Mythical Six Week Build Season

[Bill Beatty]

Is it time to eliminate the “six week” build season? Think about the tremendous savings of time and money if there was no six-week deadline. A number of folks will say that six weeks is long enough and if you expand the build season you’re going to have more mentor burn out.

Actually, the majority of the leading teams build two robots and continue to develop, improve, and practice throughout the entire FIRST season. That coupled with the withholding allowance and the practice and pit time at the various regional and district competitions allows teams to legally make major changes.

You could eliminate the building of a second robot, which most of the leading teams do. You could continue to practice, debug, and improve the one robot that you take to the competitions. And you can eliminate the “bag and tag” nonsense.

If you want to keep the six week build season, then make it an actual six week limit. Make it illegal to continue to work and practice after the ship/bag date. Otherwise eliminate it completely.

Comments?

[Christopher149]

I need some break in the spring to work on my senior design project, so I want there to still be a limit.

[Lil' Lavery]

It's probably about time we had this discussion again. For reference, here are a couple previous discussions on similar topics.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=116658
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=126848
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116789


P.S. Awesome to see Bill posting again.

[AdamHeard]

I need some break in the spring to work on my senior design project, so I want there to still be a limit.

Simple, choose to stop working.

Just like you can choose to not work on a practice robot now.

[Jay O'Donnell]

I think you would find that teams would just look at whatever the best robots are in the first few weeks (254s and 1114s of the world) and start building a whole new robot for later events and championships.

However everything involving money and time spent would be a lot nicer.

[JVN]

I'd be 100% in favor of eliminating "bag day" and shifting to a "kickoff-to-competition" schedule. We'd do less work, be less stressed, and consume less resources while probably providing a better educational experience.

[Lil' Lavery]

I think you would find that teams would just look at whatever the best robots are in the first few weeks (254s and 1114s of the world) and start building a whole new robot for later events and championships.

I would love to hear the perspectives of FTC and VRC teams on this line of thought. They have an even larger competition window and much more affordable robots, making strategies like this even more feasible.

[Karthik]

I think you would find that teams would just look at whatever the best robots are in the first few weeks (254s and 1114s of the world) and start building a whole new robot for later events and championships.

However everything involving money and time spent would be a lot nicer.

I would love to hear the perspectives of FTC and VRC teams on this line of thought. They have an even larger competition window and much more affordable robots, making strategies like this even more feasible.

This is very common in VRC. By the time we get to VEX Worlds in April, design convergence has usually set in, with 2-3 designs that have been extensively cloned/copied. Some teams really like this, others really don't.

[AllenGregoryIV]

It did seem a little quiet around here lately. :)

I've made my stance clear for a long time, the six week build season negatively impacts lower resource teams to a greater degree then large resource teams to the detriment of the entire program.

If we remove the build season limitation across the board we will see a dramatic increase of the quality of the product that we put on the field in front of the public.

Teams have more time to

Share ideas and teach during the season
make their robots professional looking (paint, etc)
iterate, tune, and tweak
Practice, Practice, Practice


The only argument I see against the limit is burn out, but a large amount of teams are already essentially building right up to and through Champs (or IRI). So if a team wants to stop after the 45 days they are able to and won't be at any further disadvantaged then they are now.

[marshall]

I'm in favor of getting rid of it. I got some evil stares from mentors when I said FIRST would eventually get rid of it about 2 years ago at a meeting but I stand by that statement. It will eventually go away.

I suspect we'd see less convergence than everyone thinks but I could be wrong.

[GeeTwo]

Getting rid of the six week season will make keeping rookies (and new mentors) on the team a bit harder.

Stop Build Day (n), also known as Bag and Tag: Another fairy tale told to help keep rookies going for a few more hours when "Offseason" seems too far away.

It would probably also make the act of packing for the first trip to competition twice as stressful as it already is, since there will be much less packing until the last minute. Also, the withholding allowance format encourages adaptability and consistency in dimensions as a requirement in the design process.

[AdamHeard]

Getting rid of the six week season will make keeping rookies (and new mentors) on the team a bit harder.



It would probably also make the act of packing for the first trip to competition twice as stressful as it already is, since there will be much less packing until the last minute. Also, the withholding allowance format encourages adaptability and consistency in dimensions as a requirement in the design process.

Weird.

