The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout' [Archive]

Brandon Holley

03-05-2013, 13:09

In the Stereotyping of Successful Teams thread, we stumbled onto the age old topic of the 6 week build season and how it effects competitiveness and mentor burnout. Instead of hijacking that thread, I felt it appropriate to start a new thread.

These were the relevant posts leading up to this thread:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1271402&postcount=81

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1271413&postcount=83

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1271418&postcount=84

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1271633&postcount=87

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1271861&postcount=92

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1271890&postcount=93

(This isn't a have-not soapbox ... I have a wonderment...)

On our team, time has always been against us. The 6 week build season is hard, and it's tough to get time out of the work days during build season to get to the school without project managers going ape s---. "Only putting in 40 hours a week? Ha. There goes your technical career." It has led to a lot of mentor burn-out, particularly when the 6 week build season is stretched out to 16 weeks in the pursuit of making software and 30lbs of robot better. The few weeks after the end of build few of us even want to think about a robot, let alone have to tweak it. Even one of the prominent FiM guys REALLY wants to do away with the 6-week cycle altogether, exposing more teams with low mentor resources to more burn-out. I'd be curious to see how the more elite teams deal with this via their team structure, mentor recruiting, etc.

One last point: teams don't even need to perform very well on the field to be talked about negatively. Simply powder-coating the robot because a sponsor has requested it every year is enough for many individuals to treat a team with this type of disrespect.

What would cause more mentor burn-out, trying to get a robot completed in 6 weeks, or trying to get on completed in 7, 8, or 9 weeks?

Teams are working non-stop right past the 6-week build window anyways, tweaking, practicing, iterating, etc...

We just stopped "working" on robotics this week, for basically the first time all year, this week!

Are we burned out? Sure. But, most of the issues were trying to build parts that couldn't be tested on a robot that was sitting next to us in a bag. This leads to a lot of problems that could have been easily solved in our build space. Instead we had to work all week creating parts, only to work all weekend at the competition getting them to work correctly.

Access to the robot has no bearing on whether we are away from home/work working on the robot.

Removing the barrier from the robot, and allowing more access to it, is supposed to allow low-mentor resource teams additional time with the robot, so they can keep up with the other teams that don't stop working when the 6-week build is over.

-Adam

I agree with Adam on this one. I would be less burnt out if the 6 week limitation was removed. As he said, it sucked having to make a bunch of extra stuff to try and make a practice robot work, not to mention wiring another entire robot and making configurations in your software since you don't have identical speed controller/sensors/etc. on both robots. Even after all that effort the practice bot never works quite right so there's even more time spent fixing those issues.

Additionally, most of the my burnout stems from having to leave work early and work until late at night because we have an artificial 6 week deadline. If I could work my normal schedule and get home at a reasonable time for another week, I would prefer that over the craziness that happens in the latter stages of the build season.

Sorry, Adam, but I must disagree. I believe it's known as Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the allotted time.

What I mean is this: Expand the season to 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 weeks, and I'm willing to bet that you will STILL spend multiple hours a day, multiple days a week, every week, trying to iterate a newer and better item, reworking the robot between Week 1 and your first competition when you realize that your design isn't working out, doing a lot of things to make the robot perform better, or even just driver practice.

The ONLY thing that will be different is... wait for it...

... You'll have your competition robot to do it on. That means you don't need to build a practice robot. Assuming that you did that after bag day anyway (or before building the competition robot), you really aren't saving that much wear and tear on yourself, because you're still running into the "Just one more tweak" from 3 or 4 different directions, which leads to more late nights, more nights, later nights...

Basically, what I'm saying is that by allowing teams to work longer, they will do just that, resulting in even more burnout. It's just human nature. I would almost go so far as to say that it won't help the teams you're trying to help, it'll hurt them. Almost.

I don't want to drag this out, and maybe it's a topic of discussion for a different thread...

But, I can't believe that a "lower" level team having 24/7 access to their robot to practice with, iterate, etc... could be anything but a good thing.

I understand that will lead to more time committment and work for them, if they choose to continue to fill the time. But, is that worse than not having access to their robot and showing up to competition after competition not being able to execute the designed game tasks?

Maybe they needed another week to get a shooter working, or get a climber or drivetrain adjusted. It's pretty hard to do major adjustments and tweaking at a competition.

With more access to the robot, do they have to meet every day....or can they meet every other day? Can they adjust their schedules to get more time with the machine, but also a better mix of time at work and home as well?

As I said before, the top teams are already doing more anyways with a practice bot. 2056 and 1114 are practicing 4-5hrs every day. 254 is re-designing an already awesome climber to be even better. 67 is trying to get partially functioning climber working to it's full potential. This is already happening.

Basically, when there is work to be done...we put in whatever time is required to get it done. Example - Last year we rolled out of the gate at Waterford and the robot was essentially "perfect". After that we did not mess with it or tweak it at all (outside of some minor autonomous improvements), all season. This year was different. We were not ready and continued to work all season to get to the point we wanted to get too. We (67) are going to do what it takes to attempt to meet our goals. If we don't need to do more work, we won't. If we need too we will.

We've talked about raising the floor. Giving the "floor" more access to their machine does exactly that. Jim Zondag has data that shows more competitions and more access to the robot leads to better performance.

Will it just create a mean shift of performance for all teams? Yeah, most likely, but it may also tighten up the difference between the best and worst teams. We are probably approaching the limits on how much better the best teams can get.

This thread just seems weird to me, that a discussion about how 341 worked harder to be better, leads to an arguement that handicapping the best teams and restricting access (not having more access) to the robot for lower level teams is for the betterment of FIRST's mission.

IDK, maybe my perspective is just one sided.

-Adam

I have had the same thoughts about this for a while. If you take out the need for teams to build a practice robot it saves a ton of resources and tightens up the competiton.

"Six Weeks" is a fallacy now anyways. It's really six weeks to build 75% of your robot (by weight).

And software isn't included so if you want to keep up with the "elite" or just have auto code that works you need to build a practice robot so you have a platform to test your code on.

And bumpers and controls aren't included, so you don't need to worry about them until after bag day...

So when does "Build Season" stop exactly?

Brandon Holley

03-05-2013, 13:18

My opinion falls on the side of eliminating the 6 week time constraint as being beneficial to the concept of mentor burnout. Eric's point about work expanding to fill a deadline is dead on, however a team may have an option now of not meeting EVERY single day for 6 weeks. My expectation would not be that the team stops after 6 weeks anyway, but that they spread the stress from a concentrated 6 weeks, to a less concentrated 8-9.

The way I see it, teams who build a full practice robot and work through the entire competition season, are going to no matter what, unless the rules explicitly disallow this action. These teams will have a second robot, they will have extra software development time, extra time to refine mechanisms and shake out bugs (disclaimer: we are one of these teams).

If you lift the restriction of teams having access to their robots, it will be pretty much the status quo for our team. However, for teams that do not have a practice robot they will now have the ability to tweak and tune right up to a competition. Its hard for me to see how removing the 'lock up' portion of the season as doing anything but raising the floor and allowing teams who would otherwise not have the means, access to fine tuning later in the season.

As for mentor burnout- there is no reason a team cannot artificially create a 6 week build season, either by putting a hard cap at 6 weeks, or by spreading 6 weeks worth of meetings over 8 or 9 weeks. I know for my team, having a few more weeks would definitely lighten the load earlier in the season, allow us more refinement on the design side- which means less wasted money on not fully vetted prototypes.

I do think this topic is a very good one and am very curious to hear many different sides of the argument though...

-Brando

lynca

03-05-2013, 13:25

Thanks for putting together this excellent recap thread.

As a lower resource team that has just started to build a practice robot.
I feel that a 6-week build limitation is hurting us more than helping.

Building a practice robot is a lot of work and we would much rather put in the work on the actual robot.

Eliminating the 6-week restriction:
1. saves money
2. saves time
3. reduces stress

It would be interesting to see a survey of Chief Delphi on this topic.

Don Wright

03-05-2013, 13:27

I've been basically away from FIRST the past two seasons (I moved to Austria) but I feel strongly about this topic.

We need to get rid of the 6 week deadline. I think this was there when there was a time we all had to ship our robots to the competition. Now, it only serves the purpose of a media point "The kids built this in 6 weeks" (which we all know really isn't true when you include improvements over the season).

To add what was more elegantly put by Adam...another thing that would be missed without bag time would be "fix-it windows". I know we would spend several hours the night before just planning these times so we can get everything we needed done in the time window. This was time we could have spent working on the robot (and caused more "burnout").

I don't agree with Eric's argument because the teams that want to continue to improve the entire season are already doing this...it's just in an inefficient way (two robots...although we would probably still build two robots because our practice bots get beat to heck...)...

nicholsjj

03-05-2013, 13:27

If someone from FIRST reads this I propose that a survey question be added about the six week build season to all teams. If there is an overwhelming majority on one side or the other from the end of the year survey then I propose that FIRST implements this change into the FRC program. I personally agree that it would lessen mentor/student burnout for the build season. One other major thing that has popped into my mind is a question for the teams that build a practice robot. How has building a practice robot correlates with student grades. Do they trend up or down after the build season. This would be the only major problem of eliminating the 6 week build season.

Taylor

03-05-2013, 13:32

No no no a thousand times no.

Anybody who says 6 days a week for a 6 week build season translates to 4 days a week for a 9 week build season is lying. Not simply because of Parkinson's Law, but because of 'elite' teams' constant need for that extra edge, and 'lesser' teams' need to try to keep up.

Here's my reality: For six weeks - 36 nights - my wife has to feed, bathe, and put our two sons to bed by herself. For 36 nights, I don't get to read bedtime stories and tuck in my two boys. I am not willing to make that 54 nights.

Don Wright

03-05-2013, 13:35

Taylor

03-05-2013, 13:38

Then don't... Who is telling you that you have to? Self impose your own deadlines. That's the beauty of it...it's in your control.

I guess we're doing Ri3D next year then. :)

Seriously. Tell your students and mentors and administrators and sponsors that, purely by your own choice, your team is only going to actively work 36 days out of the possible 54, and let me know what 469's response is. If they have any interest in returning to Einstein, I think I know the answer.

Don Wright

03-05-2013, 13:40

I guess we're doing Ri3D next year then. :)

I'm sorry...but I don't get your point (or joke)...

BTW... "3. What works for you may not work for me, and vice versa."

Joe G.

03-05-2013, 13:45

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the six week season should stay, at least for a while. Once the district system is the norm in FIRST, I could see an argument to go to a continuous build period. There are several reasons for this (burnout, I completely agree with Taylor on this), but one big one I haven't seen talked about much looms above them all.

Remember minibots? How much variety there was at the beginning of the season, for better or for worse? How a few teams spent thousands of dollars and incredible amount of times iterating to perfect the direct drive minibot? How after a few weeks of regionals, clones started popping up left and right, because teams and the rules made this possible, and everyone asked for them to never, ever be done again, partially because so many teams hit the ceiling of performance with identical designs?

I don't want to see the 120 pound robots become like this. I don't want a system where it's practical for teams to copy what others engineer. The 6 week period makes this impractical to do. With unlimited robot access, I could see teams doing complete rebuilds for championships, bringing even more burnout into play, taxing sponsors and giving a double advantage to teams with good manufacturing support, making FRC robots monotone, and resulting in some spectacular failures that wouldn't have happened by teams who try a more ambitious rebuild than they can handle

Madison

03-05-2013, 13:47

Chris Hibner

03-05-2013, 13:52

If the latter, what would you recommend to minimize the advantage a team competing late in the season has over someone who, perhaps necessarily, competes in week 1? Would you attempt to minimize the advantage at all?

I don't see the point. Teams competing in different weeks aren't competing against each other, unless there's some weird time warp that allows that in the Pacific Northwest :).

The qualification system is still based on how you do in the event you attend. OPR (which improves every week) is not a qualifier for the world championship.

ehochstein

03-05-2013, 13:52

I'm against extending the build season, I can guarantee it would lead to more late build sessions for my teams. I am already stretched thin for 6 weeks and my college hates the fact I miss so many days of class (I still keep my grades up). If it were changed to an 8 or 9 week build season I simply would not be able to be a mentor in my current capacity.

More build time = more days missed of class/work

Michael Leicht

03-05-2013, 13:53

I have to disagree with extending build season or getting rid of the 6 weeks stop time. I feel that it is impressive to build these machines within the 6 weeks. But the big issue is what about the teams that can only do a week 1 event such as GSR. There build season is only 8 weeks and another team that can only go to week 4 has a more time to work on their robot. It is not a level playing field based on the simple fact when your competition is.

Also with the six weeks deadline this allows our team to develop documents that is used during competition as well as providing a great experience for the students to learn not just how to build a robot but also how to document our build season and robot. The technical documents they create will be better tools for them in both their professional and college careers.

I understand mentors get burnt out but what is the reason for this burn out? Cause i know when it is close to the end of week 6 i feel amazing on what has taken place of not just building a robot but changing students lives forever.

Don Wright

03-05-2013, 13:54

OZ_341

03-05-2013, 13:54

I pulled this quote of mine from a 2009 thread on this topic.
This is just an observation I had from Kick-off 2000, but the quote is classic Woodie Flowers:
Back in the olden days (2000) the only kick-off was in New Hampshire, they used to let people line up at a microphone and ask questions after the game was revealed.
After Dean and Woodie had fielded several questions, an annoyed mentor stepped to the microphone and said something like....."Why don't you give us more time? Why don't you give us 10 weeks instead of 6 weeks?"
Woodie stepped to the microphone and said with a smile....."Because we like you"!
Dean and Woodie understood even back then that extending build season would only make things worse and simply extend our agony. :)

Madison

03-05-2013, 13:57

I don't see the point. Teams competing in different weeks aren't competing against each other, unless there's some weird time warp that allows that in the Pacific Northwest :).

The qualification system is still based on how you do in the event you attend. OPR (which improves every week) is not a qualifier for the world championship.

In a district system where district Championship attendance is predicated upon points earned through competition, though, isn't it plausible that a team competing in week 1 and week 6 is at a disadvantage to a team competing in week 5 and week 6?

The total time spent on the robot may be the same, but the functional state of the robot may be quite different between the former and latter at their first event. In other words, while team A has 7 weeks before they have to compete for the first time, team B has 11 weeks. Our robot would certainly perform better after 11 weeks of work than it does after 7.

I guess, if you presume that everyone is equally handicapped at 7 weeks, it makes no difference. I think our current experience shows us that certain teams do MUCH more in 6 or 7 weeks than others. So, in the end, the teams are appreciably better today would be appreciably better without a stop-build day, but everyone gets better overall. I suppose that makes sense.

Okay, I concede. But I still might die if I have to do for another six weeks.

Don Wright

03-05-2013, 14:00

Our robot would certainly perform better after 11 weeks of work than it does after 7.

But wouldn't that be true also of the robots you would be competing against at that event?

Adam Freeman

03-05-2013, 14:01

Are folks advocating an extended build season (e.g. 9 weeks) or the elimination of a stop-build deadline altogether?

If the latter, what would you recommend to minimize the advantage a team competing late in the season has over someone who, perhaps necessarily, competes in week 1? Would you attempt to minimize the advantage at all?

We meet 3 times a week during build; twice during the work week and on Saturdays. Later in the season, we meet more frequently as required. I'm pretty well ready to die after 6 weeks now; I can see how making the time allowed longer could help, but I also see where it wouldn't make much difference and the pain would only be prolonged.

It's more the latter.

I'm not sure there would be an advantage to competing later in the season. It seems like the level of competition later in the season would increase much higher than an early competition (we see similar now)... that it may or may not be a benefit to compete later. It may be in a teams best interest to register for an early regional and get a robot completed quickly, so they can get a win against a slightly lower level of competition. Then continue to develop their machine as time goes on for additional competitions later in the season.

We have a similar design/build schedule. We are not working every day all 6 weeks. We work Tuesday / Thursday 4:15-7:30pm and Satuday 8am-4pm for the majority of the build season. When we need to work more later in the season, we do...or even after.

So yes, I could easily justify to our sponsor (although we don't need too) that we would "only" be working 36 out of 54 available days.

-Adam

rick.oliver

03-05-2013, 14:03

I agree that access to your competition robot after the six week build season would "raise the floor" as many have said. By how much is debatable.

I also agree that extending the build process into the competition season would have little to no impact on mentor (or student, parent, coach, ...) burnout. It is true that the work expands to fill the time available, at least for most of us I think that would be true.

I really enjoy "continual improvement" and I believe that there is great value to the students in that experience.

The present system of events spread over six or seven weeks with the ability of teams to attend as many as they can afford creates the opportunity for some to benefit from their extra efforts to acquire the resources to evolve their machines.

I do not see much, if any difference, between completely eliminating the bagging requirements versus allowing some limited time through the competition season for working on the competition robot. EDIT: And as stated in another post, there is little difference between no bagging and having a 30 lb allowance.

I do wonder what unintended (and unwanted) consequences would ensue from lifting the "bag and tag" requirement? Would it impact the participation at early competition events? Other than dispel the myth that all of this great work is done in six weeks, I am hard pressed to to see a negative impact.

I am firmly in the camp of eliminate the bagging requirement. The only stop work date should be ship date for the Championship event.

JesseK

03-05-2013, 14:04

Doug G

03-05-2013, 14:06

Oh my heavens, we need to keep the 6-week deadline and if anything, get ride of the 30 lbs of fabbed parts rule. If I remember right, there was a time, you couldn't bring any fabricated parts to a competition, now teams can slap on a whole new shooter or intake at a competition.

Mentor burnout is a serious issue and I know for me personally, extending the build times will overwork our volunteers and myself. When we are overworked, we won't be volunteering at competitions, volunteering for community outreach events, etc. This is bad for FIRST!

Keep the 6 weeks and modify the fabricated components weight limit... (maybe 15 lbs?)

Chris Hibner

03-05-2013, 14:06

In a district system where district Championship attendance is predicated upon points earned through competition, though, isn't it plausible that a team competing in week 1 and week 6 is at a disadvantage to a team competing in week 5 and week 6?

The total time spent on the robot may be the same, but the functional state of the robot may be quite different between the former and latter at their first event. In other words, while team A has 7 weeks before they have to compete for the first time, team B has 11 weeks. Our robot would certainly perform better after 11 weeks of work than it does after 7.

No it's not a disadvantage, because everyone competiting in week 1 events have all had 7 weeks at that point. Everyone in the week 5 events have had 11 weeks, etc. In other words, your robot may have gotten better from week 1 to week 5, but so has everyone else's robot so the comptition around you is better. Once again, you're not competing against a set standard, you're competing against the other teams at that competition who have all had the same amount of time.

I'm actually going to advocate that the 6 week limit is a DISADVANTAGE to teams that compete late, especially in the district system.

Take team A who decides to attend events on weeks 4 and 6. With the current system, team A will have trouble going up against the 30+ teams at that event that have already competed in one event and have already had one event worth of refinement, practice, and fix-it windows. Team A is at a big disadvantage with the 6 week window. This is one of the reasons why we never schedule our first event after week 2.

Madison

03-05-2013, 14:06

Nemo

03-05-2013, 14:21

I am completely in favor of eliminating the six week (or any number of weeks) deadline. The build deadline certainly did not prevent our team from working hard in March and April. But it did cause us to work more slowly and cost us more money. I see no benefit to the build deadline.

Eliminating the 30 lb allowance would lower the quality of robots o n the field substantially, and that matters. Kids who get a chance to actually get their robot working properly have a better experience. The changes we make to a robot during the season provide some of the best engineering experiences.

I think robotics teams need to figure out how to exist with a nucleus of team members who show up nearly all the time but still receive contributions from mentors and students who are there, say, twice a week. It should be okay for mentors to stick with a level of time commitment that works with their lives.

MrJohnston

03-05-2013, 14:22

CENTURION

03-05-2013, 14:23

For what it's worth, I edited my earlier post a bit. I didn't think my position through entirely.

I think we could look to FTC a bit to see how a season with no end plays out. I can't speak for any other than the three teams we field and the few we've shared a build space with, but we end up cramming as much in near the end as we do for FRC. We're far less intense about our work in the early part of the season than we are in FRC, though; we don't make effective use of the additional time.

I'll second the FTC comparison. BadgerBOTS as an organization supports four FTC teams, in the past season I interacted with three of them (we all work out of the same space), and I am head coach on one of them. All of those teams met pretty casually around the start of the season, and then started cramming it in towards the end.

As far as the six week build goes, I'm definitely for keeping it. I imagine that i fyou made it nine weeks, most teams would end up working the same hours per week that they do currently, for three more weeks.

Plus, I think it's useful for showing students what you can achieve when you really push hard and work for it. Every season starts with the students (and mentors too!) saying "Oh man, how the heck are we going to make this happen in six weeks?!?! It's crazy!" But by the end, you have a working robot that nobody thought would be possible, but there it is. I think you lose some of that excitement and sense of accomplishment if you don't have that deadline.

As Woodie Flowers put it once (I'm paraphrasing): "It's a problem too large, with a budget too small, a staff too big, and a deadline too short."

SM987

03-05-2013, 14:24

It's very personal and team dependent. Will it level the playing field somewhat? I believe so. Those "elite" teams will improve say 5-10% with the extended build season while teams that have a rolling chassis by week 6 will improve considerably more. Will it reduce mentor stress? I can say in our team's case it probably would not. I suppose if we didn't have to build a practice bot (no stop build) it might reduce it some (not much). The student grades dropping is another good point. There are many sides to the argument. I'm torn between the "if it aint broke don't fix it" and the fact that the level of competition would rise if they lifted the restriction. I feel like it should be one or the other; either we bag/ship it and there's a much more stringent/small withholding allowance, or just leave it open. With 30lbs of withholding this year, it may as well have been an unlimited build season.

Michael Leicht

03-05-2013, 14:25

So I see this is a back and forth between if the 6 week deadline is really needed.

What I am more curious about and want to know is

Why do mentors get burned out?
What are some stories about a fellow mentors or yourself and burnt you out?
When they get burnt out do they come back after a year or done with it for good?

SM987

03-05-2013, 14:35

Why do mentors get burned out?

Are we looking for an answer more sophisticated than addiction? :p

Seriously I have done nothing more intense, rewarding, and fun.

EDIT: I get it, that "burnout" implies it is no longer fun. I haven't personally experienced that yet. There have been nights where it's 3 a.m. and I am just exhausted, but I've never stepped past the no-longer-fun line. I think if that ever happens I'd have to stop.

Tristan Lall

03-05-2013, 14:43

Are you saying that a team in week 5 will wait until the week 1 districts/regionals and then copy the best designs?
Wasn't it 469 that used to have a reputation (c. 2005?) for making big changes at their first event? If so, were those changes independent of what happened in week 1?

AllenGregoryIV

03-05-2013, 14:46

Everyone who knows me knows that I am all for getting rid of the 6 week build season.

My team meets 7 days a week during build season and 7 days a week during competition season too(except for the Wednesday after bag and when I'm away at competition).

The best teams are building for 16 weeks either way and spending a lot of time and money doing it.

My main problem with the 6 week build season is we have so little time to help struggling teams. We do two rookie workshops, a bumper build and hold a scrimmage which is really just more time to work on robots. All of these events plus teams coming to our shop on various days still isn't enough time to get some teams competitive. If we had up until right before competition we could have several more practice events to get robots ready for actual competition. The few teams with copy bots in our area already do this, why should we exclude those teams without the resources (yes I know they can go out and work to get the resources, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it easier for them).

Dmentor

03-05-2013, 14:50

Why do mentors get burned out?
I usually burn out because somewhere along the way robotics transitions from fun to a job. Since I'm already working a (more than) full time job, I get intellectually tired and stressed out the farther build season progresses. Also my sleeping patterns are disturbed during build season most significantly because my brain is constantly engaged wrestling with the problem(s) of the day more often robotics related than work. My burn out correlates directly with my commitment to the team. If I was less committed I'd be less engaged and less stressed out.

My burn out is generally temporary. A few weeks off and I'm eager to watch webcasts and do a little light weight robotics R&D but I'm unable to sustain any real heavy lifting for months. Come build season time I'm ready to go again.

The real source of my burn out is myself. I don't do enough in the lead up to build season to protect myself. These are the concrete actions that I know I need to take but don't seem to find the time (mostly because they are intellectually less appealing than playing with robots):
1. Recruit more mentors to the team
2. Train more team members (students and mentors alike)
3. Organize better so that we can more effectively use all our team members
4. Build a better community support structure so that we are all helping each other throughout the season rather than letting the load fall on a select few.

Adam Freeman

03-05-2013, 14:55

Forget the build cycle, the practice bots, etc.

The level of dedication required to sustain a successful technical career and a successful team as a mentor will continue to rise, eventually beyond a tipping point, for a team that wants to make it into Eliminations or better at Championships. The technical job market, where nerds compete to have meaningful impact on the projects at work for which they're passionate, is far more competitive than even IRI. A wife & house on top of that is hard enough, but add kids into the mix and it'd get tougher still.

Mentors are the keystone to the level of competitiveness in FRC -- and any student on a highly competitive team is better for it in the long run. Some geographic areas lack one type of mentor or another (for example, my area is light on the mechanical side but is overflowing with software & business). One solution is to get more mentors involved -- but how, on a sustainable basis? Another is to partner teams up who are heavy on one, yet light on another, but that's another topic for another thread (and something we're trying for 2014).

The posts quoted after me in this thread showcase an interesting few points, and I waited to respond to Adam until a few more people came in. My original statement wasn't to start an argument, but really to start a discussion on how 341 and other very successful teams are able to motivate their team to excellence for 4 months of out of the year. Is there a core of mentors who can come in when needed? Is there 'that 1 guy who loves the robot more than life'? Are the kids told 'the mentors are here, and so you shall be as well"? We've tried a variety of things on my team, with mixed results. I'd love to hear what works for a given team's circumstances.

I think that the specific discussion regarding removal of the 6-week cap is far bigger than ChiefDelphi. There are many voices which aren't represented on these forums. The 9-person team I talked to last night (1 technical mentor) doesn't have anyone who even reads CD, for example.

Jesse,

I agree with your statement here. Yes, comitting time was much easier 10 years ago (when I was a lowly engineer) than now. I've made plenty of decisions or non decisions that may or may not have adversly affected my career. These are all conscious decisions to continue with this program instead of making advancement in other areas (although there are plenty of other factors that went into the decisions). Once my kids were born, it became even harder, to commit additional time. One of the reasons we work the schedule we do, is because there is no way to commit any additional time.

This season was terrible for burn-out. Trying to get a climber developed and build put such a strain on all aspects of our robot that many of us were ready to walk away after this season. But, after seeing it all come together and having a great experience at MSC / Championships...I don't think (hope) we will lose any mentors.

To keep the team working for the entire 4 months of the year, we have a couple "really" dedicated mentors that are around all the time to help get stuff done. They really are the backbone of our entire operation. The rest of us provide the knowledge base for what we are going to do and how to do it, but they are the ones that really get it done. There's no way I could invest any additional time than I already do...but, I still think it would be easier to spread that time out over the entire season, than trying to cram it into 6 weeks.

Our core group of mentors is not getting any younger. So to help counter act this, we are looking into opening up our mentor base to former students that we feel would be able to develop into mentors. In addition to any former FIRST students that hire into the GM proving grounds that would be interested in helping out.

I agree... CD is a very small minority of the total teams in FIRST. Nothing is going to decided here, but it is a fun discussion! :cool:

Brian Selle

03-05-2013, 14:55

For our team, the "stop build" day was last Saturday. We basically work 100% until we are eliminated. Having to build and maintain a practice robot costs us 2x and increases our workload by a significant amount. At each competition there is a massive push and stress to update the bagged robot to the current state. How nice would it be to show up to the competition and be ready to go?

There are teams that stop building at 6-weeks and their mentors get a break. I get it and respect it. However, without a stop build day your season can still be 6 weeks long... just go to a week 1 event and your done (maybe FIRST could even move it up a week). Right now, if you go to a week 5 event you will be competing against teams that have worked for 11 weeks... the stop build day accomplished nothing.

For our team, removing the 6-week stop build day would not "extend" the build season at all... rather it would reduce cost and mentor burnout.

Don Wright

03-05-2013, 14:57

Wasn't it 469 that used to have a reputation (c. 2005?) for making big changes at their first event? If so, were those changes independent of what happened in week 1?
Granted 2005 was before my time with 469... Do we make changes? Yes. Are they sometimes big? Yes. Do they sometimes resemble other good designs (like 1114's arm in 2007 because ours sucked)? Very occasionally. But most of the time the changes were because we weren't really done at our first event... In fact the running joke/motto on the team was "We'll just finish it on Thursday at our first event..."

In 2008 we wanted to "shoot the ball" but thought it would be deemed illegal. After we won Detroit and saw 27's awesome robot and how much fun and cool it was, we spent the next day ripping our arm off our practice bot to make a kicker...because it was sooooo cool to score that way. The students wanted to put in the time. The mentors did too. So we did.

I think that was the last season of "big changes" other than minibot deployer in 2011...again...233 found such a cool way to launch those suckers...

Alan Anderson

03-05-2013, 14:58

Why do mentors get burned out?

Mentoring a team during build season can be a full-time job. Add that on top of a "real" full-time job and something's going to have to give. Six weeks is about the limit for neglecting family and for postponing downtime.

I am convinced that a firm "stop build" date is a very good thing.

JB987

03-05-2013, 15:02

For me, any burnout is due primarily to the compression of work into a 6 week time frame. The time frame we are given results in us working 6/7 days a week, late into the night often and even with some rotation of mentors on various days of the week we still suffer some "burnout". Of course my team doesn't stop working at the end of 6 weeks as we continue to build, iterate, program and practice with our second robot...but we do so with a less intense work rate. My team is already working throughout the season and spreading out the work hours and days would, for me, be less stressful. And no, we wouldn't just fill in the available time (we already demonstrate the ability to say we aren't going to work on certain days during the 6 week period).

