap hours out of bag for withholding allowance. So for every 'out of bag' hour not used, from the total allowed, a team would get Y pounds of withholding allowance. This would allow teams that CAN'T use all their time (due to a need to ship their robot early to an early competition), to have a bigger withholding allowance so they could take more fabricated parts into the competition.
There are a lot of options here for trying to level the playing field. I love it.
Interesting quote that showed up in my spotlight from 2005. (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=340922#post340922)
six weeks, it's too long, but not long enough.
I thought it was appropriate.
IKE and I are working on a letter to FIRST. With so many bag and unbag entries, the current Robot Lockup Form will be very difficult for robot inspectors and there will be many pages. Would somebody like to draft a new form so we can include with the letter when we present it to FIRST?
IKE and I are working on a letter to FIRST. With so many bag and unbag entries, the current Robot Lockup Form will be very difficult for robot inspectors and there will be many pages. Would somebody like to draft a new form so we can include with the letter when we present it to FIRST?Very good point. What about something like this? It can handle 44 discrete (un)bag operations instead of 18. I get the impression the original form was designed to be able to "read down" and compare the tag numbers, but as an inspector I find it's pretty cumbersome anyway (small space + handwriting), and my bigger slowdown is checking that the times work out. This fixes the latter, and if FIRST is ok with confirming the last 3-4 digits of the unlock tag (which is what happens at events anyway), it'd be easier to do both. Otherwise the form can accommodate the full tag for unlocking.
Brandon Holley
20-05-2013, 11:39
IKE and I are working on a letter to FIRST. With so many bag and unbag entries, the current Robot Lockup Form will be very difficult for robot inspectors and there will be many pages. Would somebody like to draft a new form so we can include with the letter when we present it to FIRST?
I hope IF a different system were implemented across FRC, we may be able to push for something electronic for this. Something like logging into TIMS, "Checking the robot in" and then "Checking the robot out", etc. Inspectors at the event would then just need to look at to make sure A. the robot had been 'checked in' and that B. the team had not 'checked out' the robot for more than X number of hours.
Just an idea (it saves a couple trees as well...)
-Brando
I hope IF a different system were implemented across FRC, we may be able to push for something electronic for this. Something like logging into TIMS, "Checking the robot in" and then "Checking the robot out", etc. Inspectors at the event would then just need to look at to make sure A. the robot had been 'checked in' and that B. the team had not 'checked out' the robot for more than X number of hours.
Just an idea (it saves a couple trees as well...)
-Brando
Also provides for better enforcement with less potential for problems on written forms due to confusion.
This change is reasonably easy to add to the rules as it stands right now. There's some communication and approval work, but it's doable. Adding a section to TIMS adds cost and complexity. I think it would make sense to talk about a paper system for now with a side note that an electronic system would be nice to have in the future.
AdamHeard
20-05-2013, 14:00
Also provides for better enforcement with less potential for problems on written forms due to confusion.
The only problem is it requires a team to have reliable internet access at the time.
rick.oliver
20-05-2013, 16:06
What is the value of documenting all of the bag and unbag events? Is it really necessary? Could it be as simple as, the robot must come to the event in a sealed bag. An adult team leader must affirm on a form that the team has adhered to the robot access guidelines.
AllenGregoryIV
20-05-2013, 16:27
What is the value of documenting all of the bag and unbag events? Is it really necessary? Could it be as simple as, the robot must come to the event in a sealed bag. An adult team leader must affirm on a form that the team has adhered to the robot access guidelines.
That's basically all we do now anyway. I've seen so many bag and tag mistakes, huge holes in the bag, completely unbagged robots, no forms, etc. The team only gets a time penalty of having to find the Regional Director and the LRI and get them to sign the non-compliance form. I've never seen a team be disqualified for Bag and Tag mistakes.
We don't even need another affirmation since teams have to sign that they followed all the rules on the inspection form anyway. If a team is willing to sign that after knowingly breaking the rules, I imagine they would be willing to falsify bag and tag paperwork.
The bag and tag paperwork only lets us find the unintentional mistakes and explain the proper procedures to teams. It doesn't actually prevent cheating in anyway, similar to the BOM.
huge holes in the bag
How did you deal with this?
Was it treated the same as an unbagged robot?