We're very transparent on our team that we essentially work year round, and that build season extends through the last day of champs. Doesn't seem to cause anyone to lose faith halfway through.

[Mark Sheridan]

I think more mentors are lost when they realize the time commitment is more than they expected. I think my team is better at being up front on how much time it takes to mentor. We no longer describe the commitment as only the build season but include the full length of competition.


P.S. Hey Bill is back!

[AllenGregoryIV]

This is very common in VRC. By the time we get to VEX Worlds in April, design convergence has usually set in, with 2-3 designs that have been extensively cloned/copied. Some teams really like this, others really don't.

We will see a slight rise in design convergence but not a whole lot more then we already do. Rebuilding an entire FRC robot is a lot of work with or without the bag restraints. Removing the bag restraints isn't going to instantly motivate teams to put in that kind of effort. We see teams rebuild in season every year (we did it, 973 did it, etc).

FRC is a different animal than VRC.

Less time between first competition and championship
harder to rebuild/build a robot in that time frame
more expensive to copy a design
much, much harder to get it right when you do copy a design
few teams will just wait for 7 weeks to see what the top week 1 team does


We already saw design convergence with the systems that are easy to modify in many years. It didn't ruin anything.

2011 - Minibots
2015 - Can Grabbers
2012- Bridge Balancing devices (stingers)

[avanboekel]

One major advantage of the current build format is that it only allows 1 robot to be associated with a team. There are a few scenarios in which I can see this being taken advantage of.

1) Team A built a good robot, but didn't manage to qualify for championships. Team B qualified (maybe as a 3rd robot or RAS), but doesn't have a very good robot. Again, Team B could potentially compete with a robot that they had no part in building.

2) Team C didn't build that great of a robot this year. They are friends with Team D that built a really good robot. Team C is competing in a week that Team D is not competing in. Team C in theory could compete with Team D's robot to give them a better chance at winning the event.

3) Team E has a lot of resources. They could build 2 different robots for use with different strategies. They can bring them both to competition, and just reinspect their chosen robot each time they want to play a different position in the game.

4) Cheesecaking could get out of hand (more than it already has) with teams literally bringing a full alliance worth of robots to swap with their partners.

Are there rules that could circumvent these scenarios? Probably, but these are definitely things that would need to be addressed before we drop bag day.

[orangemoore]

3) Team E has a lot of resources. They could build 2 different robots for use with different strategies. They can bring them both to competition, and just reinspect their chosen robot each time they want to play a different position in the game.

Are there rules that could circumvent these scenarios? Probably, but these are definitely things that would need to be addressed before we drop bag day.

Both robots would have to be under 120 pounds. Both robots combined could only have 1 control system. So this is pretty much prevented already.

[timytamy]

As an international team, we would need a stop build day regardless.

Generally, we need to crate and ship the robot at least a week before a regional. And if we're going to championships, or another overseas regional, there is no time to ship it back, work, and ship it out again.

Granted, in Australia we have a regional now. This however dosen't help a lot of other teams.

At the Australian regional, we were also very lucky to have some US teams come over. I think if you eliminated bag and tag, then teams that may be interested in going to regionals luck ours, would be discouraged for losing that 2 or more weeks or robot time in transit. I'd be intereseted to hear what the Hawaian teams think of this.

I think eliminating stop build day would give a massive boost in competetivness to many teams, but there would be a group that are left behind.

[PayneTrain]

I think it's in FIRST's best interests to eliminate bag day if they have any vested interest in improving both the on-field product (better competition) and off-field product (better and more numerous opportunities for education). I would assume they care about at least one of these things.

On top of that, FIRST has championed expanding the reach of the program to under-served areas. In fact, Don reiterated that point in the video released today. As it stands, a nontrivial number of teams are needlessly consuming thousands of dollars in redundant resources every year to field a practice robot. That money could be filtered back in to supporting additional existing or potential rookie teams without the current team suffering at all competitively.

"But Wil, they could just not build a practice robot now and filter that money back into the FIRST community."

Teams are run independently of what FIRST may want teams to focus on. Teams may find fielding a highly competitive program to be a better use of their time than helping to field an additional team that would risk both teams being less competitive than the original team. Eliminating bag day can help nudge teams to help out other teams.

[Monochron]

Simple, choose to stop working.

Just like you can choose to not work on a practice robot now.