If the FTC open build model were adopted for FRC I can see teams saving money on a second robot, taking more days off so we actually get to spend a more days each week with our family throughout the season. The extended access to the competition robot could also make things easier on some of our sponsors who are sometimes asked to rush outside work for us as well to fit most of our work into the 6 week period.

waialua359

03-05-2013, 15:07

Team 359 over recent years have "Mentor Burnout" "Travel Burnout" "Lack of family time Burnout" and "Financial Burnout."
Winning the CCA and many Regional Championship Banners have helped ease the burnout pain.

But as Adam has stated here, our mentors arent getting any younger, and we are also faced with the transitioning of mentorship to former students.

Our program puts just as much time in VEX and it really adds to the burnout issues.

Lil' Lavery

03-05-2013, 15:10

The Chief Delphi bias strikes once again. Please keep in mind that CD is not representative of the FRC population as a whole, and most teams who post actively on CD are above average.

Most of the elite teams meet constantly, and well past the stop work date. They have aggressive schedules, practice robots, practice fields, and lofty goals.
Will eliminating the stop work date improve their result? Probably to a marginal degree.
Will eliminating the stop work date reduce their mentor stress? To an extent, especially on competition weeks.

Most of the FRC population does not meet constantly, and scales back their efforts significantly past the stop work date. Their schedules are still demanding, but less so than the FRC elite. They don't have practice robots, and have to do significant testing and driver training at their first (and frequently only) event.
Will eliminating the stop work date improve their result? In large part yes. Bottom teir teams will still struggle (it doesn't take six weeks to build a box on wheels with bumpers, more time is not going to fix the teams who cannot do that). Middle teir teams will likely show up much closer to ready, but many will still not have ever put their robot on a real field to get proper autonomous testing and driver training.
Will eliminating the stop work date reduce their mentor stress? Not likley. Even without meeting every day, these mentors are often pushed to (or well past) their limits. Extending that build period will not help matters, even if their robot does better.

Obviously these are generalizations, but it's how I feel these types of changes would impact generalized versions of teams. I'm in the same boat as Madison (including that competing early in the season is a disadvantage to many teams who have yet to pass the threshold of being competitive). 1712 meets 3 times a week, with some additional meetings late in the season. More time would help, but few of us have that time or energy to spare. We're all exhausted when the build season ends, as it is.

I don't know if a longer build would raise the "floor" per se, but it would likely help with raising the 25%-75% percentile of teams. However, you may well see the number of teams drop, as mentor burnout increases.

Bongle

03-05-2013, 15:14

Pretty burned-out mentor here. I had too much non-FIRST stuff going on this year, and found that robotics was a bit of a chore. I'm always nonplussed about build season, but this year felt really bad. Between work, a start-up, and a girlfriend, I was massively overstretched. Our main mentor is fortunate enough to be retired, but as a working stiff I'm finding less and less time for FIRST.

The 6-week season absolutely must be kept, and I'd be happy if they eliminated the withholding allowance too. Top-end teams will build practice bots, but top-end teams will always find a way to be better whether the season is long or not. I had to skip out on the mid-february-until-first-competition build season this year, and I felt awful about it. I shouldn't feel like I'm abandoning my team by not showing up after build season.

Here's the problem:
-Extending the build season would certainly raise the floor of performance, but it would also raise the ceiling. Teams that perform near the bottom now would perform near the bottom with an official 9-week build season. Their robot might be better at the game, but everyone else's robot would be better at it too. Human psychology and satisfaction isn't interested in absolute performance, it's interested in relative performance. And coming dead last feels just as bad whether your robot can score (9 weeks) or not (6 weeks).
-Put another way, the build season is a bit of an arms race: if everyone spends 3 more weeks, then that's 3 more weeks of neglected homework, children, and jobs for essentially zero gain. The extra 3 weeks will probably not gain you any ground on any other teams, because they'll also be working for an extra 3 weeks.
-Teams can't really say "well we're just going to work for 6 weeks", because that guarantees that they'll get beaten by the teams that are willing to sacrifice their non-FIRST lives more.
-If FIRST were to make the build season officially longer, they'd probably make the games proportionally more difficult, so you'd still have teams unable to perform any of the tasks. It's not like we'd have 9 weeks to achieve the same bar we have now: the bar would be higher.

Here's a proposal to enforce a short build season: have the drive station software stop working between the end of build season until thursday of the competitions that that team is registered for, along with the reinstatement of "raw materials only" being brought to competitions. Boom: no more practice robots, no more february->march build season, no more 4-months of daily meetings to be competitive.

Clem1640

03-05-2013, 15:16

If we kept the rule concerning ending work on a certain date (the old ship date; now a bag & tag date for most events), then 6 weeks is appropriate. If this were 7 or 8 weeks, we would continue to work as intensely, but for additional time. We build a nice, designed robot, but frankly, it is never really "done". ...On the other hand, 6 months would reduce the pressure...

Maintaining the current intensity for 1 or 2 more weeks would not be an improvement from a burn-out standpoint; just worse. It would also seem to necessitate a delay in the competition season, which is probably impractical, given that this runs to the end of April now.

On the other hand, if the robot remained accessible for modification throughout the competition season (no bag & tag), it might reduce burn out a little (although I have some reservations). Mostly, this would eliminate the need for competitive teams to build a second robot (which helps).

Adam Freeman

03-05-2013, 15:22

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.

I do like this aspect of the 6-week build. It's not easy to get a high quality machine built in 6-weeks. When it happens, it is very rewarding!

With the currently imposed 6-week deadline, we WANT to get the robot completed in this time frame. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't.

I'm sure it helps to keep the students motivated as well.

Hjelstrom

03-05-2013, 15:34

Tom Line

03-05-2013, 15:44

I would hate anything longer than the 6 weeks of open bag.

Yes, the season continues after you bag, but for us it's a much slower pace. We're usually refining code on the robot, fixing any major issues, then planning for the bag window. For us that means we go from a 7 day a week before bag to a 2-3 day per week after bag.

Having the robot out-of-bag would mean that the 7 day grind would keep going, because 'large scale' improvements like adding a climber would still be on the table.

I'd vote to keep the current system just for my sanity.

Also, as a parent with kids, there's simply no way I could devote more time than I already do. I would have to take a long hard look at whether or not I would continue to mentor if a longer build season was implemented.

Jared Russell

03-05-2013, 15:46

With 30lbs of withholding this year, it may as well have been an unlimited build season.

Yep. We used much of our 30lbs allowance at each of our events (4 events * 30 lbs allowed at each = one entirely new robot). Add in unbagging hours for District events and we basically had a build season that went from January until May.

"Stop build day" really doesn't exist. Since we "stopped build", we re-designed and re-built our shooter, our intake, our shoulder joint, our loading mechanism, and our 10 pt hanger (literally every function of our robot other than the drive base).

And let me tell you: a 4 month build season kicked our butts. Easter weekend was the first weekend since kickoff that we didn't work on the robot. I think my wife forgot who I am. Many of our mentors are burnt out, and I don't think it's a coincidence that several of us had very bad winters/springs when it comes to illness (the students don't seem to mind, but they are young and energetic and can rotate in and out more than the mentors who are in the critical path).

Most of the pain was self-inflicted. We chose to pursue a very ambitious design, had some manufacturing delays that backed things up, and ultimately set a lofty standard for our robot performance and refused to rest until we met it. If at some point the deadline is extended or eliminated, teams will need to rethink how they look at build season. 6 weeks of "full speed ahead" is really all you can take.

In the end, our robot was pretty good, and we went 7-1 and seeded 5th in Newton. We would not have been able to do that without withholding allowances and unbagging time. In hindsight, if we didn't have to worry about building a practice robot, or building upgrade mechanisms separate from the rest of the competition machine, or spending the first few hours at competition frantically installing our upgrades, our season would have been somewhat less stressful. But honestly, it still would have been on the verge of unsustainable.

Since there really is no such thing as a "6 week build season" for a team like ours, there is really only one way to solve the burnout problem: self-discipline. Teams need to set their own limits and pace themselves. Karthik's talk isn't just about how to make a winning robot; it's about how to keep your sanity.

If we come to the realization that self-discipline is the only thing that will prevent burnout (whether a 6, 8, or N week build season), then I don't see why we need a stop build deadline and the additional stresses it can cause.

The only other option that makes sense is completely eliminating withholding allowances, and going back to the days where half the robots on any given field can't accomplish the game challenge.

Doug G

03-05-2013, 15:50

I vote to keep the 6 week deadline. I would even vote to eliminate the withholding allowance. The arms race will get worse as teams start copying the good designs they see in earlier competitions (take a look at VEX). It will turn into a never-ending brutal build season if you want to try to compete with the best.
(just my opinion)

Thank you mentioning VEX... with a longer build season, the amount of improvement leads to a bunch of similar scoring robots, which may be good for the average match score, but I find it a bit uninspiring. At Vex Worlds, a lot of the top bots had a very similar scoring mechanism that I'm sure were inspired by others. The minibot from 2011 is another example. I really enjoy seeing a lot of variety robots and solutions to the game challenge. This year was probably the most variety in robots. If teams were allowed to continue to improve their design, I have a feeling we see a lot more floor intakes, Full Court Shooters, and all would be using the same type of wheels... Boring...

MrForbes

03-05-2013, 15:53

I don't have a job, and I get burned out at 6 weeks. Our students do too, so do the teachers. We treat the 6 week build as a 6 week build, when it's over we are done with robots until the competition. Yet we managed to seed first and win the Arizona regional this year, so we might be considered an "elite" team in AZ (which is a relatively small pond).

I've also been involved in another robotics competition in Arizona, the National Underwater Robotics Challenge. This event kicks off on Halloween, and the event is held in June. There is plenty of time to do lots of work for it, whenever you want. Yet most teams show up at the competition with a non-working robot. I think this is the result of procrastination, caused by the way too long build season.

If anyone at FIRST is paying attention to this, please put me in the "keep the 6 week build and get rid of the 30 lbs allowance" camp.

Jared Russell

03-05-2013, 15:59

Yes, the season continues after you bag, but for us it's a much slower pace.

...snip...

Having the robot out-of-bag would mean that the 7 day grind would keep going, because 'large scale' improvements like adding a climber would still be on the table.

Both of these are already choices you and your team are making. If you have the money and time to build a practice robot, 30 lbs and unbagging time are all you need to keep on grinding. Eliminating stop build day would not rob you of the ability to make the same choices. Instead, it gives other teams (without the resources to make practice robot) the ability to do what you currently do.

Tom Ore

03-05-2013, 16:06

I'd vote to keep the 6 week build season and a much smaller withholding allowance. Mostly because that's how we function on our team. It would have been great to have a few more days to tune software to improve our consistency, but that's our fault for building up until 11:53 PM on stop build day.

In 2010, 2011, and 2013 we competed at champs with the robot exactly as bagged on stop build day. In 2012 we added a load sensor to help with ball variation but otherwise made no functional changes.. While on one hand I'd love to keep upgrading to improve our robot, on the other hand it's somehow enjoyable to make a plan early in build season and see how it all plays out (especially since it's gone fairly well for us over that span.)

Chris Fultz

03-05-2013, 16:09

my personal view is this would help newer teams and not have a signficant impact on many of the teams. It would save $$ and a lot of work and reduce stress.

Why - we build a prototype and then a competition robot. we work hard to keep the two very similar. once we bag the comp robot, then we make changes to the prototype. then we have to make a second spare part for the comp robot. then we have to be sure the new parts will fit and it will all work the same. then we spend a lot of time on thursday morning putting on the new parts, or re-fabricating pieces.

If we had access to the comp robot, we could just work on it. and on thursday, instead of finishing our robot, most of our team could focus on helping the teams that are still struggling.

Even a 1 day "out of the bag" optin each week could make more teams available to help others on the first day of the regionals.

Teams still have a choice. Even with the current rules, some teams meet 7 days a week for 6 weeks. Some meet 3 times a week. Three are some really good teams that do not meet everyday (or even 6 days a week) now.

Bongle

03-05-2013, 16:10

Both of these are already choices you and your team are making. If you have the money and time to build a practice robot, 30 lbs and unbagging time are all you need to keep on grinding. Eliminating stop build day would not rob you of the ability to make the same choices. Instead, it gives other teams (without the resources to make practice robot) the ability to do what you currently do.

The problem with self-discipline as a solution is that self-discipline essentially means: "choose between having a non-FIRST life or being competitive". If our team chooses self-discipline and goes back to our families and friends between februrary and march, it means we'd be middle of the pack at best at the competitions, because half the field or more will have been working during that time.

If FIRST mandates (and enforces) a shorter build season, then it means that you don't need to choose: you can work your butt off for 6 weeks, then relax, safe in the knowledge that the competition is also relaxing.

Chris Fultz

03-05-2013, 16:13

safe in the knowledge that the competition is also relaxing.

but it isn't.

Adam Freeman

03-05-2013, 16:25

So an example of how I got "burned out" this build season.

My family scheduled a vacation on the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of the Stop build week....(not sure how I messed up the dates :o ).

Anyways...the Satuday before, I NEEDED to have all my work done before I left the shop, because otherwise the robot would have been bagged without a functional shooter.

Myself, some other mentors, and some of our most dedicated students worked from 8am Saturday, until 5am Sunday. Just to make sure we had a mechanically sound shooter, ready for the electrical team to wire.

Now, our robot was no where near completed when it went into the bag. We were probably 60% wired (cRIO, Victors wired, a few motors wired) and 70% mechanically complete (drivetrain and shooter complete, no climber, other misc stuff not completed) ....and 0% tested. Our fault, obviously for many, many reasons.

So now our robot is sitting in a bag for 3 weeks not completed, while we continued to work on our practice bot trying to get the climber working. The stop build didn't stop us from working, it just stopped us from working on our competition bot.

When we were allowed to un-bag the week of Waterford, we worked for 3 days (2-3hrs/day...or whatever it was) to get the robot capable of shooting and hanging for 10pts. We had to fight through mechanical, wiring, and software issues that were different than the practice bot.

By the time we showed up at Waterford, it felt like we had been working for a year straight to get this machine functional....and it was really only 70% functional at that point. No pre-programmed positions. Could only FCS at the 2pt goal. Auto was a mess. No climber. Very little driver practice.

This are all 100% self induced issues with biting off more than we could handle... but, if we had access to the robot for the 3 weeks prior, we probably would have been able to get it all working in that amount of time, with the same effort that we already put in.

We then continued to work the same schedule moving towards Troy, MSC, and Champs.

How inspirational was our robot at Waterford compared to the one that we showed at in St. Louis?? Because we receive a lot more comments and questions about the one at St. Louis, than the one at Waterford.

IKE

03-05-2013, 16:35

Doug G

03-05-2013, 16:35

but it isn't.

99% would if there was no withholding allowance. Get rid of withholding or at least lower it to 10-15 lbs. Save us from ourselves!!

I think some are also misinterpreting what is meant by Mentor burn-out... It is not that we are unhappy or not having fun, it is just they we have responsibilities outside of FIRST and often make sacrifices that either hurt the team or our families. Making that choice is not always fun.

Jared Russell

03-05-2013, 16:36

The problem with self-discipline as a solution is that self-discipline essentially means: "choose between having a non-FIRST life or being competitive".

I hear your point, but the problem is that sustainability is ALREADY a self discipline issue:

1) Teams have the same choice now, even with a stop build day. Ask 67 or 254 how many man-hours they put into perfecting their climber on the practice bot after they bagged the robot.

2) Our most successful robots ever were our simplest (mechanically anyhow). Many other teams fall into this category (1503's 2011 machine, 610's World Champion robot, etc.). Just like how cramming for a test into the wee hours of the morning has diminishing returns, there is something to be said for aiming for a simple-but-effective, master-of-one-trade robot and being able to be well rested when you work on it. If you want to build the swiss army knife of robots, well, you are asking for it.

3) The artificial constraint of not being able to touch your robot from Day X to Day Y (which seems even more arbitrary once you are in a district system and get 6 hours of access per event) actually impedes your ability to balance FIRST and life, since all direct work on the robot can only fall on certain days/hours.

Bongle

03-05-2013, 17:02

but it isn't.

That's because the current ruleset permits them to. If the rules were "6 weeks, no withholding, only raw materials brought to competition, and driver station doesn't work between end-of-build and start-of-competition", then nobody would be building because nobody would be allowed to. You could work on your human player skills or talk about strategy, but that is (depending on the game) working at the fringes, rather than improving your shooter from 2 cycles to 5 cycles.

I've been in FIRST for 10 years now, and I've noticed a gradual increase (steep, in recent years) of how much building goes on between end-of-build and competitions starting. Under the current ruleset, if you want to be competitive, you also have to be doing that building (because the competition is). If you want to maintain friendships, jobs, or families, then you are essentially put in a situation of choosing to be competitive vs choosing to maintain those other extremely important things.

Put another way, you could put it this way:
-10% of teams will work to the absolute maximum of what the rules permit them to and enjoy it. Currently, that means a practice bot, 30lbs of robot withheld per competition.
-40% of the teams want to at least be competitive and have a shot at winning the competition. Therefore, they'll kill themselves trying to keep up to the top 10%. They'd work less, but in order to be competitive they have to be working about as much as the workerbee top 10%.
-The other 50% of teams probably pack it up at week 6. Some of them may be have really good robots, but many of them won't.

pfreivald

03-05-2013, 17:13

I think some are also misinterpreting what is meant by Mentor burn-out... It is not that we are unhappy or not having fun, it is just they we have responsibilities outside of FIRST and often make sacrifices that either hurt the team or our families. Making that choice is not always fun.

Amen. Burnout doesn't mean it isn't fun. I freaking love--LOVE--FIRST. But it is exhausting--and moreso the older I get; and it forces me to choose between FIRST and lots of other things that I love.

The obligations of adulthood means that "time off" usually means "time to do other types of work", and FIRST already gets in the way of other types of work. If you want to stay competitive, you meet like crazy, you push yourself, you do everything you can -- because you know everybody else is, too.

Oh, and some of us have spouses, children, pets we have an obligation to keep happy (because we own them, and that's what good pet owners do)...

I love FIRST, but I don't love only FIRST, and I don't want to do only FIRST. I also don't want to look at a group of students who say, "Mr. Freivald, we want to do whatever we can to be as good as the best teams" and say, "no, we're not going to do as much as those other teams do, because Mr. Freivald doesn't want to become suddenly single and give away half his stuff again".

Why do mentors get burned out? Because mentors have more than one passion, more than one obligation, and finite amounts of time and energy.

Clinton Bolinger

03-05-2013, 17:26

At what point/amount of unbag time would you stop making a practice bot?

1 Day/week?
6 hours/week (not just competition weeks, but all weeks?)
8
12?

I think there could be a neat compromise made where you could find a threshold that would essentially find a balance. Just a thought. I know of a handful of teams in Michigan that stopped building a practice bot a couple of years ago thanks to the 6 hrs, and 30 lb. allowance.

This would also balance a bit the desparity of teams that due multiple events vs. those that only do 1 later event.

Personally, I think that 6 hours every week would be a nice compromise.

I would even take 4 hours every week, instead of the 6 hours of unbagging before the event (District Model).

Our team spent/wasted a lot of time on a PracticeBot, that was never used to its full potential.

Love the idea IKE.

-Clinton-

Adam Freeman

03-05-2013, 17:29

Why do mentors get burned out? Because mentors have more than one passion, more than one obligation, and finite amounts of time and energy.

Yes!

I am not advocating teams/mentor spend more time on FIRST. I am advocating FIRST makes the time spent more valueable by allowing teams/mentors access to their competition robots.

Probably the most important thing that happened to us this season was getting eliminated in the quarter finals at Waterford. This gave us 3-4 hours of time to work on getting the climber strung and hooks installed. This time with the competition robot, without the pressure of having an up coming match was critical in discovering the issues that were holding us back from climbing. Without this time, I doubt we ever climb in the season.

If we would have advanced, we would have had to wait until Troy to install the parts on the competition robot. We would have then discovered we needed to change the hooks (again!) to get up to level 3. Depending on how far we got with the practice bot (it ended up falling off the tower btw Waterford and Troy, and had to be re-built). We may or may not have continued with the climber development. Knowing that the competition bot was close to climbing was what kept us moving forward.

Jim Zondag

03-05-2013, 17:55

Ask the question: "Why do we restrict access to the Robots".
The answer is not because to restrict burnout or any other reason stated here. This is a side effect and not the original intent.
The real answer today is "because we always have". This is not a very good reason. Almost no one who works at FIRST other than Dean and Woodie were here when the decision to institute this policy was made. It persists as an artifact of the past and little more. It really makes very little sense in the modern context of FRC as a season long sport and not a single event.
Look around at any other machine sport on earth and you will very rarely find any kind of restriction like this, if ever. I know of nothing else like it. If your build machines, you need time to learn to use them, time to fix them, Time to test them, and time to improve them. Contintuous improvement and iterative development are two of the core aspects of good engineering process. FRC deliberately squashes these effort for reasons I have never understood.

If you told a race car team that they could not have access to their car for weeks before the big race, they would laugh in your face. Most other machine sports are just as intense as FRC, some are more so, but none of them attempt at putting any extra artificial constraints on access to the machines. When race day comes, you go to the track; that is your only time constraint. FRC does not need to be different.

I actually find in practice that the machine access rules make the sport of FRC much harder for the weaker teams, and give a huge advantage to the well resourced teams. These rules are a major driver of cost, effort, and time investment. they makes the void between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' wider than it would be if we have free access to the robots.
This is not just opnion: the performance data from many seasons of FRC history support the statement that "Teams get better when they use their robots" (Duh!). The way it is today, the well resourced teams have many, many times more time with their robots than everyone else. My team will effectively spend several YEARS of FRC match time driving our practice robot every week during the competition season. We will never have a world in which most teams can build multiple machines per year. The only solution which approaches a more equitable solution is to remove the access restrictions for everyone. As long as this disparity exists, there will be a large amount of stratification in the league.

As for mentor burnout: I personally would spend less time, have lower stress, be able to better empower my students, spend less money, and have more fun if there were no machine access restrictions. The "myth of the 6 weeks" is simply not true, and it has never been true in my experience. Being successful in FRC takes longer than this. We should all stop lying to ourselves.

Chris Hibner

03-05-2013, 18:01

I love Isaac's compromise.

I think we would stop building a practice robot at the 4-6 hours per week threshold. I think 6 hours per week would be about right.

AllenGregoryIV

03-05-2013, 18:20

I love Isaac's compromise.

I think we would stop building a practice robot at the 4-6 hours per week threshold. I think 6 hours per week would be about right.

We try to do more than that in just driver practice. It doesn't always work out that way but we try.

pfreivald

03-05-2013, 18:21

The problem with these kinds of arguments, of course, is that people do not get to dictate to other people what constitutes "burnout" for them.

bduddy

03-05-2013, 18:58

If you told a race car team that they could not have access to their car for weeks before the big race, they would laugh in your face. Most other machine sports are just as intense as FRC, some are more so, but none of them attempt at putting any extra artificial constraints on access to the machines. When race day comes, you go to the track; that is your only time constraint. FRC does not need to be different.
Even Formula 1, the most intense and engineering-oriented motorsport of all, has instituted a mandatory "summer break" to prevent burnout of its employees.

http://www.gpupdate.net/en/f1-news/240532/f1-summer-break-driver-holidays/

Food for thought...

Jim Zondag

03-05-2013, 19:07

Even Formula 1, the most intense and engineering-oriented motorsport of all, has instituted a mandatory "summer break" to prevent burnout of its employees.

http://www.gpupdate.net/en/f1-news/240532/f1-summer-break-driver-holidays/

Sure, but this FI holiday is more of an agreed upon 2 week break by the participants during the peak of summer so that those with families have some hope of sneaking in a summer vacation. F1 Teams can pick when they do this break based on their own state of preparedness. FRC restriction is kind of the other way around.

EricH

03-05-2013, 19:07

I also would be in favor of such a compromise. To a point (there has to be a reasonable limit, or some of us get a pass to a place where every room is padded).

I would suggest the following: Each team may unbag their robot up to 3 times per week, for a grand total of 10 hours (remember the FIX-IT Windows from a few years back, guys? and how you had to use some ridiculous amount of time in one or two shots before they changed it?).

To add complexity (and therefore decrease chances of this part being used...), your withholding allowance decreases proportionally to the amount of time you spend unbagged. If, for example, a team uses none of that time, they can show up with 40 lbs of withholding. BUT, if a team uses ALL of that time, they can show up with 10 lbs (that means, for every hour you spend out of the bag, you lose 3 lbs of withholding, in this example). Teams who crate their robots and ship get 40 lbs for that regional event, 20lbs for Championships. First item on the inspection list is to check the time on the lockup form and the amount of withholding.

IKE

03-05-2013, 19:35

Sure, but this FI holiday is more of an agreed upon 2 week break by the participants during the peak of summer so that those with families have some hope of sneaking in a summer vacation. F1 Teams can pick when they do this break based on their own state of preparedness. FRC restriction is kind of the other way around.

There are actually lots of goofy rules in Motorsports. For instance NASCAR will let you work on the car. They just won't let you test it:
http://aol.sportingnews.com/nascar/story/2012-09-29/sprint-cup-nascar-approves-testing-for-2013-cars-at-series-venues
At least until this year. That is a big reason why you see so many teams sneaking into high speed wind tunnels at night is because they cannot test on represntative tracks. So, instead of a practice bot, NASCAR teams build "practice facilities".... or at least rents them.
Big Budget teams even bought their own tunnels (http://www.racecar-engineering.com/articles/nascar/the-secrets-of-laurel-hill/) (think tunnel in a mountian instead of wind tunnel...)
************************************************** *
The long and short of it is teams that want to find a way will, but I am proposing a compromise between the two camps that I think might help some find the balance that others are concerned about.

Currently there is only a small percentage that build a practice bot and fully utilize it. Most teams here in Michigan do use the "out of bag time" or at least 4/6 hours before their district events. Some have even stopped building their practice bots now that they have a reasonable amount of practice time during un-bag. As unbag time increases, this will give more opportunity to those that do not build a practice bot. It might also curb the concerns of those that would "quit if there was no lock-up" period. I have been told this by many people that I have a great deal of respect for. My guess is it is right around 6 hours/week useable in 2 hour blocks minimum.

pfreivald

03-05-2013, 19:42

I would suggest the following: Each team may unbag their robot up to 3 times per week, for a grand total of 10 hours (remember the FIX-IT Windows from a few years back, guys? and how you had to use some ridiculous amount of time in one or two shots before they changed it?).

I don't see how this helps. You build a practice robot, spend all your time tweaking and perfecting on that, then unbag just fast enough to mount the mechanism to the actual robot and do a quick integration test. Then you move on to the next mechanism...

EricH

03-05-2013, 20:02

I don't see how this helps. You build a practice robot, spend all your time tweaking and perfecting on that, then unbag just fast enough to mount the mechanism to the actual robot and do a quick integration test. Then you move on to the next mechanism...

If you don't have a total time limit, or a time limit per unbag, I can think of one very obvious loophole to any unbag rule with a limit on # of times: I bag up the robot once. Then, a few days later, I unbag the robot, and leave it unbagged until a couple of days before competition.

The basic idea is to allow a significant amount of time with the actual robot, theoretically enough to vastly diminish the return from having a practice robot. I suggest a hybrid between # of times you can unbag (which will limit the amount of what you're suggesting) and the total time (which will limit the amount of robots left out of the bag for quite a while before rebagging). I randomly picked a maximum of 3 times for a maximum of 10 hours total, partly to fit with the later text (I originally was going to go for 2 unbags, 6 hours total time).

You may want to take a look at some of the discussions of the Fix-It Windows--I think 2005 was the worst, something about 2 times for 10 hours,and that was just to build spare, replacement, and upgrade parts!--for the compromise suggestion given was effectively a Fix-It window of time, or an MI/MAR unbag period, however you want to see it.

topgun

03-05-2013, 20:10

We have a similar design/build schedule. We are not working every day all 6 weeks. We work Tuesday / Thursday 4:15-7:30pm and Satuday 8am-4pm for the majority of the build season. When we need to work more later in the season, we do...or even after.

-Adam

For me, this just begs the question, what is your team doing differently from 99% of the other teams that you can consistently create elite-level robots in 45 days with that kind of build schedule? Is it the amount of mentors with experience, project management, CAD, attitude, students, etc...? Can you elicit some principles that would be concrete takeaways for other teams following this thread.

My team has struggled the last four years producing a working robot by the end of the build season. The team is ready to try a different approach and we really want to look at successful teams to find out what changes we can make to make the build/competition season a much more positive experience. Not just from a successful robot standpoint, but from our students learning that engineering is a wonderful career. Right now we seem to be in a negative lessons learned mode, rather than positive lessons learned moving us forward.

BJC

03-05-2013, 20:41

This is an interesting discussion. Here's my perspective on the matter.

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
Pretend that the entire FRC season is only 12 hours long. The first 6 hours is used by all the teams. However, the option is available to any team to spend some extra time and money to continue to work for the other 6 hours. Teams that choose to spend this extra time and money to get the other 6 hours will generally have a more competitive robot then those who do not -- This is the current situation in FRC.

Now let’s pretend that the entire FRC season is still only 12 hours long. BUT now all the teams can use all 12 hours without having to spend the extra time and money.

- The teams who already spent the extra time and money to get the extra 6 hours will continue to use all 12 hours but will save the time and money they used to use to spend getting them.

- Some of the teams who only used the first 6 hours will continue to only use 6 hours. They were not willing to put in the time and effort to use the other 6 hours before and they are still not. Even so, now they can work every other hour rather then 6 hours straight. This saves them some stress while they maintain the same level of competition that they used to.