That's basically all we do now anyway. I've seen so many bag and tag mistakes, huge holes in the bag, completely unbagged robots, no forms, etc. The team only gets a time penalty of having to find the Regional Director and the LRI and get them to sign the non-compliance form. I've never seen a team be disqualified for Bag and Tag mistakes.
We don't even need another affirmation since teams have to sign the that they followed all the rules on the inspection form anyway. If a team is willing to sign that after knowing breaking the rules, I imagine they would be willing to falsify bag and tag paperwork.
The bag and tag paperwork only lets us find the unintentional mistakes and explain the proper procedures to teams. It doesn't actually prevent cheating in anyway, similar to the BOM.
Agreed...
AllenGregoryIV
20-05-2013, 16:45
How did you deal with this?
Was it treated the same as an unbagged robot?
Basically, it depends on the severity of the hole and when it was formed. It mostly falls on the LRI to decide if the teams needs to fill out the non-compliance form or not. Several times the hole are put in during transport (like bringing it through a doorway into the event), most of the time teams just get a pass for things like this. The bigger issues are holes that have been there for a long time and are big enough for someone to in theory work on the robot. In those cases the team gets a good talking to from the LRI and they have to do the non-compliance form.
These aren't uncommon occurrences at all, I expect about 3-5 at every event I go to. Teams were much better this year than last since it was the 2nd year for Bag and Tag at all events. We still even had a robot without a bag at championship.
pfreivald
20-05-2013, 17:36
Yeah, I don't understand the Bag and Tag rules... Why not just have an affidavit that says you stopped building when you claim to have stopped building?
The honor system is the honor system, and those who have none will cheat, while those who have some will not. The system as-is does nothing to change that.
Thad House
20-05-2013, 17:45
Yeah, I don't understand the Bag and Tag rules... Why not just have an affidavit that says you stopped building when you claim to have stopped building?
The honor system is the honor system, and those who have none will cheat, while those who have some will not. The system as-is does nothing to change that.
It is an honor system, but if the robot is in the bag, its much easier to control the urges to worked on the comp bot. If it is unbagged, then I suspect even honorable students/mentors might get too carried away and do something with the robot. The bag protects against the urges.
pfreivald
20-05-2013, 18:13
It is an honor system, but if the robot is in the bag, its much easier to control the urges to worked on the comp bot. If it is unbagged, then I suspect even honorable students/mentors might get too carried away and do something with the robot. The bag protects against the urges.
Fair enough. I can only agree with that!
AllenGregoryIV
20-05-2013, 20:51
It is an honor system, but if the robot is in the bag, its much easier to control the urges to worked on the comp bot. If it is unbagged, then I suspect even honorable students/mentors might get too carried away and do something with the robot. The bag protects against the urges.
I understand the bag, I just don't understand the form. It's just more work for inspectors to go around and check all the forms. The forms don't actually stop anyway from cheating, maybe there is some deterrent that we would somehow know and catch them, but I doubt it.
Tetraman
21-05-2013, 07:28
I understand the bag, I just don't understand the form.
They put the team on record signing a form that says "We followed the rules", and having a team on record is better than a general assumption that rules had been followed. Agreed it doesn't detour cheating, but I think it's a necessary evil.
What would detour cheating is for Refs/Inspectors/FIRST to actually lay down the hammer and tell teams who cheated that they are not allowed to participate in the event. Eventually events have to start saying "no" to these teams. As an example, based on what teams failed to do, they rack up 'points' on their team, and once they reach a number of 'points' they can't play. Like, so you need 10 to be disqualified, and based on the severity of the rules, your team is given points. If those points are >10 you can't play, and those points have a half-life every season, so it will take some time to heal your mistakes, detouring a team from making more mistakes.
I understand the bag, I just don't understand the form. It's just more work for inspectors to go around and check all the forms. The forms don't actually stop anyway from cheating, maybe there is some deterrent that we would somehow know and catch them, but I doubt it.
They put the team on record signing a form that says "We followed the rules", and having a team on record is better than a general assumption that rules had been followed. Agreed it doesn't detour cheating, but I think it's a necessary evil.
What would detour cheating is for Refs/Inspectors/FIRST to actually lay down the hammer and tell teams who cheated that they are not allowed to participate in the event. Eventually events have to start saying "no" to these teams. ...snip....