While you are right, there are a lot of teams where if one or two particular people stop working with the team, then the team takes a serious hit. It's definitely not good for the team to be operating like that, but it is a reality. The decision to let so many people IS still up to you, but it isn't always a simple one.

[JB987]

I'd be 100% in favor of eliminating "bag day" and shifting to a "kickoff-to-competition" schedule. We'd do less work, be less stressed, and consume less resources while probably providing a better educational experience.

+1!...my opinion and not necessarily a reflection of how all the rest of my fellow advisors feel:D

[Seth Mallory]

I for one like the stop date. While the students will keep on working it will be at a lower level. No more nights or weekends. The main problem is that the main mentors need the break. By this point families want their members that they loaned to the team back. College work needs to be caught up. Yards and houses that have been ignored need worked on. Prepping for classes and other jobs needs to be done. Winding down and catching up on sleep is a health problem that needs to be addressed. I also miss being home enough to cook some meals.

[jman4747]

Yea, I'd say do away with it. If you plan your time right you won't have to cram in so many hours at the beginning. Mentors may not need to come as many days a week over a longer period.

Practice bots are subverted and shipping costs matter less because you can afford to wait longer. On that line of thought, I wonder how this would affect vendors like Rev, AndyMark, Vex, etc. (if at all).

[PayneTrain]

I for one like the stop date. While the students will keep on working it will be at a lower level. No more nights or weekends. The main problem is that the main mentors need the break. By this point families want their members that they loaned to the team back. College work needs to be caught up. Yards and houses that have been ignored need worked on. Prepping for classes and other jobs needs to be done. Winding down and catching up on sleep is a health problem that needs to be addressed. I also miss being home enough to cook some meals.

I have difficulty understanding this point of view. Do you not understand that

A) teams are already meeting after stop build day at a volume similar to build season

B) teams are not obligated to meet at the same volume after build season as they were before build season, and they would be under no other obligation to do that if bag day is eliminated

Or is there another breakdown somewhere?

[Scott Kozutsky]

I think eliminating stop build day would give a massive boost in competetivness to many teams, but there would be a group that are left behind.

You're definitely right but I, like many others it seems, think that it's for the greater good. You could still do the practice robot strategy that many teams already use, it just wouldn't be necessary for the other teams to also do it.

To prevent excessive cheesecaking, there could be a rule that you can't donate non-cots parts to another team (possibly with a "unless specifically allowed by the lead inspector" exemption for specific circumstances)

[gblake]

Hmmm, On the one hand ...

If I'm FIRST and I want to inspire students, and pack a real-world-style engineering/science/technology challenge into a period that enhances a student's education, without losing sight of everything else important in students' lives ... I might decide that 44 days is plenty long enough for the students to enjoy & receive the benefits of the Strategy-to-Delivery, before-a-deadline, part of the experience.

Hopefully, as the teams mature, their students and their mentors will learn to set realistic goals for what they set out to accomplish each season during that 44-day period.

Hopefully, during those 44 days, those teams that are able, will fan out to cooperate with neighboring teams that struggle to be ready for the competition events.

On the other hand ...

If you call the program a "competition", and if you turn the competitions into showcases, and if you create a program that celebrates excellence, it would be a little myopic to not expect constant overt and subconscious pressure from teams, and from almost everyone else, to put excellent robots onto the fields.

My 2 cents ...

Focus on expanding participation in the program, not on expanding the time & resources the program consumes. The program's vision can be accomplished more easily if competition-creep is resisted.

If people want to go nuts (in a good way) squeezing as many accomplishments as they possibly can into the 44 days they get to invest in prepping for the competitions, the program doesn't need to try to hobble them, but that possible/optional aspect of the program shouldn't be the engine that pulls the train.

Be excellent for 44 days, then let the chips fall where they may.

Blake

[MrForbes]

I have difficulty understanding this point of view. Do you not understand that

A) teams are already meeting after stop build day at a volume similar to build season

How many teams do this? 5%? 10%? 20%?

There are a lot of teams that quit building on bag day, and they show up to the competition with 6 weeks worth of designed and built robot. It appears that most of them are not on CD during the off season, to comment on threads like this.

I like the 6 week cutoff. This year, our team is going to build two robots and keep going from January to April. Not my decision, but I'll go along and see how it works. We are not meeting as many hours each day, as well.

I understand that FIRST can't really control the whole practice robot thing, so it is really difficult to enforce stop build day.