- Some of the teams who only used the first 6 hours will choose to work more than 6 hours now that they do not have to put in the extra time and money to get them. These teams might work 8/12 hours, they might work 10/12 and some might even work 12/12. These teams will be more competitive as a result.
]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

The point is that teams already decide how much time and effort they want to put into their robots. The end of the 6 week build season is not a stopping point but rather the point where extra time, effort, and money is needed to continue working. By eliminating this point teams are allowed to continue working on their robots at their discretion based on how much effort they have decided they want to put into the program but without any barriers to doing so.

Regards, Bryan

Adam Freeman

03-05-2013, 21:00

For me, this just begs the question, what is your team doing differently from 99% of the other teams that you can consistently create elite-level robots in 45 days with that kind of build schedule? Is it the amount of mentors with experience, project management, CAD, attitude, students, etc...? Can you elicit some principles that would be concrete takeaways for other teams following this thread.

Honestly, I can't really explain it outside of mentor experience. We have an incredible Chief Engineer (Jim Meyer - 13 years in FIRST), who I would argue is the best in all of FIRST.

Many teams have asked how we do it....and we've tried to adapt the principles of many other great teams (148, 1114, etc...).

It's definitely not CAD experience. We do 95% of all our work in 2D AutoCAD.

I doubt it's project management, we rarely finish on time.
Since I've joined the team:

-2005: Competition robot did not drive on carpet until first competition.
-2006: Robot was a disaster. Did not have Jim full time this year.
-2007: Robot was finished 2 weeks early. Good robot. Could have done more, but was weary after 2006.
-2008: Complete design change on the arm prior to first competition.
-2009: Complete re-design during un-bag time before first competition.
-2010: Robot was done early. Added ball-magnet before first competition. Added climber throughout competition season.
-2011: Robot was finished early. Mini-bot development and deployment was finished week of first competition. Terrible code issued at first competition.
-2012: Best machine we have ever built. Robot was done early. No major issues throughout competition season.
-2013: Robot not finished when bagged. Major work to get functional before first competition. Climber developed and added throughout competition season.

So my guess would be mentor experience, attitude, and students. We expect that we will be able to create a World Class competition robot. We instill that expectation in our students. We devote as much time as possible (as mentioned before), given work and family requirements.

The other thing we have is almost instant access to parts and materials. We are very fortunate to have a build facility that we can make virtually any part that we would design for our robot. That allows us the opportunity to make design changes quickly.

I'm not sure I would recommend our design process or project management style to anyone else. It works for us....and we're willing to share it, but I don't think it is the "best" process bt any measure.

Tom Ore

03-05-2013, 21:33

Here's an off-the-wall thought:

When a company decides to delay a product launch, they decide that increased sales of a better product out weighs sales lost by the delayed launch.

What if teams earned qualifying points based on how long the robot was locked up. Lets say 1 week in the bag is the same as 1 win in the qualifying rounds. Now teams have to decide if losing the extra qualifying score is outweighed by a better robot.

Jon Stratis

04-05-2013, 01:00

Personally, I know I'm burned out as it is. 6 weeks of build, followed by being LRI at two regionals, volunteering at champs, and now getting ready to be LRI at States is a lot of time and effort, and other areas of my life suffer as a result. Is it worth it? Yes, obviously yes or I wouldn't do it (that said, I'm doing what I can to make sure we have enough LRI's to cover all the events next year so I'm responsible for only 1).

So, what if we get rid of Bag and Tag? Well, then the season would last 4.5 months. On top of all of the normal team meetings (you're deluding yourself if you think teams would meet fewer hours per week!), I would have the time I spend getting ready for each competition (volunteers, especially key volunteers, spend a surprising amount of time getting things ready just so they run smoothly for you and your team!) coming into play during the last half of the season. That's a lot of work, and a lot of time.

I believe one of the things holding MN back from going to districts is the time commitment. Coming off a 6-week build season, I know I can't commit to spending the next 6 weeks doing district competitions (With Jeff Pahl moving to Wisconsin, we only have two LRI's currently in the state, so I would have to work half the events), and the same goes for most of our volunteers. That would only get worse if we did away with the Stop Build day.

Further, I think the limited time allowed on the robot is actually one of the best things about FIRST. With unlimited time, anyone can build a competitive robot. Doing so in a short timeframe is the challenge. If anything, I would like to see us do away with/modify the withholding allowance. Limit it to true spare parts, and require that the entire robot be bagged - you can't keep working on 1/4 of your robot after Stop Build day. There's a team I know of that brought in a new shooter for every event this year. The drive base stayed the same, but essentially it was like they competed with a different robot at each event (and rumor has it they might bring in yet another shooter for States!).

As many people more important than me have said, this is a robotics competition that isn't about the robot. And yet asking for more time to build seems to go against that concept.

Cory

04-05-2013, 01:18

It's already a 16 week build season, even if people want to pretend that it's only 6.

If you want to be great (or even really good) it's almost impossible to work only 6 weeks and then stop. We took maybe 5 days off total between kickoff and championships. Our technical mentors all put in over 50 hours/week every single week from kickoff to championships. It's hardly something to be proud of and we can't possibly sustain another year like this again, but that's what it took for us to get the 2013 robot to where it ended up.

If we didn't have to build two robots and only had to perfect one robot we would put in less time on the whole.

If you think the six weeks is saving you from yourselves I don't think it is. You've made the decision (either financial or personal to your team) not to build a practice bot. Presumably if we went to an "open" competition you could continue to make the same decision and bag the robot after six weeks, lock it in a mentor's garage, etc.

waialua359

04-05-2013, 01:56

Honestly, I can't really explain it outside of mentor experience. We have an incredible Chief Engineer (Jim Meyer - 13 years in FIRST), who I would argue is the best in all of FIRST.

Many teams have asked how we do it....and we've tried to adapt the principles of many other great teams (148, 1114, etc...).

It's definitely not CAD experience. We do 95% of all our work in 2D AutoCAD.

I doubt it's project management, we rarely finish on time.
Since I've joined the team:

-2005: Competition robot did not drive on carpet until first competition.
-2006: Robot was a disaster. Did not have Jim full time this year.
-2007: Robot was finished 2 weeks early. Good robot. Could have done more, but was weary after 2006.
-2008: Complete design change on the arm prior to first competition.
-2009: Complete re-design during un-bag time before first competition.
-2010: Robot was done early. Added ball-magnet before first competition. Added climber throughout competition season.
-2011: Robot was finished early. Mini-bot development and deployment was finished week of first competition. Terrible code issued at first competition.
-2012: Best machine we have ever built. Robot was done early. No major issues throughout competition season.
-2013: Robot not finished when bagged. Major work to get functional before first competition. Climber developed and added throughout competition season.

So my guess would be mentor experience, attitude, and students. We expect that we will be able to create a World Class competition robot. We instill that expectation in our students. We devote as much time as possible (as mentioned before), given work and family requirements.

The other thing we have is almost instant access to parts and materials. We are very fortunate to have a build facility that we can make virtually any part that we would design for our robot. That allows us the opportunity to make design changes quickly.

I'm not sure I would recommend our design process or project management style to anyone else. It works for us....and we're willing to share it, but I don't think it is the "best" process bt any measure.
Thanks for sharing.
Other than you and Dave, I have never met your other engineers such as Jim who I'd like to meet one day on how you folks build great robots year after year.
I wanted to comment on the bolded paragraph above.
You bring up a good point, which almost never is talked about on CD.
Great elite teams can adjust and make changes quickly IMO.

I think for a small rural school like ours, we have quite a bit of machinery that ranks with the best of them. With 9 mills/lathes, enough space for 4 teams to comfortably build their robots, newly acquired waterjet, etc. we have way more equipment than experts and personnel to run them.
We are way too slow in our design and build process where we try to make up for it by spending a large no. of hours/day during build season.
Amplify that with the cost of travel and spending countless hours raising funds, takes time away from prototyping and other offseason projects.
If our team could ever get more people to help, then perhaps we can take more design chances during crunch time and not burn anybody out.

josmee443

04-05-2013, 02:13

The 6 week cap definitely puts a great deal of pressure on teams, since it is such a short amount of time to build a great, efficient working robot. But, I think it is helpful in some ways. It teaches members that there are certain deadlines, whether they are short or long, that must be met. And, this is quite true in real life. Essentially, I think it teaches us to make a well organized, balanced schedule to plan out how to go about building a good robot. Really, in a way, it sorts out the teams that are really dedicated to doing well during competition. Typically, the best teams are the ones with the best planning. Ultimately, it prepares us to deal with the sometimes ludicrous deadlines that are sent our way in college, and after college.

Chief Hedgehog

04-05-2013, 02:25

Forgive me as this is my first post - and seeing how we bungled out first season, this may be bumpy.

As a rookie team, I see the benefits of a determined build season. We started our team with a relatively large group of mentors (12). Each and every mentor was worth their weight in gold. However, since this was a venture that was new to the mentors and the companies that they work for, we quickly realized that we were taxing our local sponsors and their talent (our mentors). If we had pushed beyond a 6 week build season, I am not sure if our sponsors would have allowed more time.

Becker is a small community and sports are not just activities, but act as entertainment for the locals. Most of my 24 robotics athletes are also competing in winter and Spring sports (When we have a spring). However, we were not able to utilize the time between our NorthStar Regional and FRC Championships because my team was either finishing their winter sports of Basketball, Wrestling, Hockey or getting primed for Tennis, LaCrosse, Baseball, etc. All 6 of my senior boys are also involved in our Tennis Team which has made it to state that last 4 years. They will most likely do so this year.

We did very well for our first year by building a Robot very different from most (Many from Galileo may remember seeing our C.I.S. 4607 Banners hanging from our shot blocker). We concentrated on defense and climbing for ten. This did well for us as we were awarded the Rookie All-Star and also won the regional in large part to the Iron Lions (967) and the Fighting Calculators (2175).

For us rookie teams not knowing what to expect, a determined 6 week build season is great. I am not sure if I could have held my team together much longer...

RRLedford

04-05-2013, 02:39

The 6-week bag deadline is unfair in the degree that it more detrimentally affects different kinds of teams.

Ours is a small private school team that has few students overall and even those with the most dedication to the program have trouble putting in a lot of time per week. We also have conflicts with other extra curricular activities, some of which are mandatory.

We often have a vacation week in the middle of the six week window, with almost no build time taking place, from many students out of town.

We have a finals week with only one session at best.

With a small team size and this much total time conflict it becomes almost impossible to complete our build. These time bites simply represent too big of a % of the total 6-week time window to ever get caught up.

We are always finishing our build in the pits, and never having any practice or troubleshooting/optimizing time before our first match. We rarely make any practice matches. We barely get to the practice field.

If we had 9 weeks or more, losing a week or two would not be such a total total progress killer. Even when we build a practice bot, we barely finish it a day or two before competition, and this makes that effort almost just an expensive and frustrating exercise in futility.

We also typically find that our design concepts are really excellent, but having our builds barely get finished by the end of Thursday at competition, and having no practice and tuning time, means we are struggling to barely reach a competition ready level while being in the middle of competing, which does really not allow for the best results with any design, no mater how good it may be.

We typically see how easily we could have done so much better but for lack of a week or so of more time for practicing and optimizing.
We always resolve to work more efficiently, and finish earlier next year, but it just never seems to happen.

Team members get frustrated seeing this pattern repeat for 2-3 years. It takes a lot of the fun out of the program for them too.

A big part of engineering design involves testing, iterative refinement and improvement, and I believe that small teams like ours are consistently being cheated from experiencing this aspect of engineering learning, from having such a compressed 6-week build window constraint laid on us.

For bigger teams with larger groups of mentors, I can see the 6-week build being pore realistic and more fair, but for the smaller teams with few mentors it is extremely difficult to handle.

-Dick Ledford

OZ_341

04-05-2013, 09:23

I have not decided how I feel about completely abandoning the 6 week build concept and I do certainly agree with many of the points that Jared made earlier. But I also have some concerns that would make me hesitate.

Most of my concern surrounds the loss of creativity and the heavy-handed benchmarking that will occur.
At the FTC level there is a great deal of "benchmarking" that happens due the the competition structure and the ease of rebuilding. There are still many imaginative teams, but there are also teams which heavily copy from successful designs.

Sure this happens in FRC, but there are limits to how much benchmarking you can implement. If FRC opens up completely, teams that have high speed manufacturing talents and the manpower can wait until the "smart teams" figure out the game and do a complete redesign based on the most successful robot systems.
I watched this happen in 2008, when Team 121 came out with an awesome design and reveal video at the end of week 3. It was a great machine. Countless struggling teams immediately dropped their design plans and adopted the "Tusk and Roller" pickup system. Sure those teams probably had a better year on the field, but those kids lost the opportunity to go on a journey of discovery.
In 2008 our ball pick-up design was not going well and there was tremendous pressure from a large faction of our kids to just give up on our design and adopt what Team 121 was doing. We certainly had the time and the talent. But even though I loved that design, I refused to allow it. I made them stick with their plans, improve their design, and go on that journey of discovery. It was a HARD year, and it was certainly not the best machine in FIRST that year, but it did win the Philly Regional, and more importantly those kids learned something that year about believing in yourself and having confidence in your ideas.
If we change to a completely open system there will still be plenty of creative teams, but being successful will no longer mandate imagination, simply having manufacturing muscle and manpower will be enough. My fear is that it won't be all that different than school life, where many talented kids wait for the "smarter kids" to figure things out and then simply collect the fruits of their labor.

I know this happens now in FRC to a certain extent, but it will bring this practice to a whole new level. As I said, I have not decided how I feel about this proposal, but it is one of my concerns.

Wendy Holladay

04-05-2013, 10:02

3 short points.

1. the biggest obstacle to building a practice robot can be electrical, many teams cannot afford the extra h/w. but this seems like the norm, just to be even a little competitive.

2. the years 1912 did the best, the week long Mardi Gras school holiday fell during build. that tells me an 8 week session would help a lot.

3. PLEASE REMOVE the 30 lb withholding. that made our some mentors think they could just keep on going and usually for our team, that just made a bad robot worse. and we have built a lot of bad robots.

rick.oliver

04-05-2013, 11:36

The 6 week build season may be a reality for some, many or even a majority of teams; I don't know. For the eleven season that I have been involved in FIRST FRC, the 6 week build season has clearly been a myth for some number of teams. And in the past few years, the two teams which I have mentored are included.

I agree that allowing access to the competition machine during the competition season will provide the opportunity for more folks to choose to extend the intensity of the build season without spending the additional finances required to effectively build a practice robot. I don't know how many folks would make that choice, but it is a personal choice and I do not feel compelled to decide for anybody but myself.

I am 85% confident that our team would make use of the time and be more competitive sooner as a result.

My position is that the current system makes a mockery of the idea that all of this great design, fabrication, iteration, optimization and improvement occurs in six weeks. It is laughable and I find it completely intellectually dishonest.

If FIRST wants to continue to perpetuate the myth, I will continue to follow the rules and strive to increase the number of sponsors, mentors and additional processes and resources required to continually improve our team's on-field product, because that is my area of focus on the team and because the students have much more fun, are much more engaged and appear much more inspired by a much more competitive machine.

I like that we have the opportunity to improve as the season progresses and I think there is tremendous value in exposing students to the process of continual improvement. I would not want to see the system altered to eliminate this aspect of the process.

What I would appreciate is the ability to more cost effectively and productively take advantage of the full 13 or so weeks between Kick Off and the Championships ship date.

Like I posted previously, the only stop build date should be the date Fed Ex picks up the crate to take the machine to Championships.

Negative 9

04-05-2013, 13:11

Perhaps we need longer than six weeks, but I don't know how I feel about the removal of a universal stop build date.

Any game with a chokehold strategy or something close would become excessively dull after the one team that figures it out competes in their first competition.

Cory

04-05-2013, 13:28

Negative 9

04-05-2013, 13:47

Why? How would this be any different than any other year? Well, it would still be rather dull either way. I just think it would be a bit more dull to see the same robots over and over again after some team reveals their chokehold strategy at a week 2 event.

Cory

04-05-2013, 14:19

Well, it would still be rather dull either way. I just think it would be a bit more dull to see the same robots over and over again after some team reveals their chokehold strategy at a week 2 event.

I don't believe that there will ever be a chokehold strategy that could be copied and implemented by anyone other than elite teams, who are not very likely to scrap their robots midseason.

nuggetsyl

04-05-2013, 14:27

PayneTrain

04-05-2013, 14:34

Regardless of what could happen in the future, I know for a fact that teams that already work to be elite work the entirety from kickoff through their last in season event, and other teams work at varying amounts down to just the build season and time at their events, and I don't think it will change. I don't think the ceiling would grow as much as the floor will rise, which is a great thing for FIRST.

AlecS

04-05-2013, 15:13

nuggetsyl

04-05-2013, 15:25

Steven Donow

04-05-2013, 15:25

Not to hijack the thread, but both of those items are created specifically for FRC. Hex bearings don't exist outside of those produced for FRC. While Talons have great applications outside of FRC, Talons were created to cater specifically to the FRC market. So excluding game pieces, FRC isn't really killing the worlds supply of items. As far as things produced for FRC, I'm sure suppliers are working to hard to remedy such supply problems in the future.

I think what Shaun is trying to say is that oftentimes these FRC specific items(which is technically the "world's supply") get completely sold out, leaving the teams that rushed to get these items at an advantage over teams that waited a bit. The point is, with longer build season, this allows suppliers to produce more items so that teams don't have to instantly buy so many of them so early in the season.
EDIT: Shaun clarified with what I said above

However, I very much agree with what Alan Ostrow said, about how if there's an open build season, you will see much less disparity between designs. The minibot is an example, and, while I didn't personally see many Ri3D clones, I have heard that certain events had many of them. While I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, what prevents a team, competing only week 6(this example is avoiding the future implementation of district systems and is an extreme) from making no serious design progress in their robot, only to wait until week 1 of competition to see what design wins, and from there on, completely copy that design? I think that with so much time to iterate, we'd eventually see so many clones...How many teams would have had 1114/67/217 style climbs if they had a full open bag time?

Foster

04-05-2013, 15:27

IMO they should announce next years game at the finals of champs. This would make first cheaper and improve the quality of robots.

VEX Mentor here. What Nuggetsy suggests won't happen. RECF does this, reveals the next game at the Worlds Championship in April. Top teams spend the next months (May, June, July) building and designing. The New Zealand teams get into the swing across their winter (June, July and August) posting ideas, reveals, match results. North America and UK students go back to School in Sept, so build starts up in Sept/Oct. Early events like the Delaware VEX competition (19 October 2013, at the DAFB, (shameless plug)) have teams arrive that have spent the summer building.

Some get crushed and do total rebuilds in the next 4 weeks to meet again in late November and December events. (Thanksgiving? Super, a 4 day build period without school!!) Crushed again they look at the Jan / Feb season events. A last try to get to Worlds!. (Holiday break? I don't think so, too much to do. ) Meanwhile our friends on a pair of small islands in the South Pacific have entered Summer, no school, and a ton of time to build.

With a last competition date of the first week in March, teams and mentors are under pressure to get those last few berths. January, February, March: Build, hours spent by mentors, parts orders, etc. go up.

Let me interrupt this to give a huge shout out to IFI / VEX Robotics and their 1/2 price shipping during FRC build season. A huge bonus for VRC teams!

Finally March comes, teams have worlds berths, a chance to relax. Not quite, need to put a ribbon on that Excellence presentation, need to make repairs to robots, maybe build a front end posted, and lets replace that drive train too. Travel plans, wrangle roberteers, parents, robots, parts, etc.

You have arrived!!! VEX WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP!!! Compete, work on the robot, compete, more work, Excellence Presentation, compete and then:

Announcement of the next years game!!!! :rolleyes: There, that was a lot easier than being an FRC mentor!

Cory

04-05-2013, 15:32

I think that with so much time to iterate, we'd eventually see so many clones...How many teams would have had 1114/67/217 style climbs if they had a full open bag time?

It would be impossible (or very close to impossible) to perform a hang like 1114 and 67 without designing your robot to do it from the start. Doesn't matter how much time you'd have to copy it, you'd still have to build an entirely new robot.

nuggetsyl

04-05-2013, 15:41

Even if a team coppied a design, the real question would be did they learn something? Reverse engineering is not always that simple.

sgreco

04-05-2013, 16:36

Even if a team coppied a design, the real question would be did they learn something? Reverse engineering is not always that simple.

It's possible to do this now even with the with-holding allowance. You don't need to take your robot home in order to do it. In 2011, my old team (2079) built an elevator that didn't run smoothly and we had trouble calibrating it. We took the 35 pound with-holding allowance (I think it was 35) and built a completely new 4-bar linkage manipulator lightly based off of the design from 148 that we were heavily inspired by (our linkage used box tubing, but the dynamics of the system were similar). I still question myself as to whether this was the right thing to do, but we learned a lot along the way, and it made our competitive season more successful.

Long story short, even if you can't take your robot home, it's still possible to make drastic iterations that can be influenced by successes of other teams.

scottandme

04-05-2013, 16:38

It would be impossible (or very close to impossible) to perform a hang like 1114 and 67 without designing your robot to do it from the start. Doesn't matter ho much time you'd have to copy it, you'd still have to build an entirely new robot.

1114 showed their working climb at a week 2 competition. Assuming you are qualified for CMP, that gives you 5 weeks before you have to crate and ship your robot to St. Louis. Only a week less than the "official" build season, and you already have concept and design proven. The 30 point climber is obviously a very complex example, but this would apply to every novel/successful design feature shown early in the season.

As noted, this already happens at varying scales - look at 2010 "ball-magnets", 2011 minibots, 2012 stinger/balancing aids, etc. 2168, 1218, and 103 all rebuilt their 2013 robots to a significant degree after their first event.

I could see this having the same effect as the wildcard rules. Why compete weeks 1/2/3 if you have no shot at a wildcard? Why compete week 1/2/3 if you have a unique and successful robot with features that others will then duplicate, negating your competitive edge? How many 469 clones would there have been in 2010?

341 rolled out of the gate in 2012 with a dominant robot that was made out of extruded aluminum. It was genius in game analysis and strategy, not mechanical design: most mid-tier teams with good controls mentors would have been able to build a reasonable facsimile without too much struggle. Would that be a good thing for FRC? I see the merit in going through iteration, redesign, etc, as crucial engineering fundamentals, but at some point wouldn't we see significant design convergence? Didn't 341 earn the right to plow through the competition?

Watching 341 last year motivated our team to take a much deeper look at the way we approach game analysis and robot design. Along with increase in-house manufacturing capability, we were able to build a relatively simple robot in 2013 that was highly effective, and very much inspired by the way 341 addressed the 2012 game. I don't think we learn those same lessons in 2013 if we're able to play knock-off in 2012.

Mark Sheridan

04-05-2013, 19:55

For me what burns me out is having to work during the week days. I have to fight traffic to get to my team and can spend up to an hour on the road. During a weekend, I get to my team's place in about 15 minutes.

I think given my circumstances, I would favor eliminating the 6 week build. I would much rather concentrate my time commitments to the weekend.

Also, our team is still struggling to get our practice bot and competition bot to behave the same. For the competition, robot, we sure could have used 20 minute on an official field or equivalent. For example, in LV we could not climb on one of the corners of the pyramid because a larger weld on a corner. We only practiced developed our climber on our pyramid which had smaller welds. Had we realized this sooner we would have made designee changes to fix this.

I figure a lot of teams would improve if they got to take their robots to a official field or equivalent and spend a couple hours honing their bot. Squeezing time in to do this on week 6 is not practical for many teams I know. Being able to do this on a week 7 or 8 would be huge.

Since I don't think this will change, we are going to keep on adding student and mentors to complete more tasks in parallel.

Wayne TenBrink

04-05-2013, 20:43

Ike was on to something when he asked about what it would take for teams to forego building a practice bot (which seems to be behind a lot of burnout).

I would like to see an expanded version of what we already have with the district system (FiM & MAR). I like the 6 week build season, but I would also like to see greater robot access during the competition season. The district model makes it possible to do both, while reducing stress on mentors, etc.

I would like to see a 10-12 hour "practice window" in the week preceeding each of the teams' scheduled competitions (up from 6 for FiM), and a 6-8 hour "fix it" window in the week following the competition. Non-district teams attending only one event could opt to use their "fix it" window prior to their event. I would keep the withholding allowance.

The out-of-bag time would be in lieu of the Thursday "practice day" at the competition. As an FiM team, I know that having the robot out of the bag in our own shop is always more useful than another day at the venue, and reducing the days off work to attend an event is a huge anti-burnout blessing.

PS: I think 6 weeks is a reasonal amount of time to brainstorm, prototype, build, test, drive, and tweak a competitive. Independent of the mentor burnout issue, I think it is good for teams enter the competition season with a machine that is their own "solution" to the "problem" the GDC gave them - a solution that they developed without the benefit of seeing how others play the game.

Zuelu562

04-05-2013, 21:15

Speaking to mentor burnout, 3623 is a relatively small team with slightly more mentors than students (the amount of mentors that worked on the robot is equal to the amount of students). Our schedule was "be there when you can, we'll be here Mon-Fri, 5:30-7:30, Saturday 9-3". One of our mechanical mentors could be there most of the week, but not weekends. The other mechanical mentor could only make Saturdays. Myself, the other electrical/programming mentor and another mentor could be there most days (I had to start missing Tuesdays due to my class schedule).

We were pretty toast after Bag. We were there for a total of 50-something hours that last weekend, and we bagged up a driving, scoring and hanging robot. We've determined that the schedule we used was really rough, and since we plan to expand the amount of students and mentors we have, we wanted to change our approach.

We're going to be implementing subteams, Mechanical, Programming/Electrical, and Spirit/Nontechnical. Certain subteams meet certain days of the week (Mechanical meets Mon and Wed, Programming meets Tues and Thurs, Spirit meets Friday), and everyone meets on Saturday. Students can ask a mentor to come in on an off-day for their subteam if they want to work on something and they can get to the club.

We chose this approach for several reasons. Some of our students can't get to the Boys and Girls Club on certain days, so this allows students to fulfill their "attendance" requirement while not being able to devote a full week, and allows those with vehicles or able to come to the club every day of the week to give what they want to. This also allows our mentors to not have to come in every day, but get very specific work done, and also gives us room to expand our schedule as necessary.

As a 6-year FIRSTer who has never won a regional or been to championships, I'm in favor of the 6 week deadline. It's a point of pride of the program, even if it's an illusion for some teams. We still work on parts, code, finishing things up like that, but I have never in my 6 years of FIRST took an entirely new mechanism to an event and installed it. The 6-week deadline may go truly the way of the dodo if/when the district system continues to proliferate, and I've started to question it since all events (sans-champs) went to Bag&Tag.

For now, let it live. Give teams direction, and the teams who want to do everything possible will do everything possible to get better.

Tetraman

05-05-2013, 00:36

So much for the "Everything being possible in 6 weeks" speech.

This is actually something that has come up in 174's recent Mentor/Adviser meetings. I find this thread one of the best discussions in a long time, but I agree to the CD bias.

I'm in the camp of requiring the 6 week cutoff. If you want to extend build season, I'd only make it 7 weeks. Anything more than 7 weeks is too much time.

If you want additional build time, then here is my idea: The game is released as normal, and from that day we get all six or seven weeks. The "last day of build season" is actually thursday of the Week 1 regional/district events. Teams are still allowed to build all throughout the competition season until a "bag and tag day" when teams must bag and tag their robot. The following week would be the State/Region championships, and then the Championship. The idea is that there would be a "final build day" which would be before the championships.

Chief Hedgehog

05-05-2013, 01:19

I don't think this discussion going anywhere. I think we have a great system thus far. But let's expand on two options:

Option 1
For those opting for a more 'equal footing' for all teams I would suggest this:
1. Pre-determined build time (whether it be 6 weeks or 9 weeks).
2. Bag and Tag until your first Regional/District.
3. Inspect and weigh robot at registration; no allowance for additions there forth.
4. Compete with the robot as is.
5. Your first regional/district is your Championship Qualifier. Bar None.

Option 2
For those opting for no bag and tag:
1. Release next years game at the conclusion of Championships
2. All teams have equal amount of time to design and build.
3. Can qualify at any number of regionals, no need for wildcards.
4. This allows for nearly 10 months of build time.

From what I understand, FIRST is not about equality or fairness, it is about honing talent, gathering resources, and meeting deadlines. As a secondary teacher, I can attest to the sad reality that our students know nothing about hard deadlines. If FIRST is to make a ruling between the two aforementioned systems (because if we keep arguing, we will end up on one of the two sides), I am for the strict deadline.

I love the current system where a team still has the opportunity to create a bot that is unique but still has the ability to adopt and adapt. If FRC chooses one of the two aforementioned options, we are going to end up with robots that are either inconsistent (option 1), or are all the same (option 2).

Have at my arguments, I am also a wrestling and soccer coach and have thus thickened my skin.

Good Luck!

Chief Hedgehog

05-05-2013, 01:43

Here is one huge factor that people are overlooking. First is killing the worlds supply in several items. Hex bearings anyone? Talons is another great example. Also who wants to do the math on overnight shipping first teams spend? IMO they should announce next years game at the finals of champs. This would make first cheaper and improve the quality of robots.

P.S. thanks 254 for the hex bearing. Even though we bought 20 of them we were still 1 short of what we needed.

I am sorry, but I disagree. In a supply versus demand market, it is the supply side that dictates the market price. Given a 10 month window, this is a very limited time frame for most manufacturers.

If FIRST increases the time frame, and RI3D as well as successful teams continue post their robots accomplishments on the intertubes, more teams will be demanding the same products that are being used by the successful team's robot. Therefore, more demand will be put on the devices needed to perform to that level.