I agree with Tetraman about needing "some form to have teams go on record", but I don't agree on dropping the Hammer. Not that I don't think it is ethical, I just don't think you understand the normal"issues" we see in inspection as LRI's. Most teams don't cheat, and then leave an evidence trail that you can clearly call them out on (I actually believe very few teams cheat the rules intentionally). Usual issues are a team forgot their form, or tore a hole during transport, or ran out of tags. This year we did have a couple of teams that knowingly went past close of pits, and I had 1 student that for some un-explainable reason cut a hole in the bag with his pocket knife. We policed the folks that went past pits closed with a longer time penalty at their next FiM event. Large holes or missing sheet gets a special form filed. The student that cut a hole got a rather staunch lecture from his mentor, the initial inspector, and the LRI.
I actually think you could just have a mentor and student read the unbagging rules out loud, and sign a form agreeing that they complied. It won't likely stop cheaters from cheating, but it might leave a bad spot in their conscious.
I would much rather have a system in which teams upload a picture of their bagged robot to TIMS on stop build day.
As far as unbagging-bagging-unbagging before the first event: If it takes an eight-year veteran several read-throughs to understand it, how is a rookie team going to get it? I think it creates a bunch of unnecessary paperwork and will ultimately lead to shredded bags and messy lock/unlock forms. I'd much rather it be hands-off the competition robot until the first event.
To me, the tl;dr of this thread is precisely what the published author wrote a few pages ago: FRC is a big task, people get burnt out, there are many solutions - increased time is a possible solution for some teams, but isn't a one-size-fits-all fix.
AllenGregoryIV
21-05-2013, 08:09
They put the team on record signing a form that says "We followed the rules", and having a team on record is better than a general assumption that rules had been followed. Agreed it doesn't detour cheating, but I think it's a necessary evil.
They have a form they have to sign without the bag and tag form, it's at the bottom of the inspection sheet at each event. The team mentor and captain have to sign that they have not knowingly broken any rules. I completely agree that that should stay. I just think the bag and tag form is redundant. There seem to be much easier/better ways to cheat in FRC than the bagging rules anyway if a team had that poor of a moral compass.
pfreivald
21-05-2013, 08:53
I agree with Tetraman about needing "some form to have teams go on record", but I don't agree on dropping the Hammer. Not that I don't think it is ethical, I just don't think you understand the normal"issues" we see in inspection as LRI's. Most teams don't cheat, and then leave an evidence trail that you can clearly call them out on (I actually believe very few teams cheat the rules intentionally).
At both our events this year, there were teams using high-capacity, off-board compressors not controlled by the robot. In both cases they were told to stop by event officials, and in both cases they didn't stop and were still allowed to compete.
I agree that most teams likely do not cheat, but when caught, I have no problem with FIRST dropping the hammer -- indeed, I wish they would. There's no reason to have rules if they aren't going to be enforced.
Tristan Lall
21-05-2013, 13:24
I'd prefer it if the responsibility and burden of demonstrating compliance was shifted to the pre-event period. Submit the form (or better, photos) online and well in advance. Then there's no worry about lost forms, and less use of the annoying and quasi-punitive non-compliance procedure.
I also don't like the UI of the current form (or the proposed one, for that matter). What information is really important, and is there a need for the rest of it? What does it mean when the inspector signs off on it? Who is authorized to approve a bag opening, and under what conditions? Why not summarize the rules on the front (with fewer lines), and put additional lines on the (optional, if unsupported by the printer) back of the sheet or an attached page? Which information should really be stored by FRC, and not by the team?
I'd prefer it if the responsibility and burden of demonstrating compliance was shifted to the pre-event period. Submit the form (or better, photos) online and well in advance. Then there's no worry about lost forms, and less use of the annoying and quasi-punitive non-compliance procedure.As much as 'd love a smart phone app that just lets you take a photo and automatically handles the rest (for both teams and inspectors :)), I wouldn't envy the FIRST NH team that's tasked with going online. Managing both the technical and team aspects will only get harder as we go to more districts or successfully push for universal unbag time. In addition to TIMS-style crashing* at 11:55pm EST/PST on stop build, MAR and FiM teams can already complete 6 discrete (un)bag operations in a single week.