I kind of like a firm deadline. I even depend on it, for most of my own projects. I can't seem to get anything done unless it needs to be done by such and such a day. Maybe I just use bag day as a crutch...or maybe the limited build time was part of the original idea of FRC...

[waialua359]

I like the stop build day.
I found it odd that some feel it's an advantage for less resource teams to get rid of it. I feel the opposite is true.
More resources will allow the "better" teams to take advantage of what they see and do a quick turnaround before the next subsequent event.

Getting rid of the 6 week build season helps some teams but not the Hawaii and international ones. I dont mind it in VEX because we are doing all of our events locally where we can drive to events, similar to teams in FRC that drive to their events.

I realize that we are in the minority, so I totally get why teams would want to get rid of it. We are very fortunate and have been lucky the past 6 years in being succesful at regionals despite making almost no changes or none at all to our robot that is bagged at the end of the season. In fact, it never comes back home until after championships.
We have also never had the time to ever build a 2nd robot, because we spend most of the time traveling all the time! :)
For us, it makes no difference doing a week 1 or a week 6 event, our drivers need to be ready because other than the last week of build season to hopefully practice and get drive time, that's it until they do an event, subsequent events, and at Championships.

I always chuckle a little when teams say an event is a work in progress and will be back better at the next one. These events cost $$$$, and for us who have to travel there, a whole lot more $$$$$$$. I try to stress to our team that at each and every event, we need to be prepared the same as the last one we do.

This in my opinion is what makes build season special.

[GeeTwo]

Weird.

We're very transparent on our team that we essentially work year round, and that build season extends through the last day of champs. Doesn't seem to cause anyone to lose faith halfway through.

How many teams do this? 5%? 10%? 20%?

There are a lot of teams that quit building on bag day, and they show up to the competition with 6 weeks worth of designed and built robot.

To be honest, the fiction of a six week build season helps keep me on the team, even though most years I'm the most gung-ho mentor (and often member in any capacity) to continue working until the season is over. While we certainly do not stop all robot work at bag and tag, we usually do take about a week off (or at least mostly off), apart from driver practice with the "other robot". After a week or two of driver practice and a week or two of watching videos, we'll work on adjustments. Key build team members usually work on designing and building adjustments, while other members work on getting the pits ready, organizing scouting, and other functions such as give-aways. We're usually back up to about 80% of the "build season" operations tempo by the time we go to Bayou.
I really believe that we would come out behind if we had a "full-on" development season right up to our competition, due to the numbers who would not commit anything. YMMV.

[Sperkowsky]

The 6 weeks is perfect without it the average team would probably stay the same and the Elite teams would probably have even better bots.

Although I would not mind practice robots becoming illegal just because its not feasible for most teams and creates an even more unfair playing field.

[PayneTrain]

How many teams do this? 5%? 10%? 20%?

There are a lot of teams that quit building on bag day, and they show up to the competition with 6 weeks worth of designed and built robot. It appears that most of them are not on CD during the off season, to comment on threads like this.

I like the 6 week cutoff. This year, our team is going to build two robots and keep going from January to April. Not my decision, but I'll go along and see how it works. We are not meeting as many hours each day, as well.

I understand that FIRST can't really control the whole practice robot thing, so it is really difficult to enforce stop build day.

I kind of like a firm deadline. I even depend on it, for most of my own projects. I can't seem to get anything done unless it needs to be done by such and such a day. Maybe I just use bag day as a crutch...or maybe the limited build time was part of the original idea of FRC...

I would say that over half of the teams quit on bag day, easily. They may even quit before. A lot of teams only work weekends. Some show up to competition with a box of parts or even an old robot. A few teams don't show up at all. Teams do a lot of things differently, and a big one is how much they meet. It doesn't really change the fact that bag day is an artificial wall that some either circumvent with money, time, or both, and some don't circumvent it at all.

Over half the roster at most events sit out during eliminations. Why not end the event there since most teams aren't doing much after qualification matches are over?

[mrnoble]

Awesome that we get to discuss this again.

The unintended consequences will be rampant, but in the end, there will still be three basic categories of FRC teams at competition:

top level teams, who work year round and take advantage of every opportunity and loophole available to win more;
low resource, low knowledge teams, who will come to competition with poor quality robots, and
teams who are willing to work ridiculously hard, but cant yet be called "elite" (if they ever get that far)


In other words, the rich would stay rich, the poor would stay poor, and a bunch of us would just keep chuggin'. So we might as well keep it the way it is.