An elongated build season means we will have clones and the teams with the best manufacturing resources will have the edge always. I do not wish to compete in an event where all robots are the replicas of RI3D or of 1114. I want my students to compete with a robot that they designed to the best of their abilities and resources.

I am sorry if I misinterpreted your message nuggetsyl.

EricH

05-05-2013, 01:57

Option 1
For those opting for a more 'equal footing' for all teams I would suggest this:
[snip]
5. Your first regional/district is your Championship Qualifier. Bar None.

Option 2
For those opting for no bag and tag:
[snip]
3. Can qualify at any number of regionals, no need for wildcards.

I REALLY want to pick on these two items right here.

For Option 1, you don't go far enough. No way, no how. If you want an equal footing, you need no more than one or two consecutive weeks of competition. (More than that and teams have time to plan strategy if not new parts that they might not have on their robot and realize they need.) You also need zero raw materials allowed into the event for repairs (they might be used for upgrades that were previously planned out on a practice robot). And those competitions come within a week of the bag day so that teams don't have time to get a practice robot running and get drive time. I'm not going to suggest a maximum budget, as suggested in another thread.

I will also say that FLL does it that way at their lower competition levels--first event of a given level is the one that counts for the next level up, which is the one that may feed the World Festival if you go in the right year. Guess what's just a little bit frustrating? (OTOH, as I recall, there's another level farther down that has no bearing on whether or not you qualify to go higher.)

Just to nitpick Option 2, I don't think you quite understand the wildcard system. Any given team can currently qualify at any number of events (provided they attend and compete there, and provided that they aren't in MI or MAR which have their own version). The wildcard system provides for filling slots left by teams that qualify again by a particular method at later events. One team can't fill more than one slot.

My other objections to Option 2 have already been expressed, both by myself and by others.

I actually think that the strict deadline is the way to go; however, I also see the proposed option as being limiting to Inspiration--and no sports model ends the season at one event. So...

Option #3:
-Hard bag deadline, 6 weeks+3 days (the way it is now). If the robot is not in the bag, the team is given a penalty ranging from loss of out-of-bag time to being disqualified from events. Discovery of such a fact after events are over results in carryover of the penalty to the next year.
-Out-of-bag time: 10 hours during the week before the event, including Saturdays. No more than 2x out of the bag, which must be sealed until the event after 10 hours or the second time the robot goes back in.
-Half-day of practice at regionals, mainly to check field connection, followed immediately by qual matches.
-Bag up robot after event if not done with season.
-Unlimited raw materials, batteries, bumpers, control system; 15 lb of spare and upgrade parts.

I think this is the best balance of inspiration and deadline and opportunity to qualify to advance.

Mark Sheridan

05-05-2013, 02:11

I am sorry, but I disagree. In a supply versus demand market, it is the supply side that dictates the market price. Given a 10 month window, this is a very limited time frame for most manufacturers.

If FIRST increases the time frame, and RI3D as well as successful teams continue post their robots accomplishments on the intertubes, more teams will be demanding the same products that are being used by the successful team's robot. Therefore, more demand will be put on the devices needed to perform to that level.

Um what?

I'm not sure if I am understanding you but 10 months is a long time. I am a manufacturing engineer, and the issue is with supply is sudden spike is demand. In the past, I had my line shut down to devout resources to another line because a customer bought 2 1/2 months worth of product (calculated by the pervious year demand divided by 12). We don't carry that much inventory hence the issue. Determining that buffer of inventory can be difficult. I have seen months worth of inventory thrown away because the product was obsoleted and its a huge waste. From a cost point of view, no one wants to miss opportunities of sales because a lack of supply and no one wants to be the sucker holding a huge chunk of product they can't sale.

In any of these cases, we would piss off our customers if we said," oh our demand was suddenly high and our supply is limited, so we are going to charge you more." So the supply and demand costs won't change.

The point is FIRST puts a huge spike in demand and some suppliers will guess wrong about what to stock up. In 2012 is was 6" pneumatic wheels. This year, hex bearings.

Even right now, I am investigating products I want to buy now that I think the team will use next year. Hence in another thread I asked about other SMC valves. I think we will be buying talons and victors for next year in june. We already have a stockpile on bearings, which will soon grow bigger. This is all to avoid falling victim to a part shortage and to gain a competitive edge by having material on hand to start building right away.

Tristan Lall

05-05-2013, 02:38

In any of these cases, we would piss off our customers if we said," oh our demand was suddenly high and our supply is limited, so we are going to charge you more." So the supply and demand costs won't change.
Even if your company doesn't operate like that, things are more complicated if there are competitors and substitute goods.

I don't know if that's the case or not. If there are no competitors, then you're likely in the realm of market failure (in this case, monopoly) where traditional economic reasoning doesn't quite hold. Alternatively, in a competitive market, consider the possibility that another vendor will realize that you're out of stock and bid higher when approached by your customer (who has no pre-existing relationship that would tend to influence the price).

Also, I would take issue with treating a lot of the FIRST-specific market as fully competitive. I'm of the opinion that there are both good and bad reasons why total competitiveness isn't always desired by FIRST, the vendors and the teams.

DonRotolo

05-05-2013, 08:50

I also agree that extending the build process into the competition season would have little to no impact on mentor (or student, parent, coach, ...) burnout. It is true that the work expands to fill the time available, at least for most of us I think that would be true.I disagree in the strongest possible terms.Mentor burnout is a serious issue and I know for me personally, extending the build times will overwork our volunteers and myself. When we are overworked, we won't be volunteering at competitions, volunteering for community outreach events, etc. This is bad for FIRST!I am less worried about volunteering, and more worried about being there for the team. Even six weeks is about the upper limit for me.Why do mentors get burned out?
What are some stories about a fellow mentors or yourself and burnt you out?
When they get burnt out do they come back after a year or done with it for good?More on this later.

nuggetsyl

05-05-2013, 10:52

Many of the things people are posting about with ripping off designs is an issue we have now, and would not change with a year long build. The games are still going to be played over a 9 week period which is when you will see someones robot unless they show it off before competition.

AllenGregoryIV

05-05-2013, 17:45

An elongated build season means we will have clones and the teams with the best manufacturing resources will have the edge always. I do not wish to compete in an event where all robots are the replicas of RI3D or of 1114. I want my students to compete with a robot that they designed to the best of their abilities and resources.

I disagree with this. Rarely do you see anyone directly copy a robot and if they do they are rarely super successful at it. However it does bring up the bottom of the competition. I would much rather see a somewhat working attempt at improving the RI3D robot than a robot that can't play the game at all. I also have seen way too many discouraged students on teams with limited mentor support that have robots that can't play the game, they leave the program uninspired.

We have a full year build season in VEX and yes you see a lot of copycat designs, but the best teams still win and the game is played at a very high level. The development of the meta game is one of the most interesting parts about VEX. Teams constantly improve both their robots and their strategy to beat the common robot designs.

thefro526

05-05-2013, 18:11

Everything I'm about to say has probably been said already (a little late to the party, I know) but I figured I'd toss some of this out there and see what happens.

I'm one of those people that would love to see an essentially open build season, with the only 'end' being the final event with your robot. After the last couple of seasons, I'm truly starting to believe that one of the biggest reasons for mentor burnout and a lot of the stress that comes with being an FRC Participant (students and mentors) is the '6 week' build season - which, in reality, is a constraint that is 'self' imposed. If we were to remove the end of build season, I think the following things would happen.

1) Students would have the opportunity to be more involved.

2) Teams would have an easier time approaching, retaining, and effectively utilizing mentors.

3) Teams would have an easier time approaching, retaining and effectively utilizing material* sponsors. (*Material Sponsors being those who give something, whether that be machining, parts, shirts, decals, etc.)

4) Teams would spend less time in meetings per week. (If they make that choice.)

5) Teams would be able to more effectively utilize Thursday (Or Friday Morning) as a practice day instead of a 'finish the robot day'.

6) The overall level of competition will go up.

Why do I think these things?

1) Most teams that I know of and have worked with that are based out of schools meet at least 3 weekdays and one day on the weekend. Depending on the school and the students, this is a lot of time for someone to spend on an extra curricular activity, especially because many of those nights during the week and days on the weekend are 'late' days. When I was a student in HS, I was fortunate enough to go to a school that had a series of activity buses for those students who stayed late to do a variety of things. The big problem with these was that they were based around the practice schedules of the sports teams which we often worked right past. If you wanted to be really involved and get a lot of work done, this often meant that you were getting a ride home from your parents at 7pm, 8pm, 9pm or whenever. That's A LOT to ask for, especially 3-4 days a week for 6 weeks. Some kids weren't fortunate enough to have parents that could/would come pick them up on these nights so they only stayed until the bus, and after a while would be upset as most of the work would happen between 6pm or so and 9pm.

2) Finding mentors is tough. I've met a ton of people who would be awesome mentors and a lot of them are turned off at the time commitment required. Those who aren't instantly turned off usually seem to fade away after the first few weeks. Some of this is due to an underestimation of what 3-4 nights a week actually is, some of it is because of prior obligations, and some of it is due to one of the necessary evils of being on an FRC team and that is 'Work must go on'. I've seen people pitch AWESOME ideas and then not show up for a week or more so the idea is never pursued. They often come back in after missing a series of meetings and are upset that the idea was ditched in favor of another one - and that's usually their last meeting.

3) On the same train of thought as #2, approaching sponsors is hard enough. Once you throw in the delivery schedules necessitated by build season, it's nearly impossible sometimes. From my experience, the longest realistic turnaround for most goods during build season is 1 week. Most of the machine shops I've worked with work on 4 week, 6 week, 8 week and longer deadlines, so they're often booked solid for months on end. Trying to 'sneak' parts through the machines can get really old after a while, especially if the shops underestimate how busy they actually are. There's nothing worse than hearing the 'it looks like they'll be run tomorrow' line everyday for a week.

4) This helps to summarize #1, #2 and #3 - If the only deadline of build season is the date of your first competition, you can schedule your time accordingly. Right now, it seems like the minimum amount of time that a team can meet is somewhere around 3-4 days a week and one day on the weekend for the 6 week duration of build. If build is effectively lengthened to a minimum of 8 weeks for those competing in week #1, then in theory, a team could meet less frequently, let's say 2 days a week and one weekend day and still get the same amount of work done. This eased schedule can also be passed onto sponsors making parts, and vendors supplying parts, etc, etc - not to mention that it's a lot easier for a student to make 2 late night meetings a week instead of 3/4...

5) If teams have access to their robots all the way up until their competitions, then there's less of a reason to not be done. With the way things are now with traditional events, if you want to modify something on your competition machine and not have it effect your qualifying performance it must be done on Thursday - which means that you're losing valuable practice time, and depending on how involved the modifications are, you could be losing ALL of your practice time. If you look at teams in the district system that are allowed 6hrs unbag time before their event, you'll see that teams are rarely 'finishing' modifications (or their robot) when they should be practicing - unless they need to do something to pass inspection or some other unforeseen circumstance...

6) If you allow teams access to their robots for the duration of the season, they're going to have more time to practice and run the machine. There's a sizable majority of FRC teams that ship their robots with fewer than 3-4hrs of run time on them, most of which is spent driving around on some sort of field 'approximation' that doesn't necessarily help them learn what's going on with their machine. Imagine that with an 'open' build season, and more teams keeping their machines in their possession, you'll now have a reason for teams/groups of teams to find/make better practice facilities, have scrimmages/pickup matches during off weeks and use a more traditional (sports-like) practice model. Being able to do things like this would have a HUGE effect on 'real' performance. There's also the bonus of lower end teams finally being able to 'tune' their machines.

---------

There are some problems to the open build season idea, specifically that teams may rip off other designs and/or pick events later in the season specifically to have more time to practice and finish their machines... I fail to see the problem with this though, since it's no different than how FRC is right now, with the exception that only teams that are 'well off' can really rip off another design or utilize an extra week or three to practice.

For what it's worth, in both 2011 and 2013, I have been on teams that made the decision to have a build season that would 'last as long as it took'. In 2011, with 816, we finished our minibot deployment and a few other machine tweaks the morning of our first event, and replaced our claw/arm/minibot deployment on the Thursday morning of our second. Then in 2013, with 341, we revised our intake and added a pneumatic 10pt climber in between our week 1 and week 3 events, built a custom arm gearbox and did some frisbee path tweaks in between our week 3 and week 6 events and built a new shooter in between our week 6 event and the Championship.

The sort of continuous improvement that I've been a part of in previous seasons is something that as of right now, can only be done by extremely dedicated teams with the right resources to do so. We didn't have a full practice robot this year, or when I was on 816, so there's a HUGE amount of time spent playing a 'Zero Failure' game if the robot needs to be modified since the parts cannot be properly tested prior to being put on the machine. If we had access to our machine during the planning and design phases of these modifications, I can assure you that the process would have been much less stressful and time consuming.

I guess the TLDR to my whole post is that having a ship day, or bag day only serves to hurt teams with fewer resources and make it extremely hard for teams that are currently 'good' to stay good. Teams on the bottom don't necessarily have the resources to ever get their machines to become top level performers and teams on the top have to essentially have an open build season within the rules to stay competitive since that's become the status quo.

Tom Ore

05-05-2013, 18:38

I guess I'm still not seeing that an open build season would help in the long run.

An increase in performance of the lower teams will push the mid level teams, which in turn will push the high performance teams even more. The highly competitive teams will still put in a very high effort to stay at the top.

Also, the GDC deliberately designs games that are difficult to accomplish in the time available. If the games became easy to accomplish because more time is available, they'll make the games harder. Look at it the other way, the GDC could design easier games now - but they choose to design difficult games.

Siri

05-05-2013, 19:00

I'm not convinced one way or another on this question, particularly with regards to relative competitiveness. (I think lessening burnout would require a culture change in addition to a timebox change.) I do have one (new?) positive for the full-season build, though:

I remember when 1640 was a single-event team. We'd spend 6 weeks building a not particularly impressive robot, go to a single regional, get completely creamed, and then go home. We were terrible, we couldn't figure out how to get ahead, and we really didn't see a point in trying longer given the results. Even when we did two events, consistently running over ourselves (literally) did not provide much time for me to step back and feel myself grow.

Running the full season in those days, until mid- or end of March, would have made it more like a sport. I think it would have had a better impact on me. Of course, we weren't racing for the top at that point. (Our first two event season, I remember going 2-9 at Pittsburgh and then 5-6 at Philly.) But I think we would have enjoyed having a sports "season" in which to experience FIRST rather than 6 weeks and a couple tail-kickings. Off-seasons in MAR were a reasonable analog of this for me then, though more would have been better and I know may places do not benefit from as many off-seasons. (I think we did 5 last year.)

For my own team now, I think I'd prefer no bag & tag. Build season runs at least to April at this point--we had something like 14 nights off between Kickoff and Worlds. It would really just save us having to build a practice bot, which is painfully expensive, and keep us from working through practice matches. I'd be amenable to like 12 or so hours "out of the bag" per week instead, though. I do see the fear of copycats, though. This would be tough.

thefro526

05-05-2013, 19:00

Sorry to post so closely together, but I forgot to hit on the 'ripping off other designs' argument to the level that I planned to in my previous post.

Yes, an open build season will lead to robot designs being copied on a wider scale than they are now, but I think that the overall effect is being widely overestimated. There are three important years that come to mind on this subject:

2008 - 121 Released their robot sometime towards the end of week three. Their claw and arm combination were so simple and reliable that most teams in FRC could have replicated the setup, an a tonne of teams did. I can remember talking about the 121 clones that year, and the funny thing is that many/most of the clones could never perform at the level that 121 did that year, despite being one of the most simple (and elegant) machine shapes possible.

2011 - Logomotion, for all intents and purposes, was an 'easier' version of 2007's game rack and roll - with the primary differences being the 3 different tube shapes instead of one, and a stationary scoring structure in place of 2007's rack. (The scoring grid in 2011 made things easier, if anything). I can remember on of my first thoughts being 'So we pick a 2007 design that we like, tweak it and go play?'. That sort of ideology would have lead most teams to building a solid upper middle tier robot, if executed properly, but for one reason or another, the copying wasn't as widely spread as many people expected, and there were still a handful of 'bad' copies.

2012 - Rebound Rumble, is almost the same to 2006 as 2011 was to 2007; heck, I and others I know, still refer to it as Aim High Part II. The same logic applied to 2011 above applies here, and even though there was some incentive to copy, many teams didn't.

If these years have taught me anything, it's that even with an open build season, we won't see teams rebuilding their robots to resemble 1114/469/2056/254/148/33/233/118 en masse - well, unless those teams unveil their robots within 3 days of kickoff like RI3D* did....

That being said, an open build season, may lead to more widespread copying of smaller mechanisms and/or 'magic' devices during future seasons. Here are the devices/mechanisms I can think of off the top of my head:

2008 - 'Drive-through' trackball removing devices.
2009 - 'Spin in circles' autonomous modes.
2010 - 'IFI Ball Pincher'. (And an array of other ball magnets)
2011 - 'Super Fast Minibots'. (Honorable Mention to the Roller Claw with an opening jaw.)
2012 - 'Stingers/Dingus' and other balancing aids.
2013 - It's hard to say right now, but it seems like Pyramid Antenna or Pneumatic 10pt climbers win out here.

Looking back, I'm not sure if the spread of any of these things was necessarily a bad thing. Very rarely did any one of these devices propel a robot from the bottom of the ranks into the top tier, but they did help to level out the playing field at the top, especially at the CMP. If anything, the only negative thing I could say about any of these is that it can suck to have something you've worked hard on ripped off by another team... But with that being said, if you're on the ball, by the time another team has ripped off what you've made, you're already using a new and improved version.

*I think RI3D is one of the best things to happen to FRC in a LONG time. The fact that so many teams were essentially handed prototyping information and a proven robot shape really helped to raise the level of competition at most events. I know that I referenced those videos more than once, especially as a way to validate some of our own results. Without a doubt, RI3D is responsible for a sizable portion of the mid-tier explosion that we saw this year.

AllenGregoryIV

05-05-2013, 19:22

If anything, the only negative thing I could say about any of these is that it can suck to have something you've worked hard on ripped off by another team... But with that being said, if you're on the ball, by the time another team has ripped off what you've made, you're already using a new and improved version.

For the life of me I will never understand this statement. I have only ever thought about people seeing and using designs as a good thing. Imitation is a form of flattery. Hopefully they improve on it or at least try to but either way it builds the competition.

Ian Curtis

05-05-2013, 20:51

There are a lot of people that seem to be saying they are flirting with burnout even with a 6.5 week build season. I don't think we should consider this healthy!

If FIRST is coming close to burning out the core mentors that are involved enough to post on CD, we are definitely also coming close to burning out the mentors that are not posting on CD. Even if you don't like the idea of the unlimited build season, I think it is pretty clear we have to try something else.

For me, having one or two nights a week where I can just go home after work is awesome. After 10 years of robots, I know work expands to fill the available time, and as deadlines close in work just seems to get done. I know for 1778, I plan to meet much less next season than we did this year, and fully expect to build a much more competitive robot. (Conveniently we set the bar fairly low :D)

There seem to be a lot of people in this thread that are against the unlimited build season because they are worried about the top tier running away with the medals. As Adam said, I don't think that is likely. The 67s of the world are really far down the learning curve. IMO, a switch to the unlimited build season will result in less work to a top tier team, since you don't have to apply all your fixes to the practice robot and then your real robot. If you cannot put in the time to be top tier now, isn't reducing that number of hours a good thing for all of us? Those that observe a 6.5 week build season instead of the 16 week build season are already limiting themselves from the allowable build time, so I don't see why switching to the unlimited build makes you any less able to limit yourself.

The one strong argument I do see for Stop Build Day is that it means that everyone has a good night's sleep prior to the event, and no one is staying up late the night before finishing their machine and showing up grumpy. I did this too many times in FLL.

When I started reading this thread, I was very firmly in the "Stop Build Day" camp. But the more I think about it, the more I think we do it out of tradition instead of value added.

AllenGregoryIV

05-05-2013, 21:13

If FIRST is coming close to burning out the core mentors that are involved enough to post on CD, we are definitely also coming close to burning out the mentors that are not posting on CD..

I'm not sure this is true. The people that post on CD are the people that care enough to put in the kind of time it takes to burn out. So many of the teams I know that just sort of plod along every year don't get burned out. They have much more reasonable schedules, 2-3 nights a week and a day on the weekends. They don't meet consistently over the summer and some don't meet at all in the fall. However I agree that giving them more time will help.

DjScribbles

06-05-2013, 09:37

Personally, I find the competition season as stressful, if not more stressful than build season.

Build season is fun, things are constantly improving; sure there is some conflict and lost sleep, but in general you can get things done efficiently.

Once build season comes to a close though, things stop and the combination of anxiousness and lack of opportunity to improve get rather stressful. I struggled from day 2 of our second event, all the way through MSC and CMP trying to test an autonomous routine that would have literally taken me two hours tops in our build area; but instead I had to fight to test something during our few opportunities on crowded practice fields (which do not provide enough room to actually test any creative autonomous routines such as center-line or 9-disk) and during our few practice matches.

The inability to improve, fix problems, and do basic maintenance is absolutely harrowing as well. At our second event, we had a big issue with shooter accuracy, before bagging we found and fixed an issue with the sensor, but it didn't get tested until 3 long weeks later at MSC. We have a shooter wheel that is almost bare, but it's difficult to make a case for changing it when you have a match in an hour and nobody thinks another wheel could work, and the one you have does still work.

Ultimately, I think the bag date may make the days between events more relaxed, but it greatly magnifies the stress at the event for everyone, and requires teams to take a ton of risk to try to improve; and when those risks don't pan out, it can have a huge impact on a student.

I would absolutely love to go to an event where our TODO list was:
Get Inspected
Double check that everything works well on the field
Compete

If that was every team's situation... imagine how easy it would be to get on the practice field when problems arise, how much more help you could provide to teams that are struggling, etc.

DjScribbles

06-05-2013, 09:42

An increase in performance of the lower teams will push the mid level teams, which in turn will push the high performance teams even more. The highly competitive teams will still put in a very high effort to stay at the top.

Isn't that the goal of this organization?

JesseK

06-05-2013, 12:23

Isn't that the goal of this organization?

I don't think that's ever been an explicitly-stated goal of FIRST. I believe it's a community-derived goal. The idea of Coopertition is what drives it. However, I've yet to hear Dean say anything along the lines of "Man, I wish more robots worked well at this Regional".

Which brings us back around to the whole goal of FRC to begin with. The robot & competition are the vehicles of changing a culture. Yet for FIRST to become a real culture-changer we need to see better competition at a macro level, where even the kids who get pummeled one year are inspired enough to get back up and come back better the next year. For teams to be more competitive, they need more time with the technical side of the robot. For that to happen without burning through a team's primary resources (sponsors & mentors), it would appear that this thread has presented a very good case for an extended build season. I would also venture to say that extending the build season would allow for tighter inter-team partnerships to develop -- where the mentors of one team are more willing to lend mentors' time out to another team which lacks expertise in a technical area.

Many top-grade teams have presented great viewpoints over the years that getting to a highly competitive state is in and of itself a vehicle for student learning and inspiration. This, I totally agree with. Even winning RCA/REI was nothing compared to making it to Finals at Regionals or Elims at Champs. Winning FTC Worlds was even better. After reading all 100-something posts over the last few days, I could be convinced that extending the build season will not increase stress levels over what they've been in the last 3 years (we built a practice bot). However, I don't think my 'vote' matters unless we hear more from FIRST.

Nemo

06-05-2013, 17:47

My responses to some of the arguments favoring bag and tag deadlines:

If we eliminate bag and tag, some teams will work the same insane schedule for 3-4 months instead of just for 6 weeks, and other teams will be forced to follow suit in order to stay competitive.

Some teams already put in insane hours between bag and season's end. If your team doesn't match that number of hours, you've already proven that this argument is false.

Work expands to fill the available time.

The available time is already 3-4 months long. We can always work on 30 lbs of fabricated items, and that is typically enough weight to create multiple complete robot subsystems. That time is available to all teams, whether they currently take advantage of it or not.

To be sure, some teams have the capability to utilize that time more effectively than others, particularly if they have the budget to build an extra copy of a subsystem or of the entire robot. So the question is whether to make that additional time readily available to more teams.

Why would anybody favor a rule that places practical limits on low resource teams, but not high resource teams? The answers I'm seeing boil down to the next statement...

We would not be able to prevent ourselves from working lots of extra hours and burning out.

That is not a good reason to place limits on other teams. Your team needs to sit down and figure out a reasonable schedule and stick to it. That brings me to the concept of the "build sprint."

Build Sprint

Why does FRC have to be a sprint? Why can't it be something that we do at a slightly slower pace over a longer time period? It's an embedded tradition to have a "build sprint", but why does it have to be that way? Are you going to argue that all projects that one would work on in industry are sprints? They're not.

The sprint concept is one of the reasons people are afraid of an open build season. Some people can't imagine scheduling an FRC build season in any way other than letting it fill all available time slots for the entire period during which we're allowed to work. If the season is short enough, we can get away with that.

There's a limit to how long a team can operate under a 100% pedal to the metal schedule in which we work during all available time. Anybody could do it for a week, right? Two and three weeks starts to get pretty tiring, and it gets worse from there. How long is too long before we start screwing up our jobs and families and health? I'd argue that 6 weeks is already past that limit for many of us, especially those who are saying that they're very near the point of burnout and potentially needing to walk away from FRC. You know what that means? It means taking a hard look at the schedule and consider rolling it back a bit. Don't meet for 100% of your maximum possible time during that 6 week period if it's going to screw up your life. Bite off the amount that you can reasonably sustain.

If we had a 3-4 month build season, I think it would be easier to recognize that we can't simply meet during every possible time slot. It would force us to answer the question of "how much of my life does it make sense to dedicate to this team?" In a 6 week season, it's easier to cheat your way out of that question by simply assuming that you have to work during all possible times since the timeline is so severely limited.

Get rid of the 30 lb allowance so the build season really is only 6 weeks long.

True, this would make it more difficult to do robot work after bag day than it currently is. Right now it's pretty attainable for a lot of teams to improve the robot after bag day. With this limitation it would be harder. But we'd have less competitive, less inspiring robots. I've said this before - the extra time it takes to get a machine to actually work is really valuable. Quitting at the point when it almost works really sucks a lot of the power out of this endeavor. How many FRC robots have you seen that almost work? I've seen a lot.

Make no mistake - there is essentially nothing we can do to take away the extra time after bag day from the best teams. Even if we went to zero fabricated parts allowance, good teams would still be able to complete a great deal of useful work between bag day and their competitions (drive a practice bot, autonomous testing, sensors work, code work, design mechanisms that can be fabricated at the event, etc). That's why the six week build season is fiction.

Keep the bag deadline, but add limited robot access periods after bag day. This creates a compromise that allows mentors to have a break.

I could live with this, and it would be an improvement over the current rules. That said, why does this break have to be enforced through the FRC rules? Would you advocate forcing teams to take at least 1 or 2 days off per week for the purpose of preventing burnout? If not, how is that different than forcing us to stop working after 6 weeks?

In many ways, FIRST and the community have embraced the concept that different teams run themselves in their own ways according to what works best for them. Why not extend this to the schedule? Some teams might be better off spreading it out over a longer period, working less severe hours in a given week. Some teams might be better off loading it more heavily in February and March. And so on. I see nothing wrong with that sort of flexibility. Lack of ability to schedule realistically on the part of some teams is not a good reason to limit flexibility for other teams.

Irwin772

06-05-2013, 18:16

I disagree with eliminating the six week build season, the only thing I could see happening is that addition of an additional week. The whole idea of having six weeks is to prepare the students for life and real world applications, where there are strict deadlines that must be met.

I also suffer from burnout towards the end of the season both as a student and a mentor this past year. I can't even count the amount of hours I've spent on robotics in high school and university but getting rid of the time limit to build the robot removes on of the learning points that FIRST created. The students need to learn to meet deadlines, even in high school.

To prove that it should not be problem to build the robot and test before the end of the six weeks take into account that us Canadian teams have to deal with exams during week 3 or 4 depending on the year, which makes all of us lose at least 4 days of build season. Even with this barrier Canada has been able to produce 2 world champions and some of the biggest powerhouse teams in FIRST.

Cory

06-05-2013, 18:21

Even with this barrier Canada has been able to produce 2 world champions and some of the biggest powerhouse teams in FIRST.

Do you think they stopped working after 6 weeks?

JB987

06-05-2013, 18:24

Tetraman

06-05-2013, 19:43

Someone attempting to dismantle a bomb isn't going to take a one minute break just because the timer on the bomb randomly increased by one minute. They would take that additional time to work on dismantling the bomb. Same with FIRST robotics - if you give all teams additional time, the students and mentorship are going to do everything in their power to utilize that extra time by default rather than spending the extra time to relax their schedule.

In a perfect FIRST world, every FIRST team would be given a total of 240 work hours over the course of 45.5 days to build a robot. The robot must be bagged either by a) the end of the 240 hours or b) the end of the 45.5 days - whichever comes first. Teams could be able to utilize the 240 hours how they wish to ensure the students and mentors can work within their own time constraints and also work the same number of hours as every other team. (If you are wondering, I got 240 hours by suggesting that every team works 5 hours every weekday and 10 hours every saturday during the traditional 6 week build season + 10 hours to round it to a slick number.)

But obviously we are not in a perfect world and cheating (either purposeful or accidental) is an obvious problem. Additionally, would you consider a single student/mentor designing a robot part at home in CAD be "part of your hours"...lots of issues to the hourly limit. However that would be the Perfect System if the world worked correctly.