That's a lot to ask FIRST in a single letter, and I'd be concerned that conflating the two would risk the entire thing being discarded for the trouble.
*As much as I dislike the forms and the inspection lag they create, and as much as I appreciate FIRST, it's not famous for its online UIs. And not just those subject to shock loading either--have you ever tried to get a new person through a VIMS signup?
BrendanB
21-05-2013, 14:34
I don't see how submitting photos would help anything.
If a team is going to cheat, a simple photo is not going to get in their way.
I don't see how submitting photos would help anything.
If a team is going to cheat, a simple photo is not going to get in their way.
No, but it significantly reduces the paper trail. The inspectors would have a list of teams, before the event, with a checkmark (or not) letting them know which teams are compliant and which may need some prodding. In addition, RDs or SMs can reach out to teams who do not submit a picture in a timely manner and possibly catch issues before the event even begins.
AllenGregoryIV
21-05-2013, 15:55
No, but it significantly reduces the paper trail. The inspectors would have a list of teams, before the event, with a checkmark (or not) letting them know which teams are compliant and which may need some prodding. In addition, RDs or SMs can reach out to teams who do not submit a picture in a timely manner and possibly catch issues before the event even begins.
I'm still arguing against the premiss of being more concerned about bag and tag than we are with all the other rules. I would much rather know if a team failed to comply with the frame perimeter rule early than if they did with bag and tag. The teams that get caught failing bag and tag aren't gaining a competitive advantage because they are normally the teams that haven't even read the rules. It's usually the teams that either are barely hanging in there or it was just an honest mistake by a team (forgetting a form in the hotel room is extremely common). Why do we punish these teams and give the inspectors more work?
Why add the overhead that comes with bag and tag except to put up some false sense of checking into the system? The teams that are going to cheat are going to cheat, luckily I strongly believe that none of the cheating teams ever win since so few would put in the actual hard work it takes to beat a strong team that follows the rules.
We don't even have online submission of BOM or a way to check the withholding allowance. Both of these systems are basically just honor code* why can't bag and tag be the same.
*yes inspectors look at the BOM but it would be very easy to falsify one if a team was inclined to do so.
I'm still arguing against the premiss of being more concerned about bag and tag than we are with all the other rules. I would much rather know if a team failed to comply with the frame perimeter rule early than if they did with bag and tag. The teams that get caught failing bag and tag aren't gaining a competitive advantage because they are normally the teams that haven't even read the rules. It's usually the teams that either are barely hanging in there or it was just an honest mistake by a team (forgetting a form in the hotel room is extremely common). Why do we punish these teams and give the inspectors more work?
Why add the overhead that comes with bag and tag except to put up some false sense of checking into the system? The teams that are going to cheat are going to cheat, luckily I strongly believe that none of the cheating teams ever win since so few would put in the actual hard work it takes to beat a strong team that follows the rules.
We don't even have online submission of BOM or a way to check the withholding allowance. Both of these systems are basically just honor code* why can't bag and tag be the same.
*yes inspectors look at the BOM but it would be very easy to falsify one if a team was inclined to do so.
Which is exactly the reason I'm in favor of an online checkin during February. If a team doesn't do bagntag properly, there's a good chance there are bigger issues at play that should be tackled early. This could throw up a red flag that FIRST needs to contact these teams - whether it's an issue of noncompliance or ignorance.
Jon Stratis
21-05-2013, 16:51
How hard is Bag and Tag, really, even for the Districts? The MN State Championship has Bag and Tag rules similar to Districts - we allow 8 hours of unbag time, used in a minimum of 2 hour increments. This was the second year for the event, and we've only had 2 Bag and Tag issues. The first year, one of the teams failed to bag their robot after their last event (Penalty: No work time or practice matches allowed - they could only touch the robot for inspection prior to their first Qualification match, but since it was the first year and things were a little confusing, we allowed them to play), and this year one of the teams had a different interpretation of "minimum of 2 hour increments", thinking that the last unbag period could be less than 2 hours in order to "use up" the remaining time (Penalty: They got a lecture from me and allowed to continue on their way this time, as they met the intent of the rule and the 8 hour total time, if not the strict letter of it. Since they now know better, the penalty next year would be more severe if this same team has another issue).