My opinion.

[Whippet]

There are a lot of teams that quit building on bag day, and they show up to the competition with 6 weeks worth of designed and built robot. It appears that most of them are not on CD during the off season, to comment on threads like this.


I come from a team like this, so perhaps my input might be beneficial to this thread. Team 4301 consists of approximately 5 full-time students, about 10 more who go to meetings at least twice a week, and the physics teacher who has so generously given up his afternoons and weekends to allow the team to function. Our school district policy technically does not allow us to meet for more than an hour a day except on weekends, but we have been able to push it to 1:30 to 2 hours for short bursts when we really need it. We do not CAD or program at the meetings, as these activities can be done independently at home/in class and would not be an efficient use of our limited shop time.

As one could imagine, the real issue we face as a team right now isn't so much funding or manufacturing resources as it is the availability of student labor hours to build the robots. Every year, with approximately 7 people showing up per weekday meeting and 5 on Saturdays, we're lucky to have even the most simple of robots fully bagged by Build Stop. For example, our 2014 robot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDLsJxaACUA), despite its complete lack of complexity, was completed in the last few minutes of a 1 hour build meeting on bag and tag day. That's the struggle we deal with every year. Now, the robot itself wasn't actually bad, but one of our biggest impedances stemming from the late completion was that we had zero practice time before our first quals match. As a result, the robot – which relied on precise positioning to catch the ball – only ever caught one ball over the course of the entire tournament because I had no experience driving the machine.

Contrast this to our 2015 year, where the robot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f-jZghRdGo) was arguably equally as complex as the previous one: KOP + Mecanum drive, one actuated moving mechanism powered by a single motor. This time, however, we got the thing completed an entire day before build stop. The difference? Well, we made it into the eliminations bracket for the first time in our team history, and as an alliance captain nonetheless. This all, based on our team's post-analysis of the season, stemmed from that single day of driving practice.

So what is my team's position on keeping the 6 week build season? We are entirely in favor of getting rid of it. Even if we decided to enforce an artificial 6 week deadline on build completion, the driving practice alone would enable us to make drastic improvements to our robot performance at tournaments. Beside this, the extra time would allow us to be able to more comfortably design more mechanically complex robots with the confidence that we could actually complete them before the tournament. This makes us able to not only be more competitive at the competitions, but it also allows us to be more attractive to potential sponsors by being able to show them a more polished and functional machine than before. Finally, it would allow all of this to occur on a more relaxed schedule. Everyday meetings would no longer be necessary, and we could actually have one or two days a week as cool down time to reduce the burnout on both the mentor(s) and the full-time student members.

tl;dr: low-resource "kickoff to bag" teams would benefit greatly from the removal of the build stop date, even if the only benefit was that they could have a little bit of practice time they could not have had before.

[cadandcookies]

I have difficulty understanding this point of view. Do you not understand that

A) teams are already meeting after stop build day at a volume similar to build season

B) teams are not obligated to meet at the same volume after build season as they were before build season, and they would be under no other obligation to do that if bag day is eliminated

Or is there another breakdown somewhere?

I'm going to apologize immediately because this turned into something sort of all over the place, but still mostly related to this discussion.

Teams and the people involved with them are (with a few exceptions) not obligated to do much anything at all. For the most part this entire endeavor or building robots and competing with them, of mentoring and educating students, is completely voluntary. FIRST doesn't tell us we need to meet every day of the week any more than they tell us how many wheels we can have on our robot. We choose to do it, for all sorts of reasons.

There's been much made of the difference between "average" teams and successful teams, but a good deal of it boils down to time, culture, and by extension, community. Success isn't just about wanting to succeed as a team-- I'd argue that nobody wants to fail, it's feeling the burning desire, the passion that drives you to spend more time than someone else might consider possible doing something you love. I know when I was in high school, what got me out of bed from January to April wasn't the 8 hours of formal schooling I had ahead of me, but the hours I know I would be spending from 3 to 9 on robotics, whether we were meeting or not. Now, I've tempered a little in college, but now I bus an hour and a half each way to help three FTC teams and an FRC team twice a week outside of build season and probably way too much during build season, while still balancing all the normal demands of getting a degree and having a personal life. I know I'm not alone in loving this program, and I would gladly spend more time working with my students if it were physically possible, but rationally, I know that if I had a longer build season with my students, it's very unlikely it would be a positive thing for me.