AllenGregoryIV

06-05-2013, 19:55

Someone attempting to dismantle a bomb isn't going to take a one minute break just because the timer on the bomb randomly increased by one minute. They would take that additional time to work on dismantling the bomb. Same with FIRST robotics - if you give all teams additional time, the students and mentorship are going to do everything in their power to utilize that extra time by default rather than spending the extra time to relax their schedule.

If that were true every single team would meet 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Here's the thing they don't. Teams have been regulating themselves for years. I know of very few teams that meet 7 days a week and even fewer that work in shifts to maximize every second. Giving more time won't make teams work that much more. Most teams aren't working to the max yet, most people still understand that it's just a game. Giving more team would allow for more reasonable schedules a few more Saturday build/practice sessions that will help inspire students.

In a perfect FIRST world, every FIRST team would be given a total of 240 work hours over the course of 2 months to build a robot. The robot must be bagged either by a) the end of the 240 hours or b) the end of the 2 months - whichever comes first. Teams could be able to utilize the 240 hours how they wish to ensure the students and mentors can work within their own time constraints and also work the same number of hours as every other team. (If you are wondering, I got 240 hours by suggesting that every team works 5 hours every weekday and 10 hours every saturday during the traditional 6 week build season + 10 hours to round it to a slick number.)

How would you account for teams with more people. It's never going to be fair and we shouldn't try to make it fair.

EricH

06-05-2013, 20:17

My responses to some of the arguments favoring bag and tag deadlines:

If we eliminate bag and tag, some teams will work the same insane schedule for 3-4 months instead of just for 6 weeks, and other teams will be forced to follow suit in order to stay competitive.

Some teams already put in insane hours between bag and season's end. If your team doesn't match that number of hours, you've already proven that this argument is false.

I disagree. The key words that you appear to have overlooked are "to stay competitive". If a team does not match that number of hours, and is still competitive, then yes, that is false. But if the team in question is NOT competitive, then I would consider it at best a "no-contributor" to the argument--that is, it's not doing anything to show whether it is true or false.

Work expands to fill the available time.

The available time is already 3-4 months long. We can always work on 30 lbs of fabricated items, and that is typically enough weight to create multiple complete robot subsystems. That time is available to all teams, whether they currently take advantage of it or not.

And darned if teams don't take advantage of it to the max, at least the ones that want to stay competitive do. Again, it's those words: To Stay Competitive. Low-resource, high-resource, doesn't matter--teams with any amount of resources that want to stay competitive ARE using EVERY POSSIBLE DAY they can work. Why? Because they know that if they don't, someone else will, and they'll lose.

Now expand that to an official, with-robot, 4 months. If they aren't building, they'll be doing drive practice.

We would not be able to prevent ourselves from working lots of extra hours and burning out.

That is not a good reason to place limits on other teams. Your team needs to sit down and figure out a reasonable schedule and stick to it. That brings me to the concept of the "build sprint." Ahem... I would like to point out that most teams do figure out a reasonable schedule. Then at about Week 4, somebody looks at the calendar, realizes that they're behind even where they wanted to be, which is probably behind period, and goes pedal to the metal. (I know you were competitive this year--but did you stick to a reasonable schedule?)

Build Sprint

Why does FRC have to be a sprint? Why can't it be something that we do at a slightly slower pace over a longer time period? It's an embedded tradition to have a "build sprint", but why does it have to be that way? Are you going to argue that all projects that one would work on in industry are sprints? They're not.

The sprint concept is one of the reasons people are afraid of an open build season. Some people can't imagine scheduling an FRC build season in any way other than letting it fill all available time slots for the entire period during which we're allowed to work. If the season is short enough, we can get away with that. [...]

If we had a 3-4 month build season, I think it would be easier to recognize that we can't simply meet during every possible time slot. It would force us to answer the question of "how much of my life does it make sense to dedicate to this team?" In a 6 week season, it's easier to cheat your way out of that question by simply assuming that you have to work during all possible times since the timeline is so severely limited.

Nice theory. For some folks, I think the answer would end up being "Oh, I don't have anything important from X to Y dates, so I can show up all those sessions", "hey, I have something on Z, but other than that I'm free", and I think it would probably end up being a meeting during--maybe not every, but almost every time slot. However, I think what would also happen is that there might be some "rolling" or "staggered" days, such that crew A is in on certain days, while crew B is in on other days, or "Oh, yeah, we're not doing much on X day, so go ahead and take the day off".

Oh, right: FIRST also mimics a real-world experience. Let's go with I haven't had a build sprint per se at work yet, but other groups have been doing them--it's just a matter of who it is this time.

Get rid of the 30 lb allowance so the build season really is only 6 weeks long.

True, this would make it more difficult to do robot work after bag day than it currently is. Right now it's pretty attainable for a lot of teams to improve the robot after bag day. With this limitation it would be harder. But we'd have less competitive, less inspiring robots. I've said this before - the extra time it takes to get a machine to actually work is really valuable. Quitting at the point when it almost works really sucks a lot of the power out of this endeavor. How many FRC robots have you seen that almost work? I've seen a lot.

I don't think anybody's actually proposed this. I think it's been proposed to trim it down, but not remove it entirely.

I also don't agree on the "less inspiring" part. Sometimes, the best inspiration comes when you've duct-taped parts that weren't necessarily meant to work together into something that works. Apollo 13's filters, for example. "We need to fit this into this, and this is what we have to do it with." Some pre-planning required for at-competition assembly of any improvements, of course--but any team that is able to stick to a reasonable schedule (and most of the ones that don't) and remain competitive should be able to do that no problem.

Keep the bag deadline, but add limited robot access periods after bag day. This creates a compromise that allows mentors to have a break.

I could live with this, and it would be an improvement over the current rules. That said, why does this break have to be enforced through the FRC rules? Would you advocate forcing teams to take at least 1 or 2 days off per week for the purpose of preventing burnout? If not, how is that different than forcing us to stop working after 6 weeks?

I don't think we're aiming to force teams to take days off. I think it's more about allowing them to use their competition robot for development--within reasonable limitations, such as a certain amount of time per week--so that they don't have to build a practice robot, which, at least in theory, will allow them to use less time and still remain competitive. Of course, there's no restriction on how you use time outside of any such open bag windows.

In many ways, FIRST and the community have embraced the concept that different teams run themselves in their own ways according to what works best for them. Why not extend this to the schedule? Some teams might be better off spreading it out over a longer period, working less severe hours in a given week. Some teams might be better off loading it more heavily in February and March. And so on. I see nothing wrong with that sort of flexibility. Lack of ability to schedule realistically on the part of some teams is not a good reason to limit flexibility for other teams.
FIRST is a mirror of real life. If June 7, 2050 is the best day for a Mars launch, and NASA is sending something there, they want the hardware on the rocket, upright, and ready to launch on or before June 7, 2050. Not a day later. Preferably a day or 30 earlier. If you are building the payload for that rocket, there are going to be deadlines--you really don't want to miss those. There is going to be a fixed amount of time--it might not be 6 weeks, but there are a limited number of man-hours that can be put into the project between the contract award date and the launch date. And you better make that deadline.

Brian Selle

06-05-2013, 22:56

And you better make that deadline.

The mythical 6-week stop build day isn't really a deadline at all... it's merely a disturbance. The deadline is when your qualification matches begin.

EricH

06-05-2013, 23:56

The mythical 6-week stop build day isn't really a deadline at all... it's merely a disturbance. The deadline is when your qualification matches begin.

If you want to put it that way, the deadline is when your last match of the season, whether at an on-season or an offseason competition, begins.

If, OTOH, you want to go with the example I was talking about, the "disturbance" is only a few billion dollars and a couple years of several thousand people's lives wasted. Catch my drift?

dcarr

07-05-2013, 00:14

To prove that it should not be problem to build the robot and test before the end of the six weeks take into account that us Canadian teams have to deal with exams during week 3 or 4 depending on the year, which makes all of us lose at least 4 days of build season. Even with this barrier Canada has been able to produce 2 world champions and some of the biggest powerhouse teams in FIRST.

FYI - Canadians aren't the only ones having to deal with exams during the build season. Our school, and perhaps many others, have finals in week 2 which is pretty damaging to the schedule, basically knocks out a full week for many of the students.

sanddrag

07-05-2013, 00:38

I dislike the fact that because there are really no limits on working after stop build day, we invest thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to build an identical practice robot, when we could much more easily (but not currently 'legally') have only one robot and no bag. We are spending all this time and money to because we are required to put a few mils of plastic between ourselves and something we can just make two of and continue development on. In that sense, the bagging is absurd. But, it does have it's benefits, as indicated by numerous others previously.

Anyhow, consider this mentor burnt to a crisp. FRC is becoming a competition of which team has more experienced people who can sideline the greatest percentages of their lives for the greatest amount of time. It's a battle of who can sacrifice the most, and it's not healthy. It's tough to keep up.

I wouldn't mind seeing something imposed that said "FRC teams may only meet a maximum of 6 days per week, and may elect which day per week they choose as their non-work day. On the non-work day, team members may not design, fabricate, assemble, procure, or program any piece of the robot, or take part in any activities directly related to FIRST Robotics." Of course it's not enforceable, and teams would find a way to bend the rule, but it would be nice to go home for even just one day per week. Come to think of it, this isn't really any less enforceable than bagging, which is honor system anyhow. FIRST HQ, I haven't wished much of you, but for 2014, my wish is to make us go home once in a while. Thoughts?

dcarr

07-05-2013, 01:04

AllenGregoryIV

07-05-2013, 01:28

I wouldn't mind seeing something imposed that said "FRC teams may only meet a maximum of 6 days per week, and may elect which day per week they choose as their non-work day. On the non-work day, team members may not design, fabricate, assemble, procure, or program any piece of the robot, or take part in any activities directly related to FIRST Robotics." Of course it's not enforceable, and teams would find a way to bend the rule, but it would be nice to go home for even just one day per week. Come to think of it, this isn't really any less enforceable than bagging, which is honor system anyhow. FIRST HQ, I haven't wished much of you, but for 2014, my wish is to make us go home once in a while. Thoughts?

I agree with most of your post until this part. Coming from a team with only one mentor (myself) meeting more is one of the ways we stay competitive. None of my students are at every meeting. They all know they can take breaks but if FRC instituted that rule it would be difficult for us to remain competitive with teams that have 10 mentors. We don't always build 7 days a week, we have outreach stuff during build season that we do as well. Either way FRC shouldn't regulate meeting hours just like they don't regulate mentor or student involvement in the build process. The more FRC gets out of the way and let teams build the program that is right for the them the better.

Mark Sheridan

07-05-2013, 01:34

Anyhow, consider this mentor burnt to a crisp. FRC is becoming a competition of which team has more experienced people who can sideline the greatest percentages of their lives for the greatest amount of time. It's a battle of who can sacrifice the most, and it's not healthy. It's tough to keep up.

Also to add to this point there is only so much you can give up before you got to throw in the towel. I found myself extremely busy at work, long hours in december and January. I found myself burnt out before the season began. So I had to greatly scale back my contributions. Next year, I am thinking I am going to limit myself to just transmissions, strategy and a little bit of pneumatics. I think its the only way to keep sane.

This year to avoid burning out our lead CAD mentor, we were able to raise from one active CAD project to running 3 projects in parallel this year. I hope we can make it 5 next year. We have a lot students getting good at CAD, they just need to learn some more tolerancing and design for manufacturing. With all these different projects, we have to be very carful to not to encroach another space on the robot and to stay within our weight limits.

I hope we can keep on distributing our work to get as many students involved.

Rich Kressly

07-05-2013, 09:30

Depends on the prevailing philosophy and corresponding goals.

IMHO:

If you want the best robots and teams to get better on the field and are cool with asking those teams that want to be on-field competitive to start giving up other/more activities in their lives (mentors and students alike), then lengthen build, open up withholding allowance, etc.

If you want as many teams to participate in FRC as possible, keep the six weeks, get rid of the withholding allowance, and after stop build there is no robot work except at events.

I think we all agree mentor burnout is real. Potential mentor fear (no way I'm joining that FRC team, do you know their commitment?) is also an issue.

Again, it all depends upon what you want, but after many years mentoring/coaching in many programs (robots and otherwise) it would seem to me you can't have it both ways, though.

-Rich

Adam Freeman

07-05-2013, 11:16

If you want the best robots and teams to get better on the field and are cool with asking those teams that want to be on-field competitive to start giving up other/more activities in their lives (mentors and students alike), then lengthen build, open up withholding allowance, etc.

There seems to be two major, very different opinions, on if opening up the deadline will or will not increase the amount of time/effort/dedication required to be competitive.

*Along with some other relevant, but less prevalent issues.

- Mentors against, state that with more time will lead to an increase in committment to fill that time and thus lead to more burn-out.

- Mentors for, state that teams are already working through the deadline, and that opening it up will actually relieve pressure caused by having to bag the competition robot.

We can't really know what FRC teams would or would not do based on this hypothetical situation. But, there are other "open season" robotics competition out there that are relatively comparable to FRC. Aren't both FTC and VEX, open season competitions? What happens in these types of competitions? Are the mentors burned out? Are they filling every hour of every day working on their machines? Are these even comparable to FRC mentors and robots?

Taylor

07-05-2013, 11:32

We can't really know what FRC teams would or would not do based on this hypothetical situation. But, there are other "open season" robotics competition out there that are relatively comparable to FRC. Aren't both FTC and VEX, open season competitions? What happens in these types of competitions? Are the mentors burned out? Are they filling every hour of every day working on their machines? Are these even comparable to FRC mentors and robots?

Not comparable because of the everchanging FRC Kit of Parts. In FTC and VRC, we know* what's allowable and not allowable to be used before knowing the concept of the game. Since the FRC KoP is highly vendor- and game-dependent, a year-long season would be difficult at best.

An example: The router fiasco of 2012.

* other than basic, easily attainable items such as string or polycarbonate

Adam Freeman

07-05-2013, 11:43

Not comparable because of the everchanging FRC Kit of Parts. In FTC and VRC, we know* what's allowable and not allowable to be used before knowing the concept of the game. Since the FRC KoP is highly vendor- and game-dependent, a year-long season would be difficult at best.

An example: The router fiasco of 2012.

* other than basic, easily attainable items such as string or polycarbonate

I guess I was more thinking along the lines of the access to the machines and how much time is spent working on them. Not really the year long season aspect of FTC/VEX.

Are FTC and VEX mentors/students working every minute of every day to perfect their designs? If not, are these competitions not as intense as FRC?

I ask just because I am looking for something to compare to a potential open build FRC season...and I have no knowledge of the other competitions because I spend all my time working on FRC or forgetting about it for a while in the off-season (Aug/Sept - Dec).

-Adam

Hjelstrom

07-05-2013, 12:06

I guess I was more thinking along the lines of the access to the machines and how much time is spent working on them. Not really the year long season aspect of FTC/VEX.

Are FTC and VEX mentors/students working every minute of every day to perfect their designs? If not, are these competitions not as intense as FRC?

I ask just because I am looking for something to compare to a potential open build FRC season...and I have no knowledge of the other competitions because I spend all my time working on FRC or forgetting about it for a while in the off-season (Aug/Sept - Dec).

-Adam

I would say one main difference between FRC and VEX is that in VEX you can't just build one robot. The robot designs evolve as the season progresses. Good designs get copied rapidly and better designs have to be created in order to stay competitive. The entire robot typically gets re-designed a few times in a season. I believe FRC would become a season-long crunch as the best teams try to out-do each other by bringing new robots to each competition. Sure we all try to do that now but it is contained well by the rules.

JesseK

07-05-2013, 12:15

Adam I think your question has to go to the VEX forums to get the best answer, but there are plenty of successful VRC/FTC teams here that can give anecdotes.

Nemo

07-05-2013, 12:44

Are FTC and VEX mentors/students working every minute of every day to perfect their designs? If not, are these competitions not as intense as FRC? -Adam

We meet five times a week during FRC season, and three times a week for FTC. After FRC starts, FTC has access to the shop for those extra days, and they tend to show up most of the time. Of course, I don't know how often we'd meet if I only had FTC to coach; I might meet a bit more often.

We definitely leave some time on the table in FTC, and we are still competitive at the state level.

Joe G.

07-05-2013, 12:54

I would say that the average VEX team does not take the competition as seriously as the average FRC team does, because the minimum entry costs are significantly lower. However, those at the top level are absolutely putting in every hour that they can, and perform multiple complete rebuilds over the course of the season.

I think that one of FRC's greatest assets is how seriously the average team takes the program, and as a result, the incredible things that they do not just on the robot side of things, but the chairman's side of things. If a greater time requirement to be competitive was present, I fear that the number of teams doing these things would diminish, and more would become "casual" teams like a majority of VRC teams. The open season does not guarantee quality in VRC, far from it. Rather, the majority of regional level VEX events today look a lot like some FIRST events in regions where people talk about "unsustainable growth" like Texas; lots of low quality teams with a few powerhouses. "Casual" VRC teams I've worked with spend large parts of build, for lack of a better term, goofing off, then pull a last-second crunch-build. I want the minimum possible number of FIRST teams to be like this. And on the flip side, VRC powerhouses take advantage of all the time they have. This drives the performance gap wider still.

Madison

07-05-2013, 13:24

We can't really know what FRC teams would or would not do based on this hypothetical situation. But, there are other "open season" robotics competition out there that are relatively comparable to FRC. Aren't both FTC and VEX, open season competitions? What happens in these types of competitions? Are the mentors burned out? Are they filling every hour of every day working on their machines? Are these even comparable to FRC mentors and robots?

The FTC manual makes a point of stating, "The students do a majority of the work, but the mentor is there to offer guidance, suggestions, and coaching to keep the students on task and successful." Consequently, I respect that goal and am not as heavily involved with (or dedicated to, frankly) to our FTC program. It doesn't have the same appeal to me that FRC does. In the end, though, I think that if others are respecting the desire put forth in the manual, it's more difficult to compare FTC's open-ended season to FRC.

Some parallels can be drawn, but on our team, most people treat FTC as a diversion instead of something to be taken seriously on its own.

ehochstein

07-05-2013, 13:46

As a rookie FTC coach this year, my team was given a little over 5 months to build our robot. We started meeting in September, one day per week until December when we started meeting twice per week. Starting in January I also had commitments to two FRC teams. It was a huge mistake not to finish the FTC bot before then (and is now reflected in our schedule for next year) but we ended up doing the majority of our work during the last three weeks we had available. During the last three weeks we met everyday of the week to finish our robot, often until midnight.

I fear if we switch to a longer build season, those rookie teams will have the same problem, trying to finish everything during the last few weeks. Then you have the powerhouse teams who work everyday still, creating a large gap in skill and ability. Also for those teams that are run by one or two mentors, those mentors would burn out a lot easier then a team with 10 mentors.

I tend to stretch myself thin during the build season with too many commitments already, and I really couldn't handle more then six weeks unless we at least tripled our mentor base on 2470 to 6 mentors, doubled the mentor base on 3081 to 15 mentors and had 2 more mentors for my FTC team.

M.O'Reilly

07-05-2013, 14:33

I would say one main difference between FRC and VEX is that in VEX you can't just build one robot. The robot designs evolve as the season progresses. Good designs get copied rapidly and better designs have to be created in order to stay competitive. The entire robot typically gets re-designed a few times in a season. I believe FRC would become a season-long crunch as the best teams try to out-do each other by bringing new robots to each competition. Sure we all try to do that now but it is contained well by the rules.

I think that this applies to FRC right now. 30 lbs. of pre-fab. parts is a lot of robot. With district systems being rolled out, you may have 6 hours of open bag time 2-3 times a season, plus 30 lbs. of parts to fabricate 3-4 times per season. Is your team foolish for not taking advantage of these allowances? Let's just say the robot is never done until next year's game is announced.

Game data shows that alliance scores increase throughout the season. In addition to teams learning how to play the game, modifications are being made.

Anyone feel like doing an analysis of how alliance scores change through the season before and after the introduction of bag&tag and withholding allowance?

rick.oliver

07-05-2013, 15:19

bduddy

07-05-2013, 16:01

nicholsjj

07-05-2013, 16:02

Something that hasn't been mentioned on this form yet that needs to be addressed is that NO isn't a bad word. I am very passionate about our robotics program through the school and area. Yet I still at times say no. I learned my lesson last year when helping out with a robotics conference in Jefferson City, MO. I did not have enough time and energy to help out but I said I would. It didn't help anyone as I was not able to accomplish what I said I could. This can be applied to an extended build season. If you haven't seen your family in three weeks then tell your students that there will not be a meeting from Thursday through Sunday. Without the pressure of getting your robot built in four to six weeks then you would be able to stop building for a 4 day break every week or two. Doing this will not only help you get a break from the burnout as a mentor, but it will also allow for your students to be able to get caught up on their schoolwork and family time. I would encourage mentors that are suffering from burnout to say "No were not meeting for a few days" and see the results for the team. I understand that it's hard to tell inspired students to put robotics on the back burner for a while, but with time your students will understand and respect your decision for it.

Tldr; No isn't a bad word and saying it during the build season can be very positive.

popnbrown

07-05-2013, 17:53

But, there are other "open season" robotics competition out there that are relatively comparable to FRC. Aren't both FTC and VEX, open season competitions? What happens in these types of competitions? Are the mentors burned out? Are they filling every hour of every day working on their machines? Are these even comparable to FRC mentors and robots?

From my experience of working with a FTC team & FRC team for the past two seasons, here are some facts about the teams:
1. The FTC Team met less frequently than the FRC team
2. As FTC is smaller, there was a significantly better attendance rate at the FTC meetings than at FRC meetings.
3. FTC in Illinois (and our team) starts competitions in Nov, so our team has a 6-8 week build season, generally 7 weeks with start-up time etc.
4. Between our Qualifier and the State Championship, activity for the FTC team is very heavy, as the kids get more interested and want to change more things.
5. For both FTC and FRC, activity picks up quite a bit towards the end of build season. We've only gotten better in FTC this year (our second year), and have put together a timeline (which wasn't followed) in FRC.

My observations/conclusions:
- Because of 3, and also because it's the same group of kids on FTC and FRC. I would say it's possible to do a comparison. It is altogether two different competitions which does change things but still.
- An explanation to number 5, I believe that going through the stringent deadline has forced us to try and get more organized and slap together timelines. It requires our students to be more diligent and focused. Without such a strict deadline, I already envision the "You guys should get this done" "But we have so much time". Resulting to things being postponed and extending the commitment of mentors AND students.
- As 4 shows, since we didn't bag our robot for FTC we continued to make improvements and continue to work on the robot. The students we work with are super interested, if we don't give them a "no, we're done" then they'll push to continue working on it.
- With 4, our FTC team could have done a lot of outreach, fundraising etc events, but it's hard to pull the students away from the robot and have them focus on those things that are actually important to the sustainability of our team. Our FRC team is different, as after the stop deadline, we still have quite a few meetings, but switch to a focus on outreach, and competition ready items, which also typically brings in a couple of new mentors. We simply use their motivation and re-task them, and year after year they better understand the need for all this not robot related stuff we do.

In my opinion, having a deadline helps to not kill our mentors AND students (everyone needs to see families and sleep). It allows our team to focus on other fundamental aspects of our team. The deadline also creates a hard deadline, and as is we have trouble with organization, with our artificial deadlines. I believe that deadline makes them realize that our team will become way more efficient if we plan and think things through ahead of time (ie. Design week, Build week, meeting schedules).

While expanding the season, may allow teams to build better robots, are better robots more important than important skills such as time management, proper communication and organization that students NOT mentors are inspired to pursue after seeing the success of better teams?

Irwin772

07-05-2013, 17:55

FYI - Canadians aren't the only ones having to deal with exams during the build season. Our school, and perhaps many others, have finals in week 2 which is pretty damaging to the schedule, basically knocks out a full week for many of the students.

This further proves the point that a lack of time doesn't affect many teams, California has consistently put out many great robots even with the loss of time.

Tetraman

08-05-2013, 07:20

If that were true every single team would meet 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. ... Giving more team would allow for more reasonable schedules a few more Saturday build/practice sessions that will help inspire students.

The biggest reason for burnout (at least discussed in this thread) is the amount of time required by mentors/coaches. You are suggesting that adding additional time to build season will decrease mentor/coach burnout?

And how can an extra saturday inspire a student? Mentorship inspires a student and as this thread has proven there is a big issue with mentor burnout because there is too big of an attendance requirement. I stated that "If you give all teams additional time, the students and mentorship are going to do everything in their power to utilize that extra time by default rather than spending the extra time to relax their schedule." I'm suggesting that giving additional time to teams isn't going to fix the 'burnout' problem because those additional days and times will be used the same way their current days and times are. None of the teams are going to say "Today, we take this specific friday off - the team will not meet on friday during week 5 out of 7." That's scary.

Additional time isn't going to make students 'stronger' if the mentors get 'weaker'.

How would you account for teams with more people. It's never going to be fair and we shouldn't try to make it fair.

Actually that would be fine by me. The goal in my scenario is to find what kinds of team advantages would be fair and I think that team size is a fair advantage. If you can recruit them, maintain them, and provide for them, why wouldn't team size be an allowed advantage? I don't think having 200 active students and 40 active mentors/coaches/parents is a good team size at all, but if a team can utilize it then have at it. Team Size works itself out based on what teams can manage for themselves and its not that team size equates to more victories.

HumblePie

08-05-2013, 08:02

Excellent discussion here. I tend to side with the folks who believe that the work will expand to fill the available space. My son was a senior on the team, and I wanted very much for our team to make our first trip to CMP. Some might say (have said) I was obsessive. We finished the shooter just prior to our Week 1 competition, bringing in 28 pounds withholding, and tweaked the shooter on the practice bot between week 1 and 3. Well, it worked, resulting in a Week 3 win at Peachtree (Thanks 4026, 4080), but feeding issues remained. So, then we embarked on a completely new shooter for CMP. That meant a solid 4 months of FRC. Had a great time at CMP, and would love to go back. Question is, can my home life handle this level of commitment?

If the withholding allowance were held to a more modest 10 pounds, perhaps it would have saved us from ourselves (or the team from ME). We could still "tweak" some subsystems (like feeding), but the stretch goal of an entire new shooter would be out of reach. BTW, the latest shooter revision was easier to feed, but less consistent shooting, so maybe we learned a lesson there?

On a slightly unrelated note, why does Bag Day have to be a Tuesday? If it's truly a six week build, make it on a Saturday. If not, just make it a full 7 week build and bag on a Saturday night. The students won't have school the next day, and the Mentors won't be zombies at their jobs (or have to burn vacation) the next day.

Taylor

08-05-2013, 08:07

On a slightly unrelated note, why does Bag Day have to be a Tuesday? If it's truly a six week build, make it on a Saturday. If not, just make it a full 7 week build and bag on a Saturday night. The students won't have school the next day, and the Mentors won't be zombies at their jobs (or have to burn vacation) the next day.

It's been my assumption that the Tuesday bag-n-tag day is a holdover from the FedEx days (some far-flung teams still use FedEx). Shipping thousands of large crates on a Sunday would be a logistical nightmare for all parties involved, and the following Monday is (in my experience) always the American holiday Presidents' Day.

HumblePie

08-05-2013, 08:18

It's been my assumption that the Tuesday bag-n-tag day is a holdover from the FedEx days (some far-flung teams still use FedEx). Shipping thousands of large crates on a Sunday would be a logistical nightmare for all parties involved, and the following Monday is (in my experience) always the American holiday MLK Day.

In our 3 years, we've crated once (rookie year) and bagged twice. Each time, Bag Day has been after the President's Day weekend. I would prefer a full 7 week build to utilize the holiday weekend, but if the robot sits bagged or crated for a couple of days, I'm fine with that. At least I can get some sleep.;)

AllenGregoryIV

08-05-2013, 08:37

The NCAA has quite comprehensive limits on when and how teams can practice, and their goals are pretty similar...

There is far more money involved in NCAA sports. Especially in terms of schools getting more money if they practice longer hours. They will do better on the field and potentially get into championship games that have large pay outs from advertisers. FRC teams don't get money when they win a World Title (directly). So we are not exactly comparing apples to apples. The money puts far more pressure on coaches and teams in NCAA athletics. If FRC ever gets that commercial (charging admission to the public for events) than maybe it would be a better comparison. Also the last A (association) in NCAA is very important in why they are able to regulate schools.

Bongle

08-05-2013, 09:05

There is far more money involved in NCAA sports. Especially in terms of schools getting more money if they practice longer hours. They will do better on the field and potentially get into championship games that have large pay outs from advertisers. FRC teams don't get money when they win a World Title (directly). So we are not exactly comparing apples to apples. The money puts far more pressure on coaches and teams in NCAA athletics. If FRC ever gets that commercial (charging admission to the public for events) than maybe it would be a better comparison. Also the last A (association) in NCAA is very important in why they are able to regulate schools.

Don't underestimate the power of simply wanting to win. Men's football and basketball (the only revenue-generating NCAA sports) aren't the only NCAA sports: There are plenty of moneypit sports (swimming, rowing, track, triathlon) that athletes will sacrifice their marks and life for, simply to win. And I say that as a former 12-hour-per-week varsity swimmer. Also keep in mind that even in NCAA football/basketball, the athlete himself doesn't directly see a cent (well... except for seeing the officials and coaches around him spending piles of money).

FIRST is no different, and I think time limits would be a reasonable thing. After all, what's the point of inspiring a student to be an engineer, if he/she fails their math and physics courses because they were working on the robot for 4 months?

rick.oliver

08-05-2013, 10:16

I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of teams out there that are extremely inspiring without putting their mentors through extreme burnout or forcing their students to give up other activities, etc. I believe that it is in the interests of FIRST to ensure that that remains the case. If that entails placing or keeping limits on those teams that do not limit themselves as much, that may be unfortunate for them but I think that at some point you have to look at everyone's interests. The NCAA has quite comprehensive limits on when and how teams can practice, and their goals are pretty similar...