As long as we have a stop build day, I think Bag and Tag (with the form) is valuable. As it stands, there is NO robot rule that goes unchecked. We look at everything regarding the robot to ensure the rules are followed, and that includes Bag and Tag. If we stopped requiring a form and stopped checking it, it would only encourage teams to become more lax with it.
I've just read this entire thread, all 440 posts since yesterday and now I'm definitely feeling burnout!
I think most perspectives have already been addressed so I have little to add except to say that I both admire the all-consuming effort from mentors of elite teams, yet also feel sorry for them to some extent.
Once you've achieved an exceptional level of performance, the pressure from sponsors, students yourself and the wider community to stay on that hamster wheel must be intense.
Tetraman
23-05-2013, 07:23
I agree with Tetraman about needing "some form to have teams go on record", but I don't agree on dropping the Hammer. Not that I don't think it is ethical, I just don't think you understand the normal"issues" we see in inspection as LRI's.
Granted, I do not want to tell any team they can not participate just because of a mistake or two, and as you have described those are not what I would consider bannable offenses. I echo Patrick's post about the compressors. THAT is the sort of thing that should cause a team to no longer compete at that event - ignoring the order of the RIs.
There is also a huge value in having to make a difficult deadline. The six week time period is very short and every team knows it. Teams then have to evaluate their ideas and determine which ones are the most important and attainable before the deadline. Moreover, it forces them to operate under stress - all the while trying to maintain gracious professionalism.
Frankly, learning the teamwork and leadership required to build a robot under those conditions is more valuable than the technical skills acquired.
^^^This. As a student, although I know that my entire team would like more time to build the robot, the whole point of the bag and tag deadline is to teach kids about real-world deadlines.
Also, a longer build season would certainly mean student's grades would suffer more than they already do. Not cool.
Chris is me
20-02-2014, 14:18
I don't understand the idea being thrown around that "we need bag and tag so kids can learn about deadlines". There's still a deadline without it! The deadline is now the date of your regional. If you're attached to 6 weeks as a concept - that is an issue separate from "stop build, wait, and compete" vs just "compete".
The bag itself has no impact on whether or not there is a hard deadline. The only way there would not be a hard deadline is if the regional was actually delayed by teams not being done with their robots.
If we got rid of Stop Build, we could always make Week 1 the same week as the former Stop Build day. Everyone who wants a 6 week build season without wanting to feel disadvantaged could choose to go to a Week 1 regional.
BrendanB
21-02-2014, 10:30
Interesting thread revival.
I for one would be very interested to hear how people approached this year's build season differently compared to previous years.
For me, this was the first year I did not feel "burned out" but I still felt some exhaustion at the end of the 6 weeks.
3467 tried something a little differently in that we imposed no meetings on Wednesdays (on top of no Sundays) and on long Tuesday & Thursday meetings we had "quiet time" for a few hours in our classroom and encouraged students to study to stay on top of school. We also met a little less on Saturdays (start an hour later and tried to end a little sooner). During week 6 we did shift to high gear meeting Sunday at the start of the week and met for nearly 8 hours each day including Wednesday leading up to our scrimmage event. We took Sunday off after a pretty good run at Scrimmage then regrouped on Monday/Tuesday to bag.
Overall this was the best build season I have been a part of. Student participation was greatly impacted since they had more time to study which meant they had more meaningful time to help in the shop. The mentors also penciled out a general schedule of the build season with weekly tasks and deadlines on design to help move the build season along. Overall we worked harder to push the team more at the beginning of the season as we knew weeks 1-3 was where our "burn" was created by not utilizing that time effectively. I had seen build schedules used in the past but never have I been able to stick to one getting behind almost instantly. It wasn't until the end of week 3 that we got behind on a task which was related to order delays out of our control. Overall by the end of the build season we blew the schedule by a day completing the practice robot one day later than we had hoped. We built two robots much faster than our team has ever made one robot and while its too early to say if it was a successful season, our team has been very pleased with our efforts thus far.
There is also a huge value in having to make a difficult deadline. The six week time period is very short and every team knows it. Teams then have to evaluate their ideas and determine which ones are the most important and attainable before the deadline. Moreover, it forces them to operate under stress - all the while trying to maintain gracious professionalism.