I should also probably say how stop build actually affects me and my team: it cuts our number of shop hours (especially on Saturdays) down to about 3/4 to 1/2 of what it is during build season. It reduces the days I bus down from 4-5 to 2. The people in the shop are almost exclusively people who actually have work to do, or who are highly passionate about what's going on. They'd be in the shop whether there was a stop build day or not. This is also pretty much how it was on my high school team, and I'd imagine it's something like what FIRST expects the effect to be.

In our society there are a number of laws to help save people from themselves, and in FRC that's how I view the stop build day. On one level, I hate it, and wish it would go away forever so I can divert the resources we've been using to work around those limits to more valuable things, but on the other hand, I love it because it means I can start ramping down my robotics induced insanity and take a step back to reevaluate where I'm at in all the other (equally important, but more often ignored) aspects of my life.

So yes, FIRST doesn't tell me I need to add on a 40 hour work week with my team, but I do it anyways because I love it, during build season. But on a less visceral level, I can sometimes appreciate "the man" coming in and telling me it's time to dial it back for a little bit. And while at the time I fight it, at the same time I know it's probably what's best for me and a number of other people.

A small note on the difference between FTC/VEX and FRC-- and don't get me wrong, I love FTC, and though I'm only now participating in VEX U, I'm sure I would have loved being a part of a VEX team in grade school too-- they are, without a doubt, less intense programs on average. Yes, there are teams that are more intense than the average FRC team, but FRC, especially at the middle to high level, is, well, the hardest fun you'll ever have. There's so much more pressure to succeed and do well at competition, both internally and externally. It's that sporting atmosphere, the drive for victory, that, like in "real" sports, fires people up. FTC has some of that, but the events are smaller, the teams are smaller, and the stakes are smaller, and so the fire is less intense. In FRC, even lower resource, smaller teams have people who are intensely interested in the competition as a whole. I'm not sure the same can be said in FTC.

tl;dr: I hate stop build because it's an obstacle when working with my team, but I love it because it saves me from myself

[asid61]

The main valid argument I've seen for the "stop build day" is that it would discourage teams from going to Week 1 regionals. However, I argue that teams would go anyway due to locality and the fact that everybody has only had the 6 weeks anyway- it would change very little. However for teams that don't have the funds to build two robots and/or go to only one local regional, the benefits would be immense. Personally I would vastly prefer the extra time to drive, test, and improve things, as we usually go to week 3 and 5 regionals.

[MrForbes]

tl;dr: low-resource "kickoff to bag" teams would benefit greatly from the removal of the build stop date, even if the only benefit was that they could have a little bit of practice time they could not have had before.

Seems to me that the work expands to fill the available time. If you knew you had another 3 or 4 weeks to work on the robot, would you spend that time practicing with the same simple robot you usually build in 6 weeks? or would you build a "better" robot with the additional time, and still not get to practice with it?

We've had the same experience with practice on our FRC team, as well as other robotics projects. Setting a self imposed 5 week build deadline lets us spend a week getting to know our new robot, and we've done well at competitions using this approach.

[jman4747]

I don't see the burnout problem like others do. Meet less often over a longer period and you solve that. You could also shorten meetings or cut out some week days and use weekends or vise versa.

If you were a team that could sustain that whole period at full chatter then you save the practice bot while simultaneously getting more time overall.

Everyone will be able to save on shipping costs and better utilize machining sponsors because your lead times won't be as short. Snow days and government shutdowns become less of a problem too.

I also think that design convergence might not be too bad since, depending on how drastic a change, it could be unreasonably expensive for most even given the time.

[aryker]

...or maybe the limited build time was part of the original idea of FRC...

I'm surprised more people haven't brought this point up already. I always viewed stop build day as beneficial because of the experience it gives to the students--namely, the experience of a hard deadline that everyone would prefer to be just a little bit further away.