The stated purpose of the NCAA can be distilled down to "ensuring a level playing field". The real purpose of the NCAA is debatable. The goal of FIRST is culture change. I don't see anything in FIRST documentation which indicates they are trying to level the playing field. I do agree that they attempt to design games and rules which allow rookies and less experienced (and perhaps less resourced) teams be competitive.

Allowing access to the competition robot throughout the build season will help many teams be more competitive at lower cost with less stress. How some teams may choose to use that flexibility is their choice. It does not change the learning opportunities associated with the program; rather, it opens the opportunity to learn about continual improvement and the impact of decisions.

I would hate to see the day when every team needed to add a "compliance mentor" to their list of mentor needs.

JB987

08-05-2013, 10:32

Siri

08-05-2013, 12:52

"None of the teams are going to say "Today, we take this specific friday off - the team will not meet on friday during week 5 out of 7." That's scary."

Actually Evan, our team did exactly this...after a rough 2010 build season when we tried to do the impossible (lift 2 robots along with our bot) and finally figured out that the points weren't worth the effort, so we decided to take off all Fridays since that season and we also banished all-nighters, rarely working until midnight these last 3 seasons. We scaled back and set smarter work schedules, work fewer and shorter days and as our record attests, it hasn't seemed to hurt our end product.;) A bag free season could allow us to spread out the work days even better and IMO further reduce the burn out potential while still maintaining a top notch program/robot. As stated in an earlier post, it just takes discipline.I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this. Our team as a whole took 2 weeks off total before worlds, but we'll send people home or tell them not to come if it's starting to visibly wear them--everyone individually has had much longer off. Additionally, 7 of those 14 days were the first Tuesdays and Fridays of January. If build season was longer this schedule would last longer, because we'd make it that way. We've gained a very firm understanding of what happens if we work our students and mentors too hard for too long: the end product (the robot, team and inspiration) gets worse, not better.

Do other teams not experience this? I would think they do, given that we're talking about burnout. Will "everyone" really try to go full out for 4 months? Why? There are much, much better ways to "keep up with the Jones'" that don't risk harming our end goal. We've already learned HOT meets less often than most of us do in the current build season. If I recall, 1114's mentors are in mostly just on weekends. Yes, a unbagged season will require more self-control, but I don't think I buy the argument that competition will force teams to burn themselves out, if only because it should be a foreseeable situation (is it not? why not?) and has a negative impact on competitiveness.

Michael Corsetto

08-05-2013, 13:18

"None of the teams are going to say "Today, we take this specific friday off - the team will not meet on friday during week 5 out of 7." That's scary."

Actually Evan, our team did exactly this...after a rough 2010 build season when we tried to do the impossible (lift 2 robots along with our bot) and finally figured out that the points weren't worth the effort, so we decided to take off all Fridays since that season and we also banished all-nighters, rarely working until midnight these last 3 seasons. We scaled back and set smarter work schedules, work fewer and shorter days and as our record attests, it hasn't seemed to hurt our end product.;) A bag free season could allow us to spread out the work days even better and IMO further reduce the burn out potential while still maintaining a top notch program/robot. As stated in an earlier post, it just takes discipline.

+1 to this! We take off every Sunday to give our students and mentors a day of rest. Wouldn't trade it for the world.

I totally get that teams that currently iterate within the 30lb withholding allowance/practice robot would be less "burned out" if they only had to iterate/build one robot. 1678 is a perfect example, they started out with a completely different robot then when they finished. After Madera, they designed a new shooter inspired by 973's incredible design, and slapped that on with the 30 lbs at Davis. Then, between Davis and Champs, they built a more effective intake based on 254's effective pickup system.

Team's like these don't stop working, and it seems like the bag becomes more of a formality then anything else.

I like the idea of having more time to help other teams too, especially rookies. A few extra weekends with the robot could mean more opportunities for effective outreach.

Question: Would teams build a practice bot if there was no bag and tag?

Great discussion for sure, it's hard to image FRC without the 6.5 week "build season", but I'm trying to keep an open mind!

-Mike

Brian Selle

08-05-2013, 13:42

Pat Fairbank

08-05-2013, 15:21

Question: Would teams build a practice bot if there was no bag and tag?
Probably. Our practice robot this year fired thousands of discs, suffered numerous collisions with field elements while driven by a certain other programming mentor, survived a 63" fall from the pyramid, and got all sorts of scratches on the powdercoat and polycarb. We wouldn't want to compete with a worn-out robot.

That said, having unlimited access to both robots would do a lot to decrease team stress around those epic Thursday morning rebuilds at competitions and the worry about whether they will perform the same.

waialua359

08-05-2013, 15:51

We start every season with at least 1 day (Sundays) off.
Then after a couple of weeks, we find ourselves behind schedule again and spending more and more longer hours per day, seven days a week.
I'm pretty sure our scenario is similar to others.:)

JB987

08-05-2013, 15:54

waialua359

08-05-2013, 16:02

Probably because you just have to powder coat your bot...:D
Ever since we started doing it in 2008, there is a correlation between powdercoating and the # of Motorola Quality awards we got.:rolleyes:
Next year, we hope that modulating our robot frame and other functional parts via our waterjet will cut down on the build time somewhat and help us build 2 bots for the very first time.

Tetraman

08-05-2013, 17:35

Will "everyone" really try to go full out for 4 months? Why? There are much, much better ways to "keep up with the Jones'" that don't risk harming our end goal.

Teams/mentors/students currently burn themselves out going full out for 6.5 weeks to keep up the the jones... so Yes. Yes there will be teams that do this. Yes there will be teams with students and mentors who give up day and night to build a competitive robot over 4 months.

... I don't think I buy the argument that competition will force teams to burn themselves out, if only because it should be a foreseeable situation (is it not? why not?) and has a negative impact on competitiveness.

Why not? Because it's apparently a problem now at 6 weeks of time. Why would it be 'solved' if we go to 8 weeks, or 12 weeks?

So X number of teams/mentors/students have the wrong idea about meeting times and schedules? Yes, yes they do, my own included. Is that a problem for those individual teams to solve, or a problem for FIRST to solve? I don't know, but it needs to be solved, and an extension of time to build will only increase the problem.

JB987

08-05-2013, 18:33

An unresolved question seems to be whether or not burn out is the result of total hours spent working on robots over +/- 4 months or compression of hours forced into a 6.5 week primary build period that for many of us includes production of a practice robot as well. Sure, some teams will work to fill any extra hours made available if more open bag time is allowed (or the bag is eliminated)...but that will be their choice. Some teams like ours (having learned the hard way in 2010) will chose a work schedule that lessens the likelihood of burnout. Nobody is forcing a team to work for X amount of hours currently or in alternative scenarios previously discussed. Each team needs to determine what works best for them as things currently stand and would need to do the same should any aforementioned possible changes occur.
I would like to see choice opportunities expanded, not limited and would like to see more robot access opportunity equivalence between district and regional bound teams as well. My inflated 2 cents... and I am not speaking on behalf of our team (not all 987 mentors are on the same page regarding this issue :) ).

Bob Steele

08-05-2013, 19:00

I’ve been reflecting on the many posts which infer that we must choose between FIRST FRC excellence and having a life. I think that can be said about any endeavor. Think about it, those at the “top” of any field or profession are highly committed and focused. It may appear to some of us that they don’t have a life or that perhaps their priorities are misplaced or they have extraordinary capacity.

I think it is a reasonable inference to say that those of us posting on this thread are striving to be excellent. I do not want to sacrifice quality and competitiveness in my own program and I certainly do not want FIRST to implement rules which inhibit my ability or anybody else’s ability to be as great as they want to be.

I will respect another person’s choices when it comes to their level of commitment to their program and I neither need nor want FIRST or anybody else (outside of my wife) dictating my level of commitment to our program.

I want to see FIRST FRC continuing to grow in both number of teams participating and the quality and competitiveness of their robots. I believe that the mythical 6 week build season is as much a deterrent to both of those goals as anything else. More rules which are more constraining are certainly not going to help, in my opinion, ease the burden of mentors or students. More things like Ri3D would go a long way toward accomplishing the goal of increasing competitiveness. Those things may also help ease the burden of many mentors, too.

I'll say it one more time, the only stop build date should be the ship date to Championships.

This is very well said. In my opinion, let teams be whatever they want to be. Your team should define how much they want to work and how they balance it with "burnout."

Inspiration isn't determined by the time a team spends working on a robot.
It is determined by the quality of the experience for the students and mentors.

If your team wants to work once a week and Saturdays, that is fine. If your team wants to work 3 shifts for 6 weeks... that is fine too...

I would have an issue with the stop build date being the ship date to Championships if I were a team that qualified in my only regional and it was in the first week of competition. The stop build date is when you stop building.

From my experience, it is MORE frustrating to NOT be able to change the robot via the 30 lb allowance than to allow it.

I started this before that allowance, when we had to actually ship the robot "complete". I remember going to events where a team completely rebuilt their robot in the three days of the event so they could compete better in their second event... I also saw many robots that couldn't do much at all. In my opinion the gap between great robots and poor robots was much bigger then...of course the "great" robots were not as good as the ones we have today...

We have all had sleepless nights thinking about robot and team performance. It is somehow in our nature to take this seriously.

Teams will always use whatever rules are given and work within them to do the best job that they want to do.

I think of the bag day as a point when the team "takes a breath"
Of course we all continue to iterate after that point... the 30 lb allowance allows ALL teams to have a better robot. Imagine how the robots at your events this year would have competed if there had been no 30 lb allowance.

Do you think it would have been better or worse?

The allowance is a step in between allowing teams to continue working on their complete robot or at least come up with something they can put on later.

I would be in favor of allowing teams the 24 hour period before each event to put on their 30 lbs of allowance... and then no allowance at the event...

This would prepare teams for the way that 2 day district events will be conducted and give everyone a chance to drive the robot for some practice before arriving at an event. It would also eliminate the need to worry about the allowance at events.

I would like to see some rule that allows bringing in 1 for 1 replacement pieces (to replace broken structure). This would give teams the opportunity to fix structure pieces at an event if necessary..

We all work hard... we compete hard...
I think that is the essence of why FIRST is so powerful.. the team building that goes on during the process. We stretch our minds and resources..

Jaxom

08-05-2013, 19:59

Probably. Our practice robot this year fired thousands of discs, suffered numerous collisions with field elements while driven by a certain other programming mentor, survived a 63" fall from the pyramid, and got all sorts of scratches on the powdercoat and polycarb. We wouldn't want to compete with a worn-out robot.

You powdercoat your practice bot?!?!?!? THAT is either "attention to detail" or "<insert sarcastic, non-PC comment here>". :)

Jared Russell

08-05-2013, 20:25

ToddF

08-05-2013, 20:44

This thread has been an eye opener for me on many levels. It has been a little peek into the student work ethic, mentor work ethic and resources necessary for a team to transition from "really good" to "elite".

I, frankly, don't expect the rules concerning the length of the build season to change. What has been interesting to me is how the proposed solutions to provide breathing room exclusively focus on somehow extending the end of the build season. Thinking "out of the box", what about making a few tiny rule changes that would allow teams to begin sooner, rather than ending later? Now, I can just hear the chorus of, "We can't build a robot without knowing the game rules!" But, that simply isn't true.

Let me ask some questions. Would your team design and build a drive train (including bumpers) before the game rules were released, if it were legal to start building on, say, the first weekend in December? Could you be creative enough to build one which could be adapted to the game, whatever it ended up being? Would the rewards of doing so be worth the risk that it might not be perfect for the game and it might need to be modified? What rules would need to be changed for this to be legal?

Our team had a near disaster in 2012 because we didn't have enough mechanical mentors to divide between student subteams. We didn't have a functional drivetrain until week 5.5, and it nearly killed us. After the season, we devoted the summer to looking at this problem. The solution we came up with was to develop a drivetrain made as nearly as possible with COTS components. Under the current rules, COTS components can be purchased before the season starts. Our students practiced assembling, wiring and programming the 2012 summer drivetrain so they knew exactly how to build another one when it was legal to do so. We even worked with vendors so that certain necessary components, which would have been custom, were added to their COTS product line, and thus legal to pre-buy. On kickoff day, we were ready to go, and only needed to fabricate 4 axles from hex stock and some shaft spacers. All the rest of the drivetrain parts were COTS parts which we had pre-purchased.

Now, the new size rules threw a monkey wrench into our plans, but we were expecting that SOMETHING would have to be tweaked. So, we had our competition drive train running in two weeks instead of one. No big deal. No stress. No burnout. The drivetrain was mostly assembled and wired by rookie students who learned their skills in the fall. The more experienced students were available to iterate on scoring mechanisms for nearly the entire build season. Of course we worked like crazy during the build season, but we didn't come as close to burning out as we have in years past.

So, in summary, don't expect FIRST to change the rules to make things easier on you. To protect yourselves from burnout during the build season, change how your team works. Start thinking NOW about how the team can work less hard during build season. Are you doing skills development during build season when you could be developing skills ahead of time? Are you fabricating parts during build season because you don't have time to purchase COTS parts? Are you purchasing COTS parts during build season that you could have purchased ahead of time? Is it better to have a perfect robot just barely in the bag, or is it better to have a pretty good robot with lots of time for practicing and tweaking?

This year we chose to do the latter, and from a robot design and build perspective, we were successful. Unfortunately, we forgot one little detail. Having time to practice does you little good if you don't have a place to practice. We are currently working to fix that problem, but that's the topic of another thread (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116631&highlight=2363)...

DampRobot

08-05-2013, 20:51

JB987

08-05-2013, 21:04

This thread seems to involve three separate questions:
Would expanding the build season add or reduce the number of hours a team works?
Is the 30 lb witholding alowance too much, and if so, how is it best reduced?
Does robot work always expand to fill all available time?

I'm not ready to add my own opinion quite yet, but would like to remind posters that they are likely above average in the FRC community and that the majority of teams do not build a practice bot.

1. If greater pre event access to robots was allowed you may not need much withholding
2.Possibly add hours, unlikely to reduce hours worked and for some, total hours may stay the same but spread out
3. It doesn't for my team anymore

EricH

08-05-2013, 21:07

Let me ask some questions. Would your team design and build a drive train (including bumpers) before the game rules were released, if it were legal to start building on, say, the first weekend in December? Could you be creative enough to build one which could be adapted to the game, whatever it ended up being? Would the rewards of doing so be worth the risk that it might not be perfect for the game and it might need to be modified? What rules would need to be changed for this to be legal?

I don't know. However, I do think they would seriously consider doing something like that.

Now, that said, the #1 risk is that the size changes and the team has a welded frame (or other very-hard-to-reconfigure frame). BAR NONE. Can moving stuff around be done to make it work? Sure. But for 90% of the teams that don't use the Kitbot or 80-20, and most that do, that size change will really make life miserable. I'm pretty confident that most teams would either adapt their drivetrain to the game, or play the game in a unique way.

So, let's assume that on 12/1/2013, FRC says "OK, folks, your base size for the year is a 160" frame perimeter, bumpers are between 2 and 10 inches, and you can start work NOW. The rest of the rules will be at your regularly scheduled Kickoff. Good Luck!" For the sake of example, I'll assume that the Kitbot/PDV option is applied such that the team will receive the Kitbot early in December, say as close as possible to 12/1.

If that was the situation, I think there could be massive, massive playability benefits for teams that opted to take a calculated risk. As follows:
1) Rookies could have a drivetrain, with several hours of practice, well before Kickoff, giving them time to troubleshoot potential problems beforehand (familiarity).
2) In addition, all teams opting to take the risk would be able to focus much more on object manipulation. More objects manipulated=more exciting game, which can lead to a whole trail of benefits that should be fairly obvious if you've spent more than a couple of years around FRC or CD.
3) If the only thing you have to do with the drivetrain/frame design is to tweak it, see #2. It may be much easier to tweak than to start from scratch.

However, the massive risk is that you get something like this year, where the variable robot shapes to contend with the pyramid and the loading zones wreaked havoc on many possible drivetrain/frame combinations that could have been worked out ahead of time. Or the assumed-legal motors were not legal after all.

OTOH... Using the real-life mirror, often you may have to adapt a "stock" design to fit a specific need. Under deadline. With limited budget/materials on hand. Hmmm... Sounds just about perfect for this little addition.

I like that warped thought. *wonders if Frank et al are looking at this thread and getting ideas*

ehfeinberg

08-05-2013, 21:37

This thread has been an eye opener for me on many levels. It has been a little peek into the student work ethic, mentor work ethic

This thread seems to involve three separate questions:
Would expanding the build season add or reduce the number of hours a team works?
Is the 30 lb witholding alowance too much, and if so, how is it best reduced?
Does robot work always expand to fill all available time?

I'm not ready to add my own opinion quite yet, but would like to remind posters that they are likely above average in the FRC community and that the majority of teams do not build a practice bot.
Took 172 posts for a student to weigh in on the issue. Tells you something...

See what you don't understand about us students is that we don't know when to stop. By the time build season is over, I find that a large majority of the students are burnt out and need to take a break from robotics. I know a lot of people who towards the end of build season already start to fall ill and fall behind on school. Making build season longer would just hurt these students even more.

cadandcookies

08-05-2013, 21:51

Took 172 posts for a student to weigh in on the issue. Tells you something...

See what you don't understand about us students is that we don't know when to stop. By the time build season is over, I find that a large majority of the students are burnt out and need to take a break from robotics. I know a lot of people who towards the end of build season already start to fall ill and fall behind on school. Making build season longer would just hurt these students even more.

I agree with this-- I'm an AP student that loves to take challenging classes (mostly because I just love learning about things), but even with my desire to do well in school, it's often difficult for me to balance the two-- and I do try. The problem is, of course, that building robots is so fun, and school can be, well, not.

As a student, I would have a good deal of difficulty restraining or spacing myself when it comes to a longer build season-- even when I'm not in the shop, it takes my mind off of whatever I'm doing that isn't robotics. More time would just burn me out more-- I don't get sick during build season, but I often get sick right after it because the adrenaline wears out.

In theory, I love the idea of a longer build season, but in practice, it would distract me far too much from my studies (and please, although I am a student and I'm complaining about focus issues, it isn't from a lack of effort on my part that I get distracted by robots; I'd much rather be able to focus on what I'm currently working on, but it's quite difficult, and that's coming from someone that balances far more honors/AP classes than I probably should).

That being said, I won't be too upset when districts finally makes its way to Minnesota-- I don't believe that longer build season and district system have to go hand in hand, or even that a longer build season necessarily follows the district system.

Siri

08-05-2013, 22:06

Why not? Because it's apparently a problem now at 6 weeks of time. Why would it be 'solved' if we go to 8 weeks, or 12 weeks?

So X number of teams/mentors/students have the wrong idea about meeting times and schedules? Yes, yes they do, my own included. Is that a problem for those individual teams to solve, or a problem for FIRST to solve? I don't know, but it needs to be solved, and an extension of time to build will only increase the problem.So how do we fix it? I think we're on the same page that the burnout itself is the problem (despite disagreeing on whether a longer season would increase or decrease it).

Why is it that some of our own are working themselves to the point of diminishing returns, and how can we avoid/help this? For those of us that have started to avoid this, how and why? (For myself--I used to make myself sick in build, almost put myself in the hospital once--I think I just slowly learned that missing one night now is better than 4 later, or than screwing up something that costs 6.)

For myself, I don't agree with your final statement about a longer season making it worse--if the season is significantly longer. A week longer and I agree, I'd probably burn myself out the first year from not pacing correctly. But twice as long? If I look at our VEX teams or other analogs, I just don't see it happening. They tend to spread out and take it easier--sometimes too easy! So the end cram might be rougher the first year, but the season average less stressful. I don't have a method of proving it either way, though, so I suppose that pushes for the status quo until further evidence emerges.

---
As for how to deal with deadlines, I'd say learning how to deal with long deadlines is just as important as learning short ones--both being critical.

Students: yeah, I didn't know how to stop as a student either (see above)--that's what mentors are for. "Go sit down, call your mom, go home, and go to sleep." And to be fair, given the types of people that register on CD, it's no surprise there are more former students than current ones--you spend a lot longer as the former.

pfreivald

08-05-2013, 22:09

We mentors already give up a significant portion of our lives--indeed, many prospective mentors (and/or their spouses) consider it an unreasonable portion of our lives to the point that they are unwilling to participate in FIRST--so that our kids will be as successful as they are willing to work to be.

Extending the build season will result in our having to give up even more of our lives, even if it means that we work less nights per week during that time. Indeed, this is true even if we put in less total hours over those weeks.

The thing is, we mentors do other things. (I, for example, have a wife and pets I like to spend time with. I keep bees. I'm on a school board. My lawn does not mow itself, and my house will not fix itself. I write books (and have a contract to fulfill before the end of summer). I edit books (for actual money). Some mentors coach sports and direct plays and run marathons and draw comics and flip houses and fix old cars...) These other activities, like FIRST, often require significant sustained effort over a period of time in order to do them properly, and they already interfere with one another to a significant degree. (For example, if I try to do FIRST and finish a novel in the same three month time period, I will never do any work around the house or spend any time whatsoever with The Redhead(tm) or my pets--which is of course unacceptable.)

This means that they are not activities that can be reasonably accomplished at the same time as FIRST build season, even if the hours-per-week requirement of build season is relaxed.

People keep posting about burnout, as if what's happening is that mentors are literally collapsing from exhaustion, forcing their too-understanding spouses to drag their dessicated, dehydrated, swarf-and-pizza-grease-covered bodies home to rehabilitate in time for the next season. This is not the case (most of the time; for most of us). What's happening is that we're reaching our personal limits of what we're willing to sacrifice for our FIRST kids.

I already dislike the impact that the withholding allowance has had on my life--I wish it were smaller or nonexistent--but at least it puts a practical limit on the number of things we can iterate. Eliminating bag and tag opens up iteration to every mechanism, every bit of functionality; and anyone claiming that this will result in less "mentor burnout" is kidding themselves.

I want to be an "elite" team. I want The Grapes of Wrath to inspire that same level of jaw-dropping awe/abject terror on the playing field that OP and Simbotics and Miss Daisy and the Poofs and all the other truly incredible teams do. I sacrifice a great deal to try to make that happen...

I don't know. Maybe some of you are smarter than I am. Maybe you're more dedicated. Maybe you're better organized, need less sleep, have no pets or children, hate your wife and don't want to see her unless you have to, and maybe you have no interests whatsoever other than FIRST. But all of that is irrelevant as to whether or not any given mentor has reached their limit on what they're willing to sacrifice to field a competitive robot.

Just please, stop pretending that extending the build season will result in less sacrifice. It won't.

Abhishek R

08-05-2013, 22:55

To me, the idea here is that in 6 weeks, teams build a robot that is supposed to be ready for competition. The thing is, when you go to a regional, you see many robots which are just almost at the competitive level, who, given a little more time, would have had things in better shape.

Some of these teams only attend one regional, so by extending the build season, they get a better shot at making that regional more worthwhile. But suppose the team decided that now that they have more time, that they can take maybe one day off each week. Would the robot not be at the same level it would've been at before?

Yes, it does require discipline and planning to use time effectively. But teams are constantly trying to get better, and they would likely use this time to step their competitiveness up another notch. So I think that teams would use all the time they are given to make the most of their advantage.

DampRobot

08-05-2013, 23:09

While a lot of good points in this discussion were brought up, I'd like to remind everyone that possibly none of the suggestions here will be acted on. FIRST moves slow, and tends not to change the things that work well, albeit it not perfectly. A "6" week build season is not going to change. Withholding allowances might, and I could believe unlock periods before regionals as they do at district events. But I very seriously doubt there will be any form of open build season in the near future.

Yes, I know, six weeks burns people out (it burnt out me too). But I don't really believe that the problem is that build season is too short, or that bag day is too soon, or 30 lbs is too much. Allowing people to work longer will make many of them work longer; I'm convinced of that. Those that want to stay competitive at all costs will work every second that is provided and more, and those that just want to have fun will only meet a few times a week. Most will find some happy medium, as they do in the current system.

Also, 6 weeks is just one of those things that makes modern FRC what it is, just like 120 lbs, 60" tall (to start), 27' by 54" fields and 3v3 alliances. It's so much a part of the FRC system that it isn't going to change. And certainly not with the level of disagreement in the community that is expressed on this thread.

So what can Manchester do to, reasonably? One is make the withholding allowance smaller or larger. They might actually do this, but I still think 30 is a good number. It lets you iterate a subsystem, but not really change your robots overall function (what we did at SVR is an exception). Competition would feel a lot more futile if there was no withholding allowance. If you got something wrong, like a gear ratio for example, there would be no recovery. And that would make competitions and FRC in general a lot less fun and inspirational.

They also might allow everyone in FRC a certain amount of in-shop unbag time. I'd actually support this. It would essentially do what the first half of Thursday at competition is, but allow teams to utilize the time a lot more effectively. I don't really think it would change the nature of the game too much either. Maybe 6 hours or so, as it has been proposed in this thread, and as they do it at districts?

Overall, I'm not expecting much to change next year. But I've been wrong before. Mentors and students alike will always find ways to push themselves beyond their limits given the current scale of FRC (a build season longer than a week and shorter than six months). Ultimately, the decision about how much and how long to work is for an individual to decide.

pfreivald

08-05-2013, 23:19

Also, 6 weeks is just one of those things that makes modern FRC what it is, just like 120 lbs, 60" tall (to start), 27' by 54" fields and 3v3 alliances. It's so much a part of the FRC system that it isn't going to change.

You realize that two of those four things have changed at least once in the past couple of years, yeah? (One year--I forget which--maximum weight was tied to starting configuration height. This year, you could be 84" high at the start of the game.)

cadandcookies

08-05-2013, 23:33

You realize that two of those four things have changed at least once in the past couple of years, yeah? (One year--I forget which--maximum weight was tied to starting configuration height. This year, you could be 84" high at the start of the game.)

Variable weight was 2007, and you couldn't be more than 60" tall at the start of the game this year, per G22.

pfreivald

08-05-2013, 23:40

Variable weight was 2007, and you couldn't be more than 60" tall at the start of the game this year, per G22.

(a) Thank you, and (b) yes you could (https://frc-qa.usfirst.org/Question/590/does-part-b-confined-to-its-starting-configuration-limit-robots-to-60-or-does-it-allow-robots-to-be-up-to-84-at-the-start-of-the-match-since-all-robots-must-start-in-contact-with-the-pyramid-and-a).

Grim Tuesday

08-05-2013, 23:44

(a) Thank you, and (b) yes you could (https://frc-qa.usfirst.org/Question/590/does-part-b-confined-to-its-starting-configuration-limit-robots-to-60-or-does-it-allow-robots-to-be-up-to-84-at-the-start-of-the-match-since-all-robots-must-start-in-contact-with-the-pyramid-and-a).

Number one missed rule this year. I always like to read the manual for changes to 'standard' rules and try to figure out why the GDC changed them.

Even with that, I didn't notice that you could be over 60" in starting config until mid week 4.

EricH

08-05-2013, 23:45

One is make the withholding allowance smaller or larger. They might actually do this, but I still think 30 is a good number. They have done it in the past. Let's see how good my memory is... A couple years back, they went up to 60 or so due to what I'll call "special circumstances" due to my fuzzy memory (I want to say 2009 and weather). Back in my day... Oh, wait, wrong place... IIRC, we had it as small as 10-15 back in the early days of the withholding allowance. (Before then? Unlimited spare, replacement, and upgrade parts, provided they were built in a FIX-IT Window, which could be very lousy hours for teams...)

2007, where to be full weight of 120 lbs you had to be no more than 4' tall at the start of the match, was quite an interesting year. After that, 110 lbs up to 5' tall, and 100 lbs up to 6' tall, which was the maximum that year. A very well-liked change that left the next year, for reasons unknown. (Also memorable: "How do you fit a 6' tall robot into a 5' tall crate? Plan ahead."--paraphrase of Woodie Flowers at Kickoff that year)

I remember when the weight went from 130 lbs with battery to 120 lbs without--2005 season, as I recall. I remember when bumpers were optional or not used at all. I remember when the size last changed--30x36 went to 28x38, in 2005. At the same time as 2v2 became 3v3, and as I recall the field size changed slightly too. The following year, a 1-8, 1-8 selection became 1-8, 8-1.

cadandcookies

08-05-2013, 23:45

pfreivald

08-05-2013, 23:50

They have done it in the past. Let's see how good my memory is... A couple years back, they went up to 60 or so due to what I'll call "special circumstances" due to my fuzzy memory (I want to say 2009 and weather). Back in my day... Oh, wait, wrong place... IIRC, we had it as small as 10-15 back in the early days of the withholding allowance. (Before then? Unlimited spare, replacement, and upgrade parts, provided they were built in a FIX-IT Window, which could be very lousy hours for teams...)

2007, where to be full weight of 120 lbs you had to be no more than 4' tall at the start of the match, was quite an interesting year. After that, 110 lbs up to 5' tall, and 100 lbs up to 6' tall, which was the maximum that year. A very well-liked change that left the next year, for reasons unknown. (Also memorable: "How do you fit a 6' tall robot into a 5' tall crate? Plan ahead."--paraphrase of Woodie Flowers at Kickoff that year)

I remember when the weight went from 130 lbs with battery to 120 lbs without--2005 season, as I recall. I remember when bumpers were optional or not used at all. I remember when the size last changed--30x36 went to 28x38, in 2005. At the same time as 2v2 became 3v3, and as I recall the field size changed slightly too. The following year, a 1-8, 1-8 selection became 1-8, 8-1.

All good stuff. I think the first year they allowed it, the withholding allowance was 15 lbs... <grumpy old man>And yes, kiddos, there was a time before the withholding allowance, and people built robots and competed with them! Now get off my lawn!</grumpy old man>

Walter Deitzler

08-05-2013, 23:55

EricH

09-05-2013, 00:00

Oh, I forgot one thing. BONUS TRIVIA!