Frankly, learning the teamwork and leadership required to build a robot under those conditions is more valuable than the technical skills acquired.
This. A million times this. Engineering in the real world is done under the looming threat of deadlines. The bottom line is that if you are assigned to a project at work and given 6 weeks to complete it, your boss is not going to care if you could make it better if you had 14 weeks. You have your deadline, and you are expected to abide by it. This is an invaluable lesson for high school students to learn. Remember, all the technical skills FRC gives you can also be learned at college, or even on the internet. What makes FRC such a valuable program is the less tangible benefits it provides.
Kyler Hagler
21-02-2014, 11:03
Coming from a students perspective, I feel there is not a real good reason for the bag. Most of the issues I have against it have already been addressed but in all honestly, if you go to a event for another type of sport/competition you build/practice up to that event. I intern at a local world class manufacturing sponsor here in the area, the projects that I do as well as the engineers and other employees, don't work on their projects up to a certain point (lets say 3 weeks before their deadline) then stop, close up shop. They work, prototype, design, and refine until the deadline. I can see where F.I.R.S.T. is thinking the bag is the deadline but why not the actual comeptiton. This just causes teams to build double of everything, doubling the cost of the already expensive robots we make and actually causes more burnout then just making the build season open. Again, most of what I have said has been presented already.
Thats my 2¢
P.S. Good luck everyone!
JamesCH95
21-02-2014, 11:48
Does anyone remember where bag-and-tag came from? From the old 'ship date' requirements. Why did we have ship dates? So teams local couldn't work on their robot until the last minute when out-of-town teams would lose days, or weeks, of time shipping their robots. There are still teams that have to ship their robots in advance of their events.
Maintaining bag-and-tag keeps the amount of robot access the same for everyone. It also rewards the teams that build a practice robot. If building a practice bot is too taxing on a team's mentors/students/funds and leads to burn-out... then perhaps a practice bot isn't for that team.
95 is, and always has been, a relatively small team. In many years prior we got by through working hard, too hard in my opinion. Mentor burn-out has always been a significant problem. In recent years, especially this year, we've taken several steps to reducing mentor burn-out: taking Sundays off, meeting from 530-830pm instead of 430-9pm during the week and 9am-5pm on Saturdays instead of 8am-6pm. Each coach is also encouraged to take a night off every week.
This has forced us to work efficiently, design within our means, design for fabrication and assembly, utilize CAD and CNC fabrication equipment more heavily, and spread out the design and management tasks so we can tolerate missing 1-2 coaches every night. All of these are very good practices that translate very well to real-life and have lead to the least-stressful build season in my 5 years of being head coach on 95. Not unrelated to this: I am now the longest continuously-active head coach on 95 that I'm aware of, and I haven't even been threatened with divorce!
Steven Donow
21-02-2014, 11:51
Does anyone remember where bag-and-tag came from? From the old 'ship date' requirements. Why did we have ship dates? So teams local couldn't work on their robot until the last minute when out-of-town teams would lose days, or weeks, of time shipping their robots. There are still teams that have to ship their robots in advance of their events.
Bag and Tag developed/was first used in Michigan in 2009. It would have been ridiculous to ship robots to districts, so this was the solution devised. I'm sure someone else can chime in with more details. 2011 was the first year it expanded outside of Michigan, where most events where Bag and Tag (not all were, ie. we had to bag for NJ but then had to ship our robot for Philadelphia). 2012 Bag & Tag became the default for all events.
JamesCH95
21-02-2014, 11:56
Bag and Tag developed/was first used in Michigan in 2009. It would have been ridiculous to ship robots to districts, so this was the solution devised. I'm sure someone else can chime in with more details. 2011 was the first year it expanded outside of Michigan, where most events where Bag and Tag (not all were, ie. we had to bag for NJ but then had to ship our robot for Philadelphia). 2012 Bag & Tag became the default for all events.
I agree entirely. It still makes perfect sense for a majority of teams who attend local events, districts or otherwise.
My point is that the reasons for shipping, and bagging/tagging, are still relevant: it prevents some teams from getting an unfair advantage over other teams who are simply further away from the nearest FRC event. Consider teams from Brazil, HI, Israel, etc. who would loose whole weeks shipping their robot to an event while a team down the street can work up until the night before.
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