--In what two years was ship day extended, and by how long was it extended each time?
--What was the reason in each of those years?
--How many teams used much of the extra time to make improvements?

--2003 and 2004 both saw the ship day extended by two days.
--In 2003, teams in the Northeast couldn't even get to their robots, let alone get them onto the FedEx trucks (which weren't running). In 2004, severe KOP delays across the board was the reason.
--Anybody that could get to their robot, from what I hear. In 2003, I know of at least one team that made an upgrade in those two days that would not have been possible before ship without them.

Yep, folks, that's right, there have been FRC build seasons longer than 6 weeks, 3 days.

DampRobot

09-05-2013, 00:17

(a) Thank you, and (b) yes you could (https://frc-qa.usfirst.org/Question/590/does-part-b-confined-to-its-starting-configuration-limit-robots-to-60-or-does-it-allow-robots-to-be-up-to-84-at-the-start-of-the-match-since-all-robots-must-start-in-contact-with-the-pyramid-and-a).

Yes, but I was using these examples more in the sense of "usually." I can't think of any team that really built their robot to have an 84" starting configuration, and 120 was still a max in 2007.

My gist was that were not going to have 40 lb robots or 100" tall ones anytime soon. But yes, you were technically right.

ToddF

09-05-2013, 08:23

While a lot of good points in this discussion were brought up, I'd like to remind everyone that possibly none of the suggestions here will be acted on.

...

So what can Manchester do to, reasonably?

There are some very simple rule changes which would help teams alleviate the time crunch imposed by the 6 week build season.

-Allow reuse of bumpers. Bumpers are one component in which zero creativity is allowed either in design or fabrication. Requiring teams to repurchase materials for and re-fabricate bumpers every year serves no purpose other than subsidizing the plywood/pool noodle/fabric industries. It's immensely wasteful of materials and valuable build season time. Bumpers should be re-classified into the same category as the drivers station console. The option to reuse, modify or completely re-fabricate each year should be up to the discretion of each team.

-Publish the list of legal motors, the robot size restrictions, and bumper rules on October 1. This allows teams to begin designing drive trains, or even pre-purchasing motors, during the fall. Keep the rule that designs must be published before kick-off day to be used.

-Current rules allow for fabrication during build season of previously designed parts if the design was published prior to kickoff day. This is good, because it encourages out of season development efforts. Suggested rule change: Make it legal to use any parts fabricated after October 1 or November 1. This preserves the intent of the rules that the current years students are the ones building the robot. But it allows teams to take educated risks in choosing to pre-build some parts of the robot. It also would promote closer cooperation between rookie and more experienced teams, as the experienced teams could help rookies come up to speed outside the pressure cooker atmosphere of build season.

I would give my left arm if someone would start a company making bumpers as COTS items at a reasonable cost. With a clever bracket system design, no modifications would be required, and they could be used year after year. Not having to make bumpers every year would go a long way towards reducing burnout on our team.

Taylor

09-05-2013, 08:58

This thread seems to involve three separate questions:
Would expanding the build season add or reduce the number of hours a team works?
Is the 30 lb witholding alowance too much, and if so, how is it best reduced?
Does robot work always expand to fill all available time?

1. Add.
2. Too much. 10 lbs max.
3. Yes - this can be minimized with near-perfect mentorship and time management practices, but yes.
I would give my left arm if someone would start a company making bumpers as COTS items at a reasonable cost. With a clever bracket system design, no modifications would be required, and they could be used year after year. Not having to make bumpers every year would go a long way towards reducing burnout on our team.
"Reasonable cost" is arguable, but there is this (http://www.andymark.com/Bumpers-s/253.htm).

Also - I wouldn't dream of building the drivebase before knowing the game challenge.

Jared Russell

09-05-2013, 11:36

For those that seem to think "6 weeks" is some sort of sacred number and that hard artificial deadlines are the best real world experiences for the students...

I honestly do not run into this situation very often professionally. A more realistic scenario for me is a longer period of time with intermittent milestones and an actual deadline (like a demo or delivery) at the end. It requires good project leadership and pacing yourself while avoiding procrastination.

I cannot get behind the "limit robot access" or "reduce the withholding allowance" arguments for other reasons as well. Maybe it is because my team doesn't have a practice space and can't really test our robot in match conditions until after "stop build day". Every team learns something about their robot once they have played a real match. Usually that means one or more improvements you need to make to the robot to get it to work the same way it did in the shop. We have taken advantage of withholding allowances at virtually every competition that 341 has competed in.

If you take away or significantly reduce the withholding allowance, how can I improve the robot? By frantically and stress-fully fabricating parts in my pit during practice day? Been there, that is a not a happy experience. During an unbagging window? Better, but unless you have all of the equipment you need in-house you are still limited in what you can actually accomplish.

There is virtually no analog in real world engineering for a "build the whole thing, never test it except on the bench, and if it doesn't work you won't have a chance to improve it" project.

Taylor

09-05-2013, 11:39

There is virtually no analog in real world engineering for a "build the whole thing, never test it except on the bench, and if it doesn't work you won't have a chance to improve it" project.

um (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html) ...

Jared Russell

09-05-2013, 11:51

um (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html) ...

Not the same thing. They have dedicated testing facilities, simulators, etc. The beauty of "engineering done right" is that we can do amazing things and be very confident that they will succeed the first time. But only because simulation, testing, and incremental improvement are such fundamental parts of the engineering design process.

rick.oliver

09-05-2013, 12:21

...

I would have an issue with the stop build date being the ship date to Championships if I were a team that qualified in my only regional and it was in the first week of competition. The stop build date is when you stop building. ...

To clarify, when I wrote "ship date to Championships" I had in mind that the ship date would be the Tuesday after the final Regional/District Championship and would apply to all teams which qualified for the Championships.

rick.oliver

09-05-2013, 12:26

Not the same thing. They have dedicated testing facilities, simulators, etc. The beauty of "engineering done right" is that we can do amazing things and be very confident that they will succeed the first time. But only because simulation, testing, and incremental improvement are such fundamental parts of the engineering design process.

Agreed! Could not agree more.

Mark Sheridan

09-05-2013, 12:35

I love the withholding allowance, its saved me a bunch of times:

766:
2005: added anti-backdrive at SVR
2006: added low goal score at Davis, improved at champs
2010: added better ball magnet at Davis
2011: add minibot at SVR

3309:
2012: changed shooter at LA, better bridge tipper at Madera
2013: added 30 point climber at LA

I did not always need to full withholding allowance but a few of these years completely changed the performance of the robot. I would be pretty disappointed if it went away.

Nate Laverdure

09-05-2013, 12:57

So, let's assume that on 12/1/2013, FRC says "OK, folks, your base size for the year is a 160" frame perimeter, bumpers are between 2 and 10 inches, and you can start work NOW. The rest of the rules will be at your regularly scheduled Kickoff. Good Luck!" For the sake of example, I'll assume that the Kitbot/PDV option is applied such that the team will receive the Kitbot early in December, say as close as possible to 12/1.
I had a similar idea back in 2007 (I keep things like this in my "Bad Predictions" file):
Idea: Extend the build season by a week, and then kick off the competition in phases. My sample build season schedule:
Week 0 Sat -- Release VKoP; manual sections released: Communication, Team Organization, At the Events, Robot Transportation, The Awards, The Tournament, The Robot, Kit of Parts
Week 1 Ongoing -- Several game hints are released throughout the week
Week 1 Sat -- Kickoff presentation @ Manchester NH; game simulation released; manual sections released: The Arena, The Game
Week 2 Tue -- Supplemental KoP items may now be purchased and ordered
Week 2 Sat -- Physical KoP arrives; robot components may now be fabricated
...
Week 8 Tue -- Shipping!
That thread (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=630914) has some other relevant thoughts in it, also. It was about creating ways to force teams to design and THEN build, which I think is very relevant to the problem of build-season burnout.

Keep going with this thread-- the discussion is very valuable.

Madison

09-05-2013, 14:33

After reading this thread with interest and trying and failing to discuss my own experiences and feelings about burnout several times, I've begun to think that abandoning the 6-week build period would be a worthwhile experiment.

For me and my team, it might alleviate a few problems that are a big source of my burnout at the end of a season.

-- It'd allow mentors that are unable to commit to the schedule required to be responsible for major robot components to be more helpful. This is a BIG problem for me right now; I have very few mentors on the team that are willing or able to put in the time required to be completely responsible for the successful design and manufacture of major robot systems and I end up taking on all of that myself.

-- It'd allow students that aren't able to meet with us frequently to be more involved and take on a larger burden of responsibility throughout the season. We have a pretty big problem with consistent attendance outside the core group of students and tasks often require a lot of rework because plans/ideas/problems are not communicated well by students who aren't consistently present.

-- It'd allow our sponsors to offer more to us because our tight deadlines won't put so much pressure on the day-to-day operation of the their business. Getting parts from our sponsor in a few days is impossible and getting them in a few weeks is sometimes a challenge, but if we could safely wait three or four weeks, we'd be in okay shape.

-- We'd save a ton of money. We spend about $3000 on parts per robot each season and probably $750-1000+ on expedited shipping. If we were able to work continuously on one robot in place of building a second, that'd represent significant savings to our team. For this alone, I'm on board.

-- I might get to take one day off each week to do normal person things. That's exciting.

Brandon Holley

09-05-2013, 15:16

-- We'd save a ton of money. We spend about $3000 on parts per robot each season and probably $750-1000+ on expedited shipping. If we were able to work continuously on one robot in place of building a second, that'd represent significant savings to our team. For this alone, I'm on board.

This is a big point for me. The amount of money spent as a collective on expedited shipping (even with gracious discounts offered by AndyMark and IFI) has got to be astronomical. This is money we are quite literally throwing away as it relates to the 6 week deadline.

I would certainly welcome the cost savings...

-Brando

Mr. Van

09-05-2013, 17:33

Ok- I've actually read this whole thread. I think this is what I've got:

Some mentors/coaches are saying that they are stressed because they spend too much money building a practice robot and have to rush on Thursday mornings to install their 30 lb. withholding allowance mechanism. If only they didn't have to do these things, but could continue working on the actual competition robot, their lives would be less stressful and there would be less mentor burnout.

There is a simple solution here: Don't build a practice robot. Don't use the 30 lb. withholding allowance.

Ah, but you want to stay competitive with those who do. There are teams willing to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of mentor-hours refining their robots with every nanosecond of time available. These teams turn out the most competitive robots, and to keep up with them, you have to do the same...

Will these teams really put in any less time or effort? Of course not. The primary difference (should we extend the official build season) is that these teams will have an easier time doing what they already do - and they will push the envelope even further.

Those of us trying to keep up with the "elite" teams will be in the exact same situation - little will change. Except that we will loose teams because we will loose mentors who can't keep up with the extended time demands.

For those teams that are struggling just to get a robot finished, I believe that teams that having difficulty building a working robot in 6.5 weeks will have difficulty building a robot in 8 or 10 or 16 weeks.

FRC is a game of mentors. The best teams have the best mentors. Period.

Many teams have teacher/mentors who MUST be at EVERY meeting or work session. They can not miss a single day because the team can not meet or work unless they are there - per school district rules. Loose those mentors, loose the team.

Lastly, the only students who have commented on this thread have pointed out that they have other demands on their time outside of FRC.

I'll say it again: FRC is a game of mentors. If you want to maintain and expand the program, you must ensure that the mentors are there - ready, willing and able to do what they do. Any expansion of the build season will lead to loosing mentors - in fact many already find the extensions that so many seem to need to "be competitive" to be so stress inducing that they are forced to make the choice between being "competitive" and mentoring at all.

Maintain the limited build season.

Remove the withholding allowance.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

pfreivald

09-05-2013, 19:30

Maintain the limited build season.

Remove the withholding allowance.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

You, sir, are my hero.

Jim Zondag

09-05-2013, 20:16

So, after all the back and forth in this thread, and all of the anecdotal and revisionist commentary on the history of what we do and why, I decided to do a little archeology. I went back and reviewed the actual game manuals from the early years (92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98). There is no available 94 Game Manual I could find in any of the archives.

In 92 and 93, there were no machine access restrictions at all. There was a kickoff, and there was a tournament. That was it....make a robot and show up to play.

In 95 we see the first indication of limits, as FIRST expanded to have more than one event. The rules of engagement were the same in 95 and 96. The excerpt from the 1996 manual is below:
-------------------------------------
Shipping Deadlines
To provide every team, regardless of events in which they participate, approximately the same number of design and build days, the following shipping regulations and dates apply:
New England Tournament (Manchester, NH) Competitors
1. Teams may either ship of bring their machine with them to the tournament.
2. After the tournament, all teams competing in the National Championship will have five days to make repairs and/or changes to their machines, within all rules outlined in this document
3. By end of business on Friday, April 5, machines must be picked up by a shipper for transport. This will give all New England teams five additional days to work on their machines.
National Championship participants only
1. Teams must ship their machines by end-of-business on Tuesday, April 2, 1996.
2. This will give all teams competing in only the National Championship an equal number of days to work on their machines as team competing in both events.------------------------------------

So, if you notice, this was not done to limit involvement by participants. It was done to try to equalize the number of workdays depending on if teams went to one or two events. You were allowed to work on your robot all the way upto and through the regional if you chose. Since the CMP required shipping robots to Disney, equalizing dates were imposed. Teams had 5 days to work on their robots after the first event before being required to give it up.

Actual "shipday" rules were not imposed until 1997. From the 97 manual:
----------------------------------------------------------
1. Machines MUST BE OUT OF TEAM HANDS by 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb 25, 1997. This means you many ship the robot or drive the robot to the drayage/storage facility of your first event by 5:00 p.m. on February 25.

Regional Competitors
1. After competing in a Regional, any teams competing in another event will have two days to make repairs and/or changes to their machines, within all rules outlined in this document.
2. Machines MUST ARRIVE as the next site by the next Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.
-----------------------------------------------
After talking with some oldtimers from this era, they believe that the main reason for these changes in 1997 were due to LOGISTICS concerns. When events started to be scheduled on back to back weekends in 97, FIRST had to reduce the amount of time teams had to do repairs in order to make sure the crates could get to their destination in time.

Eventually (2002) the weekend hold back period was eliminated completely, again this was mainly to avoid the logistical complexity of hundreds of teams trying to all ship from various locations and instead allowed FIRST to control all of the logistics of all of the machines from the beginning to the end of the season by shipping direct from event to event. Again, the removal of these hands on repair and improve windows had nothing to do with limiting access by team, it was for LOGISTICS.

Phase forward to today. ALL of the Logistics for ALL of the teams are now entirely up to the teams and not any centralized control. So why does FIRST still maintain these rules? Seriously, they are nothing more than an artifact of an obsoleted system. Everyone who put the original rule in place at FIRST HQ is gone, yet these rules remain. Teams now attend anywhere from 1 to 6 events per season, so equalization of access time is functionally impossible, yet these rules remain.
So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

Mark Sheridan

09-05-2013, 20:31

So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

+1

Tetraman

09-05-2013, 21:54

So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

I'd say half and half. It's not smart at all to just keep doing things because thats how they have been done, but I am still in the camp that the rules as they exist (with some tweaks) are the best way to go.

To argue for why an "open access" build is in my opinion wrong for FIRST, is because of the competition schedule. Consider that there was open access to the robot at all times. Some teams don't have their first Regional event until week 4 or 5. A good majority of teams in those week 4 or 5 regional have at least been to one other event. I would argue that the teams who have been to a previous event have a massive advantage over those who hadn't.

Teams that know how their robot plays in a game of first and can correct it over the course of 2 to 3 weeks have a gigantic advantage over those who have so many more extra weeks of build and gameplay footage but no knowledge on how their robot actually does with 5 others on the real field. I'd argue further to say that in this scenario the best teams will HAVE to make week 1 event if they want to have any sort of competitiveness for the future events.

Open build would give too much advantage to teams with the capability to travel long distances to their events or have events nearby for attending both a week 1-3 and week 4-6.

Keeping the robot out of the hands of teams during the competition season maintains that robots and teams can be as equal as they were at the end of the competition season since the beginning of it - but doesn't stop teams from fixing their problems and getting better over time. This year so many teams got better as the events went on, but it wasn't overwhelming to push out teams who hadn't got a taste of action on the field.

I think the 30lb allowance is fine. It allows for robots to evolve and can keep teams busy, if they want to be busy, during the competition events but isn't that much unfair as being able to redo half of a robot in 2-3 weeks.

Jim Zondag

09-05-2013, 23:43

In 2013, despite all the successes of all the teams represented on these forums, the Median OPR of the league after 1 event played was 10.3.
Over 1200 teams had a net contribution of 10 points or less per match. This level of accomplishment could be achieved in Ultimate Ascent by simply building a kit chassis with two stationary hooks on top. Since HALF of the league cannot achieve this basic level of play in their first outing, it is very hard for me to understand statements that say that we are giving teams enough time to be successful. We are not. 13% of the league has a sub-zero OPR at their first event. This means that our league is producing over 300 teams per year who NEVER EVEN SCORE AT ALL in their first event. This is a design failure of our system. (and I doubt than any of those teams are represented here).

Sure, many of these teams would still not be successful if we gave them more time, but many of them would get much better. Look at the data. After two outings the median MORE THAN DOUBLES to 24 points per team per match. This is huge. The average of the top teams does not change very much, but number of negative almost completely disappears.

What this is telling us is that with some time to work on their machines, get on a playing field, get help from other teams, and benchmark other's solutions,
HUNDREDS of teams move from a position of NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY, to a position of BEING ABLE TO POSITIVELY CONTRIBUTE to their alliance's success. However, since 1400 teams only played once this year; many, many teams never get this opportunty to improve. And because of this, many of them fail and do not return to the FRC. And this is the real problem. The most difficult place to start a FIRST team is at a school where they previously decide to quit FRC in the past. Our current system is somewhat designed to kill teams early in their life cycle.

http://i.imgur.com/Zkxv5HS.jpg

These trends are essentially the same, year after year after year, regardless of game design. When registration closes next fall, take a look at where all of the teams who drop out of FRC fall on these charts. The key to improving the sustainablity of FRC is to get teams to a reasonable success plateau early in their team history, ideally in their first season. Then they are likely to stay. Right now the FRC system works against this goal in many ways.

Some of the people on this post say they may quit if the rules were changed, however we already have a system which actively kills teams by the hundreds each year. Which is worse?

s_forbes

10-05-2013, 00:11

... HUNDREDS of teams move from a position of NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY, to a position of BEING ABLE TO POSITIVELY CONTRIBUTE to their alliance's success. However, since 1400 teams only played once this year; many, many teams never get this opportunty to improve.

I think this may be a misleading graphical representation of the time input vs performance for the reason you stated here. I'd suspect many teams that put in the effort to raise the funds to attend two regionals also put in more effort to build a robot that performs well. Their performance isn't based on playing time at regional events, there's just a correlation between the effort spent building a high performance robot and the effort spent raising funds for multiple regionals. I do agree that robot performance increases if a team has the opportunity to attend multiple regionals, however, and also agree with the point you're making.

With the way our team operates during the build season, I would prefer to have no bag day. We build a practice robot to get more tweaking time in, and in doing so we waste a lot of man-hours and resources just to build the second robot. With no bag day, and no need for a practice robot, we would be expending fewer resources to get the same performance out of our competition robot (which would allow us to take more days off during build season).

With the amount we spent doing fast R&D and building a practice robot to work around the bag deadline, we could have potentially gone to another regional instead (if it was priced similar to district events).

Tristan Lall

10-05-2013, 00:18

A couple of methodological points, just to be rigorous about this:
Over 1200 teams had a net contribution of 10 points or less per match.
[...]
13% of the league has a sub-zero OPR at their first event. This means that our league is producing over 300 teams per year who NEVER EVEN SCORE AT ALL in their first event.
How are fouls being accounted for, if at all? As negative points? Could a portion of those 300 therefore be scoring fewer points than they receive in fouls? (This is of course still awful, but it doesn't mean they didn't score.)

Sure, many of these teams would still not be successful if we gave them more time, but many of them would get much better. Look at the data. After two outings the median MORE THAN DOUBLES to 24 points per team per match. This is huge. The average of the top teams does not change very much, but number of negative almost completely disappears.
Isn't that confounded by the likelihood that many of the worst teams only participate in one event (and thus their badness isn't reflected in the event 2 statistics)?

To measure the actual improvement, we'd want to separate out the event 1 performance of teams that participate in 2 or more events, and compare that to those teams' 2nd events. (And even after doing that, you wouldn't expect this 2-or-more-week group to be representative of the 1-week teams, because attendance at a second event—especially outside of district play—is probably strongly correlated with greater resources and organization.)

Our current system is somewhat designed to kill teams early in their life cycle.
I think "designed" is probably too strong a characterization. It's nevertheless completely fair to say that the system is pretty good at it.

Ian Curtis

10-05-2013, 00:27

I think this may be a misleading graphical representation of the time input vs performance for the reason you stated here. I'd suspect many teams that put in the effort to raise the funds to attend two regionals also put in more effort to build a robot that performs well. Their performance isn't based on playing time at regional events, there's just a correlation between the effort spent building a high performance robot and the effort spent raising funds for multiple regionals. I do agree that robot performance increases if a team has the opportunity to attend multiple regionals, however, and also agree with the point you're making.

Jim, can you do the same thing comparing 1st and 2nd event just Michigan and MAR teams? I have to imagine it shows the same trend.

So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

Some of the people on this post say they may quit if the rules were changed, however we already have a system which actively kills teams by the hundreds each year. Which is worse?

And if we do it for a season and it does really end the world as we know it... who says we can't go back?

Open build would give too much advantage to teams with the capability to travel long distances to their events or have events nearby for attending both a week 1-3 and week 4-6.

I absolutely disagree. Closed build season gives the 2 event team at least 8 matches on the real field, plus a few practice matches, PLUS 3 days to work on their robot for their event registration. Meanwhile a team that is not competing does not get to practice, AND gets no time to work on their robot. Multi-event teams HAVE a huge advantage as is. Instead of leaving 1 event teams to be sitting ducks, moving to an open build season at least lets them learn, make changes, and most importantly practice like multi-event teams.

Mr. Van

10-05-2013, 00:37

Jim brings up some valid points. Obviously teams that are not successful are not inspired to continue, but I don't believe that extending the build season will help these teams to the extent hoped. The reasons a team is not able to build a functioning robot (a drivable base with some articulated hooks on it, for example) are many and varied, but I would argue that a build season that is too short is not one of them.

One of the major reasons is that teams perpetually "bite off more than they can chew". Another is that they refuse to use items like the kit-bot chassis, or they may simply not have the technical skills necessary to build a working robot at all. These problems will happen if the season is opened-ended or if there is a time limit, unless the teams have better mentorship.

As Jim notes, real improvements occur when teams get on an official game field, play against other teams and gain the experience of driving a robot in a competition. It is a real shame of our system is that half of the teams are "one-timers". At least we agree on that! It seems that the district system will help in that basic registration includes two events, but overall, this is a major problem.

To me, however, the solution to improving robot (and therefore team) performance is to improve mentorship and provide more opportunity to actually play the game. This does not require a longer build season.

I doubt that the CD community will be able to come to any sort of consensus on this issue, but I'm glad that we've brought this question up for debate.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

Siri

10-05-2013, 01:15

First, Jim, thank you very much. This offers very, very valuable perspective on the matter that we've only really alluded to thus far. I'd look forward to any MAR/FiM exclusive data you might have. It might not be as dramatic--among other causes, they're quite competitive regions, both due to and resulting in the district model--but I'd bet it's something.

Open build would give too much advantage to teams with the capability to travel long distances to their events or have events nearby for attending both a week 1-3 and week 4-6.I would hope that in many if not most places, an open season would make FRC practice more like FLL., FTC and VEX: scrimmages aren't for "off-season". If some off-seasons moved to off-event weeks (in their area) during competition season, teams wouldn't have to travel so far or pay so much just to play on an at least semi-real field with other teams. (Semi-real given the logistics of getting a real field in competition season.) It might make easier replicablity/shippablity a constraint on the FRC GDC the way it is on the others--but heck, shouldn't it be anyway? It's certainly well past worth it.

One of the major reasons is that teams perpetually "bite off more than they can chew". Another is that they refuse to use items like the kit-bot chassis, or they may simply not have the technical skills necessary to build a working robot at all. These problems will happen if the season is opened-ended or if there is a time limit, unless the teams have better mentorship. [emphasis mine]Another culture change I find likely--perhaps naively--if the season got more open is further inter-team mentorship. If the strong teams weren't trying to cram so much into so little time, there'd be more of a chance to help others. This would be particularly potent if the powerhouses we're all trying to keep up with decided it was a good use of their time--which I suspect many would.

We helped and worked with a few teams a bit even with build, but if I look at what FLL does and the scrimmage we host, I know it could be a lot more. We couldn't add more more collaboration meetings or get more people on our pyramid in 6 weeks--but we did have one team that actually used their unbag time with us. A open season makes scheduling stuff like this much more doable. There's only so much you can do to help before the game comes out--so many of the struggles (though not in the teams we collaborated with directly) I see come from misinterpreting the game or mis-prioritizing what one's team is capable of managing.

In short, it's not just the time itself; it's the culture change it could catalyze.

dtengineering

10-05-2013, 01:52

I was originally planning to post my expression of support for the six week build period... but Jim's well-researched posts, in particular, have caused me to re-think this. Having an extended build season with some form of milepost along the way might be a worthwhile experiment.

One thing that bothers me during tech inspection is that there are teams that clearly have not read the rule book. It would be great to announce the game, publish the rule book, and then require teams to pass on online rules test before receiving their KoP. (I wish I could remember who originally posted this suggestion... I think it is brilliant.)

I've also thought that it would be good to have a pre-build, design-only period, where teams are allowed to design, model, sketch and plan, but not actually build anything. Unfortunately, this would be difficult to define and impossible to enforce... however with a longer build period I could have told my team, "no one builds anything for the first two weeks". As it turns out, the more experienced we got at the game, the more time we spent on CAD and the less time we spent re-building... more time for design would have been nice.

It would have also been nice to have more time to spend refining the control system. We tried building practice bots, but usually by the end of build we were so burned out (and often getting things ready for our first event) that we never really used them to full potential. Perhaps we could have teams document their robot photographically, uploading the photos on a certain date, and allow no physical changes to the machine other than wiring and sensors between that date and the team's first event. (At which point they could bring in 30 pounds of withholding allowance and make physical changes at the event.) Again, it would be awkward to define, and difficult to enforce, but our programmers deserved more time with the machine. Heck, even a few more days of driver practice would have helped sometimes.

It was also difficult to find working professionals who could make the comittment to attend build sessions three or four nights each week. Without that kind of comittment, it is hard to have a real impact on robot design, especially in the first couple weeks when prototypes and models are created, evaluated, modified and replaced in very short order.

Perhaps most disappointingly, however, we were so busy building our robot that I was only able to get out to assist other local teams a few times during build season.

There are good things about the six-week window, and once we learned to build the best robot that our team could build, rather than trying (unsucessfully) to build the best robot that 1114 could build, it actually wasn't as crazy as it was our first few years. Like I say, I was originally planning to post my support for continuing the six-week limitation.

But I think the arguments put forth in this thread have convinced me that it might be worth trying something new.

Jason

Zuelu562

10-05-2013, 06:44

I think we're reaching a crossroads with this issue. In the world where Regionals exist and teams exist that only go to one, I think the 6 week build is necessary. With the proliferation of the district system (FiM, MAR, and this year, NE), I think that an open build is not only plausible, but probably the correct solution. I don't think we need to go to that now, nor need to segment the teams that participate in the district system from the rest of the FRC world via rules changes.

Granted, if we allow open build in the district system, going to a week 1 and week 6 district to allow for the "most" time on field and for fixes. Just as the initial 6 week rule was added for a logistical issue, so too will another system accounting for districts. Do I like the 6 week system, even if it is a marketing slogan at this point? Yes. Do we need it forever? No. Do we need to change now? Not necessarily.

Bongle

10-05-2013, 07:02

We are not. 13% of the league has a sub-zero OPR at their first event. This means that our league is producing over 300 teams per year who NEVER EVEN SCORE AT ALL in their first event. This is a design failure of our system. (and I doubt than any of those teams are represented here).
To build a running, driving kitbot takes an experienced team about a day. If another team is seriously 40 times slower than an experienced team, the problem here isn't the time available, it's that the slower team simply isn't using the knowledge available to them over the internet and from more experienced teams.

Really, the teams that haven't managed to score 10 points probably DO have a kitbot, and probably DO have hooks, but for some reason (electrical, programming, broken chains, etc) maybe don't move in a given match.
The problem is that they, like every team I've ever been on, plan their robot build to fill the available time minus about a minute, and never plan on sustained testing. Given a 7, 8, or 9 week build time, they'll build a more-complicated robot that does more stuff, again spend 30 seconds on testing, then again be surprised when it fails on field.

pfreivald

10-05-2013, 09:04

It seems to me that some of these arguments are better formulated as, "Week zero events are critical for robot success".

Instead of extending the build time, FIRST could put an extra week between stop build day and the first regional in order for more teams to plan and execute week zero events -- and allow unbagging and work at those events...

...and directly encourage/foster/help ensure that every area has an event that teams can attend.

Nemo

10-05-2013, 10:26

Isn't that confounded by the likelihood that many of the worst teams only participate in one event (and thus their badness isn't reflected in the event 2 statistics)?

To measure the actual improvement, we'd want to separate out the event 1 performance of teams that participate in 2 or more events, and compare that to those teams' 2nd events. (And even after doing that, you wouldn't expect this 2-or-more-week group to be representative of the 1-week teams, because attendance at a second event—especially outside of district play—is probably strongly correlated with greater resources and organization.)

Here's just the teams that attended 2 or more events.

14812

rick.oliver

10-05-2013, 11:26

... So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

What he said!

thefro526

10-05-2013, 12:30

Some mentors/coaches are saying that they are stressed because they spend too much money building a practice robot and have to rush on Thursday mornings to install their 30 lb. withholding allowance mechanism. If only they didn't have to do these things, but could continue working on the actual competition robot, their lives would be less stressful and there would be less mentor burnout.

There is a simple solution here: Don't build a practice robot. Don't use the 30 lb. withholding allowance.

Ah, but you want to stay competitive with those who do. There are teams willing to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of mentor-hours refining their robots with every nanosecond of time available. These teams turn out the most competitive robots, and to keep up with them, you have to do the same...

Will these teams really put in any less time or effort? Of course not. The primary difference (should we extend the official build season) is that these teams will have an easier time doing what they already do - and they will push the envelope even further.

Those of us trying to keep up with the "elite" teams will be in the exact same situation - little will change. Except that we will loose teams because we will loose mentors who can't keep up with the extended time demands.

I don't know if I follow your logic here and if I do, I don't think I agree with it.

What you're saying is that we remove the withholding allowance and discourage the construction of practice robots in order to decrease the amount of mentor burnout? Will a mentor be less burned out if they are forced to spend a season leading a team with a subpar design into multiple competitions where they have no chance than if they were to lead the same team into their competitions with 30lbs in machine upgrades that they spent the last 2-3 weeks building?

I'd argue that they're both equally stressful and tiring - but in different ways. If the robot is bad or flawed in some way, you'll spend an entire season trying to keep students upbeat, happy and hopeful - not to mention that you may be fixing the machine after EVERY match. I don't know about everyone, but I know that I couldn't deal with that kind of stress without it eating into my personal life. On the other hand, given the same scenario where a team would be allowed to fix their machine via 30lbs of upgrade parts, a mentor would probably spend much of their time trying to keep their students focused, productive and engaged in the task at hand, and if things work out right, an upbeat and hopeful attitude could/would be a by product of that task.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that either way, a problem would still exist in either situation but the problem would be much different. It's kind of like the difference between not sleeping well one night because you're worried about something versus not sleeping because you were working towards a solution to a problem.

For those teams that are struggling just to get a robot finished, I believe that teams that having difficulty building a working robot in 6.5 weeks will have difficulty building a robot in 8 or 10 or 16 weeks.

FRC is a game of mentors. The best teams have the best mentors. Period.

Many teams have teacher/mentors who MUST be at EVERY meeting or work session. They can not miss a single day because the team can not meet or work unless they are there - per school district rules. Loose those mentors, loose the team.

Lastly, the only students who have commented on this thread have pointed out that they have other demands on their time outside of FRC.

I'll say it again: FRC is a game of mentors. If you want to maintain and expand the program, you must ensure that the mentors are there - ready, willing and able to do what they do. Any expansion of the build season will lead to loosing mentors - in fact many already find the extensions that so many seem to need to "be competitive" to be so stress inducing that they are forced to make the choice between being "competitive" and mentoring at all.

Maintain the limited build season.

Remove the withholding allowance.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

I agree that FRC is a game of mentors and the amount of time that the head mentor(s)/teacher(s) spend is one of the biggest factors in a teams success. I think the scenario that we're shooting for by 'ending build season' is one where these key mentors/teachers don't have to spend 'as much' time per week on FRC to be successful.

The thing that many people seem to be missing about ending the rigid 6.5 week build season deadline is that no one is FORCING anyone to work more and/or longer than before. It only allows those teams that WANT to spend more time on FRC to do so without some of the more annoying restrictions - and gives those teams that couldn't do certain things like practice driving, make new parts, whatever, a way to do so without necessarily incurring extra expenses.

rick.oliver

10-05-2013, 14:19

... The thing that many people seem to be missing about ending the rigid 6.5 week build season deadline is that no one is FORCING anyone to work more and/or longer than before. It only allows those teams that WANT to spend more time on FRC to do so without some of the more annoying restrictions - and gives those teams that couldn't do certain things like practice driving, make new parts, whatever, a way to do so without necessarily incurring extra expenses.

I agree with your assessment of the benefit of eliminating the restrictions. I am not sure that any of those posting in favor of retaining the current system are missing the point that those of us in favor of eliminating the restrictions are trying to make. All have offered valid points and I am sure that there may be consequences which none of us has considered.

I appreciate the varied participation and respect folks for sharing their honest perspectives. I sincerely believe that the subject will be discussed by FIRST; perhaps it is discussed on a regular basis already.

I understand the value of a marketing slogan and if that is really the only reason the rules remain the same I can accept it and will work to grow our team's resources so that we become more competitive. I know that it will also make us a stronger team, as was pointed out in a previous post.

The argument which creates angst with me is the notion that I must be saved from myself. That simply runs counter to my value system.

Bob Steele

10-05-2013, 15:41

To be honest I got a little tired of the "Built in six weeks" mantra at CMP

NASA doesn't get a "30 lb allowance" when it sends something to MARS

I appreciate the idea of a finite build season.... but it truly does not exist.

Really good teams work 12 months a year.
Really good teams work 2 months a year.

FIRST is about inspiration...
I can be equally inspired by what a team does with limited resources including time or by what a team does that is organized and has greater time and resources.

This thread was begun to discuss Mentor Burnout..
No amount of changing the rules will stop that... Mentors choose how much they participate for a number of reasons. If you changed the build season you would still get mentors putting in hours and hours because they want to inspire students.

No one is forcing anyone to do anything. You can mentor a team once a week or 7 days a week. 2 months a year or 12 months a year.

It all comes down to the individual mentor.
I know mentors whose schedules would be total burnout for most mentors yet they are ready for more.

I know mentors who get burned out with schedules that are relatively short.

In my opinion, you have to like students and challenges.
You also have to see the results of your time and effort and feel valued.

As a coach I spend a great deal of my time making sure everyone on the team knows how valued and important they truly are.

AllenGregoryIV

10-05-2013, 16:09

No one is forcing anyone to do anything. You can mentor a team once a week or 7 days a week. 2 months a year or 12 months a year.

It all comes down to the individual mentor.
I know mentors whose schedules would be total burnout for most mentors yet they are ready for more.

I know mentors who get burned out with schedules that are relatively short.

In my opinion, you have to like students and challenges.
You also have to see the results of your time and effort and feel valued.

As a coach I spend a great deal of my time making sure everyone on the team knows how valued and important they truly are.

This fantastic

Alan Anderson

10-05-2013, 16:51

No one is forcing anyone to do anything. You can mentor a team once a week or 7 days a week. 2 months a year or 12 months a year.

I want to be there for the team when I am needed. Being needed more than a few days a week for longer than a month and a half exceeds my willingness to make FRC a priority.

If the build season were to be extended, I would have to scale back my involvement significantly. I think that is true of most mentors on the team. I am certain that a longer build season would make teachers more wary of participating. I believe the team -- and the students -- would suffer because of it.

rick.oliver

10-05-2013, 17:26

... If the build season were to be extended, I would have to scale back my involvement significantly. I think that is true of most mentors on the team. I am certain that a longer build season would make teachers more wary of participating. I believe the team -- and the students -- would suffer because of it.

I understand Alan's point and I respect his perspective. I agree that the outcome Alan describes is, for some - perhaps many, a real possibility. I maintain that it becomes a choice. I have made the choice in some cases to invest significantly more time and effort beyond the first 6 weeks.

I also recognize that the outcome is an uncertainty at this point. I believe that if the bag deadline were eliminated, then wise adults would adapt appropriately and that the net impact would be a benefit to FRC.

pfreivald

10-05-2013, 18:40

I understand Alan's point and I respect his perspective. I agree that the outcome Alan describes is, for some - perhaps many, a real possibility. I maintain that it becomes a choice.

Of course it's a choice. The question is whether or not we want to foster a reality where you either build competitive FRC robots or do anything else.

AllenGregoryIV

10-05-2013, 18:55

Of course it's a choice. The question is whether or not we want to foster a reality where you either build competitive FRC robots or do anything else.

I don't think removing the build window alters reality that much. It gives teams with less resources the choice to build longer like many teams already do with practice robots. It give people more choices. There are competitive teams without practice robots now but its harder. There are also competitive teams that don't meet insane hours and take 2-3 days off each week.

The biggest point I'm going to keep restating is that removing the build window will allow a lot more time to help teams get better. More pre-event practice sessions, pre-event inspections and time to get help with problems. A huge subset of teams just plain need more time to work on their robot before it can be something that runs well at competition.

pfreivald

10-05-2013, 18:56

You are right that there's a difference between the teams trying to become functional and teams trying to compete with the best.

Bongle

10-05-2013, 19:32

I don't think removing the build window alters reality that much. It gives teams with less resources the choice to build longer like many teams already do with practice robots. It give people more choices. There are competitive teams without practice robots now but its harder. There are also competitive teams that don't meet insane hours and take 2-3 days off each week.

The biggest point I'm going to keep restating is that removing the build window will allow a lot more time to help teams get better. More pre-event practice sessions, pre-event inspections and time to get help with problems. A huge subset of teams just plain need more time to work on their robot before it can be something that runs well at competition.

But the problem is that there's also a large subset of teams that will use that additional time to become EVEN MORE competitive at competition. Mid-tier teams will hit the performance previously reserved for elite teams, while elite teams will hit new highs. Teams that previously would have fielded unreliable boxes on wheels will field reliable boxes on wheels with unreliable game pieces ... and still come dead last, provoking CD conversations about "oh, they just need more time".

The problem here is this:
[2 week build] A team that fields an nonmoving robot among a field of barely-working robots will be uninspired
[6 week build] A team that fields a moving robot among a field of mostly-working robots will be uninspired
[4 month build] A team that fields a pretty decent robot among a field of 2013-einstein-level robots will be uninspired.

Teams that field relatively bad robots will not be happy. No matter the build length, someone will have a zero-and-N record, and those people will leave unhappy. What we currently build would look amazing to a bizarro FIRST that has a 3-week build season, but yet there are still unhappy teams. Similarly, what a 4-month-FIRST would build would look alien to us in terms of quality, but there'd still be teams that were unsuccessful. And burned out mentors.

So we know this:
-Low-performing teams will probably remain low-performing and still come away thinking the top 2/3s of teams are cheating/adult-built/insane.
-Mid-tier teams will probably kill their mentors and students chasing their dreams of being elite for 4 months instead of 6 weeks.
-Elite teams will either kill their mentors and students, or will have the luxury of working a bit less intensely thanks to excellent ingenuity or sponsor support.

AllenGregoryIV

10-05-2013, 20:06

But the problem is that there's also a large subset of teams that will use that additional time to become EVEN MORE competitive at competition. Mid-tier teams will hit the performance previously reserved for elite teams, while elite teams will hit new highs. Teams that previously would have fielded unreliable boxes on wheels will field reliable boxes on wheels with unreliable game pieces ... and still come dead last, provoking CD conversations about "oh, they just need more time".

The problem here is this:
[2 week build] A team that fields an nonmoving robot among a field of barely-working robots will be uninspired
[6 week build] A team that fields a moving robot among a field of mostly-working robots will be uninspired
[4 month build] A team that fields a pretty decent robot among a field of 2013-einstein-level robots will be uninspired.

Teams that field relatively bad robots will not be happy. No matter the build length, someone will have a zero-and-N record, and those people will leave unhappy.

So we know this:
-Low-performing teams will probably remain low-performing and still come away thinking the top 2/3s of teams are cheating/adult-built/insane.
-Mid-tier teams will probably kill their mentors and students chasing their dreams of being elite for 4 months instead of 6 weeks.
-Elite teams will either kill their mentors and students, or will have the luxury of working a bit less intensely thanks to excellent ingenuity or sponsor support.

Those assumptions just aren't true. There don't have to be teams that have a zero and N record. Also the winless record isn't really the problem it's the perception that they spent a large part of their lives on something that wasn't even able to play the game at all because they were fixing frame perimeter issues or were overweight or they just didn't know what they were doing. I know of a very good team that winless recently because of problems and a very rough schedule. They are still very proud of their accomplishments because they were still playing the same game as everyone else. The problem is with the teams that don't get it and aren't playing the same game.

I'm pretty sure there is a limit to how much adding more time does for the already good teams. For example if you gave teams 6 years to build an FRC robot I don't think they would be that much better than many of the robots we saw this year.

The option of spending a huge amount of time trying to win is already there. I probably spent more time in my shop than nearly anyone in FRC (about 11 hours a day for almost all of build season and a large part of competition season, however very little of my time was spent working on the robot). How does giving mid-tier teams less work (not having to build a practice bot) make their jobs harder?

Assuming that low performing teams will remain low performing is just awful. Most of those teams just don't know better and giving more time for veterans to help them will open their eyes to what they are capable of.

Also, what qualifies a team as Einstein level? I think this year out of all them shows just what can be done by raising the level of competition. How many of the Einstein teams this year were traditional powerhouses? (I think only 2 had won it all before and for most of them it was their first trip.) Powerhouse teams didn't get that way by some sort of magic or right, they worked hard just like all the teams that were on Einstein this year. What I'm trying to say is that a pretty decent robot has a shot at winning against Einstein calabar robots, the gap isn't that big. However the gap from really bad to descent is pretty large and very noticeable to people watching our events.

IanW

10-05-2013, 21:11

... Having an extended build season with some form of milepost along the way might be a worthwhile experiment.

One thing that bothers me during tech inspection is that there are teams that clearly have not read the rule book. It would be great to announce the game, publish the rule book, and then require teams to pass on online rules test before receiving their KoP. (I wish I could remember who originally posted this suggestion... I think it is brilliant.)
...
Jason
I'm surprised fewer people haven't touched on these ideas.

First, having a milestone during an extended build season would not only give teams more time to identify and address issues, but also prepare students for the real world where, as I understand it, milestones in design projects are the norm. I recognize that most logical milestones, such as a preliminary inspection, would be hard to implement. However, if one was developed, I feel that it could be very beneficial.

Second, using rules tests as a barrier to entry isn't anything new in student design competitions. I joined a Formula SAE team this year (Go GFR, btw), where rules tests are part of the process of applying to competitions. I feel that this would be easier to implement, though there would need to be penalties in place for late completion/failing to complete the test. However, the penalties also couldn't prevent teams from competing. A rules test could even serve as the milestone described above.

Just some thoughts I had.

Mark Sheridan

10-05-2013, 21:37

I feel that this would be easier to implement, though there would need to be penalties in place for late completion/failing to complete the test. However, the penalties also couldn't prevent teams from competing. A rules test could even serve as the milestone described above.
.

How about penalizing teams who have not passed or taken the rules test by forcing them to put their robot into a bag after 6 week while everyone else can keep working on their robot?:D

This tread is a little too serious. Well a more piratical solution we used this year was: we talked to an inspector who mentors a neighboring team. he pointed out our shooter needed a shield. Saved us some time on thursday.

Chris Hibner

10-05-2013, 21:43

I want to be there for the team when I am needed. Being needed more than a few days a week for longer than a month and a half exceeds my willingness to make FRC a priority.

If the build season were to be extended, I would have to scale back my involvement significantly. I think that is true of most mentors on the team. I am certain that a longer build season would make teachers more wary of participating. I believe the team -- and the students -- would suffer because of it.

This is where I disagree. If someone came to me at work and said, "We have a project for you, and you have two options of how you want to do it. You can do it in 6 weeks, or you can do it in 12 weeks." What would I choose? Let's see, the first option would cause me to work nights and weekends and alienate my family, and the 2nd option would allow me to go home at night and have my weekends off. It seems like the 12 week option would lead to a lot fewer issues with the personal life.

Jim Zondag

10-05-2013, 21:49

Much of this thread focusses on the smaller part of the issue:

http://i.imgur.com/gTFWg1Z.jpg

EricH

10-05-2013, 21:57

Much of this thread focusses on the smaller part of the issue:

http://i.imgur.com/gTFWg1Z.jpg

Too easy, Jim. We just need a few (dozen) more District-model areas!

BTW, on the rules test and penalties: I suggest that if implemented, a team that averages above X% by a certain date gets to keep working on their competition robot. A team that averages below Y% (which is some reasonable amount below X%) must stay in the bag for an additional Z time, potentially up until their event. Teams in between X and Y must bag their robot, but if they reach X% within N attempts following bag day they may unbag immediately. Of course, the implementation of said test is a bit of a challenge, as is the enforcement of penalties.

Taylor Nicholson

10-05-2013, 22:10

But the problem is that there's also a large subset of teams that will use that additional time to become EVEN MORE competitive at competition. Mid-tier teams will hit the performance previously reserved for elite teams, while elite teams will hit new highs. Teams that previously would have fielded unreliable boxes on wheels will field reliable boxes on wheels with unreliable game pieces ... and still come dead last, provoking CD conversations about "oh, they just need more time".

The problem here is this:
[2 week build] A team that fields an nonmoving robot among a field of barely-working robots will be uninspired
[6 week build] A team that fields a moving robot among a field of mostly-working robots will be uninspired
[4 month build] A team that fields a pretty decent robot among a field of 2013-einstein-level robots will be uninspired.

Teams that field relatively bad robots will not be happy. No matter the build length, someone will have a zero-and-N record, and those people will leave unhappy. What we currently build would look amazing to a bizarro FIRST that has a 3-week build season, but yet there are still unhappy teams. Similarly, what a 4-month-FIRST would build would look alien to us in terms of quality, but there'd still be teams that were unsuccessful. And burned out mentors.

So we know this:
-Low-performing teams will probably remain low-performing and still come away thinking the top 2/3s of teams are cheating/adult-built/insane.
-Mid-tier teams will probably kill their mentors and students chasing their dreams of being elite for 4 months instead of 6 weeks.
-Elite teams will either kill their mentors and students, or will have the luxury of working a bit less intensely thanks to excellent ingenuity or sponsor support.

I disagree with your measure of inspiration here. There will always be differences in how others are inspired, but normalizing it to the level of robot competitiveness is not a model I would agree with.

The following representation is, in my opinion, how I think it might play out, going by your metrics:
[2 week build] A team that fields an nonmoving robot among a field of barely-working robots...
This team is uninspired. Even if they reach the level of their peers, they still have a barely-working robots, and I don't think anyone is inspired here. (not that anyone here would argue for less time)
[6 week build] A team that fields a moving robot among a field of mostly-working robots...
(If this is what we consider where we currently are…) This team is inspired to work hard to keep improving their robot, trying to get their robot to a fully functional level to compete against their peers.
[4 month build] A team that fields a pretty decent robot among a field of 2013-einstein-level robots...
Or the never-ending build... This team has worked all season learning and improving from their peers in parallel with competing with them. This team sees how to improve, and now has the time now to do that. They are inspired to try and reach a higher level because they are now within reach of it.

I think teams are far more inspired by being able to accomplish building robots fully capable of competing and playing the game, than just simply being inspired by how well they did. The latter might set a very bleak picture of FRC. If we were to assume inspiration based on success, then I think improvement in FRC would be very staggnant, and we would be lacking many up-and-coming teams. Fundamentally, teams, and individuals, drive to improve would be lost.

Why do some of us here think that 6 weeks, a somewhat arbitrarily set time, is the perfect length for build season? I think the 6 weeks is the reason for much burnout, not a limit being set to prevent more.

Siri

10-05-2013, 23:25

Second, using rules tests as a barrier to entry isn't anything new in student design competitions. I joined a Formula SAE team this year (Go GFR, btw), where rules tests are part of the process of applying to competitions. I feel that this would be easier to implement, though there would need to be penalties in place for late completion/failing to complete the test. However, the penalties also couldn't prevent teams from competing. A rules test could even serve as the milestone described above.Agreed. I think they really could pull off a rules test without much trouble, actually. Just throw the ref & inspector tests (or lite versions) onto STIMS and TIMS, and require say 70% of those registered to pass before the team has access to their PDV voucher codes. All electronic, totally enforceable. Even if teams go open book or take group tests, they'll still absorbing the information better than some do now.

Err...I think I've forgotten how this sub-topic connects to the thread title. Put me down for what Jim and Chris said.

I also agree with Taylor's paths of inspiration. We've never been 0-N exactly, but we went 2-9 at Pittsburgh 2007, with similar results elsewhere 07-08. We moved-ish mostly, in a direction or two. The most inspiring years of our team's history. I can trace it directly to our swerve drive, and in fact to every banner we've ever achieved. I just wish we'd had the opportunity to iterate more back then and receive more team mentorship to get better faster. The team is 9 years old and our first winning season was 2011. (thanks MOE!) We're now happy to be a mid-level team eagerly--but manageably--chasing the elites for 4 solid months of the year.

waialua359

11-05-2013, 07:51

Perhaps I may be a little biased being where we're from.
Since participating in FIRST in the 2000 season, and from personal observations, I think the #1 reason new/fairly new teams quit is because of money.
Many grants and/or regionals have startup funds to get teams going. After that, the real struggle begins on addressing sustainability, as opposed to mentor retention and being "not-inspired" as the primary reasons.

I personally like the 6 week build season. It teaches a lot of life lessons and skills for everyone on the team.
However, I am not opposed to eliminating Bag/Tag and allowing for continuous improvement throughout the season. Less time and less resources building a practice bot.

Tetraman

11-05-2013, 10:14

Jim Zondag

11-05-2013, 10:48

I think the #1 reason new/fairly new teams quit is because of money.
Many grants and/or regionals have startup funds to get teams going. After that, the real struggle begins on addressing sustainability

Glenn, I completely agree. FIRST has a 20 year old pricing structure on a league that has grown about 100x its original size in this period. One of the things that I see is that teams join FIRST to build robots, but after a few years, a noticeable amount of their effort shifts toward raising money. Many mentors (including me) really don't enjoy this type of thing, and it takes away from the core expereince. This is a big factor in sustainablity.

FRC is too expensive, I think most of us agree. Comparted to a mainstream sport, the enrollment fees are many times higher. This is not something that we have been able to change (yet).

Billfred

11-05-2013, 11:18

FRC is too expensive, I think most of us agree. Comparted to a mainstream sport, the enrollment fees are many times higher. This is not something that we have been able to change (yet).

Yes and no.

2815's long been a two-events-and-go-from-there team. Right now, that means six hotel nights (check in Wednesday night, check out Saturday), four days with a bus, and $9,000 in registration. We will write grants until our hands wear out, sweat and freeze selling programs at USC football games, cohost SCRIW (I don't walk the next day), and so on and so forth to be able to pull that off.

Okay, so being able to watch the game after we wrap up sales is kinda fun...and we wouldn't put on SCRIW if we didn't think it was worth it...but you get the idea. It's hard!

Were we in Michigan, we're down to two hotel nights (if that), four bus days (if that), and $5,000 in registration.

If our area had the team population (and density) to pull districts off, I'd be jumping on that train quickly!

Jim Zondag

11-05-2013, 23:50

Tetraman

12-05-2013, 00:24

But why is registration still $5000?
Read the FIRST annual report and try to answer this.
To hesitantly quote Mark Leon...."Do the math".
Try find another high school sport with a league enrollment fee this high. I cannot.

Our school's field and track (used for all of our sports) cost 6 million to repair three years ago. While not an enrollment fee, I'd call it somewhat of an "upkeep" to continue playing effectively similar to what we have to pay to keep our team registered.

I do at least feel the costs are too high, and would like to see a pie chart to what use and where our fees (all of our fees) are put to. *wink wink* Frank *wink wink*

waialua359

12-05-2013, 00:26

But why is registration still $5000?
Read the FIRST annual report and try to answer this.
To hesitantly quote Mark Leon...."Do the math".
Try find another high school sport with a league enrollment fee this high. I cannot.
Jim,
I am totally with you on this.
Reg pricing needs to be scaled down with the growth of FIRST. Its the responsible thing to do if the intent is to grow the no. of teams and sustain those that are currently participating. And of course, the district model is a step in the right direction.
The whole mentor burnout and build season are already tough enough to tackle as it is. And as I've read your previous posts, just because districts are cheaper, doesnt mean the work to put them on are less by any means.
Kudos to you all!

waialua359

12-05-2013, 00:32

I do at least feel the costs are too high, and would like to see a pie chart to what use and where our fees (all of our fees) are put to. *wink wink* Frank *wink wink*

I agree that the costs are much too high/event.
However, I dont think that its appropriate for Frank to do what you're suggesting.
Instead, we can all make suggestions via the official feedback form, and FIRST can decide in the future how they make those "crucial" decisions that affect everyone, including the organization themselves.

nuggetsyl

12-05-2013, 00:50

But why is registration still $5000?
Read the FIRST annual report and try to answer this.
To hesitantly quote Mark Leon...."Do the math".
Try find another high school sport with a league enrollment fee this high. I cannot.

Here is the real crime at MAR. First pays for nothing 0 zip nada. Its all covered by the reagional sponsers. Now I have no issue with paying for game design but its total crap that we have to pay for MAR champs another 4000 and first takes it all.

Cory

12-05-2013, 02:02

Here is the real crime at MAR. First pays for nothing 0 zip nada. Its all covered by the reagional sponsers. Now I have no issue with paying for game design but its total crap that we have to pay for MAR champs another 4000 and first takes it all.

How is that any different than every regional your team (or any other team) has ever attended (assuming that said regionals were raising enough money that they were not being propped up by FIRST)? Not saying it's right of FIRST to be structured this way, but this is hardly a new outrage.

Siri

12-05-2013, 02:13

How is that any different than every regional your team (or any other team) has ever attended (assuming that said regionals were raising enough money that they were not being propped up by FIRST)? Not saying it's right of FIRST to be structured this way, but this is hardly a new outrage.I think the issue is that it's literally impossible for MAR and FiM teams to qualify for Worlds based on initial registration. This can be very hard on some teams, though Region Champs provides a very good and inspiring season goal for others.

Of course, it works both ways: we get 2 events--almost triple the matches--for the price of one, is it really reasonable to get 3 including a "big show"? Personally, I think everyone's "price of one" should go way down, but it is a pro/con of districts.

Ed Law

12-05-2013, 03:53

I see a lot of posters tossing around the word 'inspiration' as if it blusters an argument. The assumption of "something that could add inspiration being inherently good for FIRST" is not a healthy one. Remember what inspires students more than any other part of the FIRST program: Mentors/teachers/coaches/parents/people. I really don't care if additional time to the build season inspires these kids - I want to know if this additional time actually solves the problem of mentor burnout so our mentors can continue to be the main source of leadership, innovation and inspiration for students.

And I think the answer is pretty basic: We don't know. As some of the mentors have already posted, if the build season does become extended they will feel hurt even more to keep up with the added time demands. On the other hand, other mentors say the additional time will increase their flexibility. So ultimately we won't know the true effect on ourselves and our teams if the build period is extended.

I think the worst part about this issue is that changing it will anger a lot of people but not changing it keeps a lot of people angry. The true answer is for FIRST to choose in what direction the program wants to take. If FIRST doesn't want to alter the system then that's fine with me. If FIRST does change I may not like it but I'll still do everything I can for my team and the problem because I believe in the program.

Otherwise I really have no answers to solve the problem of mentor burnout - except one: Is FIRST really the program for you?

I like how you summarized the sentiment on this subject. I can't help but draw a parallel to when Michigan proposed the district model and piloted it. There were a lot of oppositions, both inside and outside of Michigan. I don't need to repeat what people had said. I am sure there are still people who think the district model is a bad idea and they oppose it, but a majority of people finally saw the benefits of it and especially after Jim Zondag explained the thinking behind every change.

Change is always hard for some people when they don't know if it will benefit them. By allowing teams the option to access their robot any time if they want to, I don't see how it can hurt any team that does not build a practice robot. The only thing I can think of is for teams that do not build a practice robot thinks it will benefit teams that build a practice robot more than it benefits them. Because it will give these teams more time to concentrate on improving their robot rather than building and wiring another robot and raising more money to pay for it.

For my team, we plan everything to death. Right now in our build schedule, I see days to assemble the practice robot and to wire it. Based on our resources for each year, we decide what kind of robot to design and build so we can finish on time. Then we schedule enough work sessions to finish what we planned to do. We do not meet 7 days a week. In our first two years, we only met 4 days/17 hours a week. In the last few years, we increased it to 5 days/20 hours a week. My goal is to create a sustainable program, hence mentor/student burnout is part of my consideration when I decide on the meeting schedule.

How will it affect us if we have unlimited access to the robot? The first thing I will do is to reduce the number of meetings back down to 4 days 17 hours a week because we can accomplish the same tasks in 6 and a 1/2 weeks. It takes us about 20 hours to build a second robot. That will allow me to take out 3 hours of meeting time each week. On top of that, I will be a lot less stressed out when the two robots behave differently due to quality of build by students and some mentors.

I can handle 4 days a week. 5 days is a stretch for me. 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. My goal is not to have the most competitive robot and stress everybody out by doing so. I know it is not all about the robot but I also know students joined the robotics team to compete in robotics.

If teams do not want to build a second robot with the current rules, that is their choice. How many hours they meet is their choice. By removing the artificial stop build date, it does not change what teams have to do. It is still their choice. Removing the barrier to access the robot will make my life easier and a better experience for my students.

If you are wondering why it will be a better experience for my students, I will elaborate. Very few of them comes 5 days a week during build season. When students cannot attend all work sessions, they get lost. Things move so fast during build season that it is hard to keep up with the design and decisions if you miss too many meetings. Some students would loose interest and feel disconnected. If I can reduce the number of meetings to 4, a bigger percentage of students will be able to attend most meetings. Our team will be more cohesive. Everybody will be on the same page. We do have weekly team meetings where each subgroup will report on their work but it is not the same.

So for those of you who oppose this possible change, were you opposed to the district model before also? Would you be willing to give it a chance?