As CEO of an engineering consulting company, I see these at work all the time, and every time I do I'm grateful for the experience I had on my high school FRC team that prepared me for it. It's valuable for these kids to learn that no one is going to wait on you in the real world, and that whenever you see a deadline on a calendar you should treat it as immovable and plan accordingly. I know my clients appreciate this approach, and I can't think of a single situation in life where this mindset would steer anyone wrong. If stop build day teaches this effectively, then it's invaluable(especially when so many high schools these days have a "no zeroes" policy, but that's a rant for another day...).

[Jay O'Donnell]

I'm surprised more people haven't brought this point up already. I always viewed stop build day as beneficial because of the experience it gives to the students--namely, the experience of a hard deadline that everyone would prefer to be just a little bit further away.

As CEO of an engineering consulting company, I see these at work all the time, and every time I do I'm grateful for the experience I had on my high school FRC team that prepared me for it. It's valuable for these kids to learn that no one is going to wait on you in the real world, and that whenever you see a deadline on a calendar you should treat it as immovable and plan accordingly. I know my clients appreciate this approach, and I can't think of a single situation in life where this mindset would steer anyone wrong. If stop build day teaches this effectively, then it's invaluable(especially when so many high schools these days have a "no zeroes" policy, but that's a rant for another day...).

The problem is that it's not really a deadline anymore because teams are working around it. And if we opened up build season then the deadline would be by your competitions basically.

Not saying I agree with opening up build season, just stating those points.

[Mark Sheridan]

I am reminded of these great ideas for compromise a few years ago. Getting a little practice, tinker and programming time before competition would have a large improvement in competitiveness of competitions.

I would personally keep the deadline as is, and do a "hands off week". Hug you family, feed the dog, ... hands off the robot in the bag. If you make a practice bot, go crazy, but for everyone else, get some rest.

I would then allow for 6 hours each week of unbag time weeks 1-7. This time can be used for practice, test and tune, fix what got broekn in the finals at the last event.. Whatever you choose. It is just that the robot can only be out of the bag 6 hours (or 4 or 78 or 12 or...), and no blocks shorter than 1 hour. FiM uses 2 hours, and it is a bit of a pain. 1 hour minimum would be more flexible and allow for practice.

In short, keep the "Stop Build", but allow for more test and tune windows. Test and tune windows should make it very hard to decide whether or not to do a practice bot. I personally believe 6 hours each week would be right around the level necessary to make it a hard decision.

I really like this idea. However I don't think it should become a hard decision whether to build a practice robot or not. It should be a easy decision for most teams but for the super competitive people, they will decide to build one anyway. I would like to modify a little. After the stop build date, have the one week of hand off time for everybody on the competition robot. Then if a team has no event in a given week, they will be given 9 hours in one hour increment. If a team has an event to attend, they will be given 6 hours because they will be able to access their robot during competition. This will even the playing field a little for teams who does not have the resources to attend multiple events and registered for a late week event. If I have 9 hours a week, I will not build a practice robot which as I said before will allow me to reduce the number of meetings from 5 to 4 per week. Putting some limit will prevent people from building a brand new robot for championship after watching week 1 or 2 events. There should still be a 30 pound limit or higher to prevent completely new robot.

Let me expand on the reason behind this proposal.
1) There is no change in the deadline, 6 1/2 weeks. FIRST can continue to advertise that this is a 6 1/2 week program. People who like a deadline because it is how it works in the real world and they want students to learn that will get what they want.
2) One week of hands off time will force everybody to take a break from the competition robot and rest. This will also allow international and teams that have to ship their robot to register for a week 1 event with no disadvantage. Supercompetitive teams and individuals can continue to work on their practice robots. Some teams can concentrate on their awards submission and preparation during this week.
3) 9 hours of access in weeks that teams do not have events will give them enough time to not have to build a practice robot. This saves time and money and makes some people happy. This gives teams more time during build season. Some will choose to meet less and some will choose to do more with that extra time. It also allows room to use those extra time to catch up due to snow days for some unfortunate people. This 9 hours access time will also help rookie teams and less resourceful teams to get help from other veteran teams to get their robot to work as it was designed to. This will raise the bottom like Jim said earlier.
4) 6 hours of access in weeks that teams have events is the same as what we do in Michigan and MAR. It works well and reduce stress because it is more efficient use of time when you are at your own shop and practice facility. This increases the number of teams ready for inspection on the first day.
5) Keeping withholding allowance and maximum access time per week will prevent teams to copy other designs and build a completely new robot. That will alleviate some people's concern.
6) For those people who do not want an extended build season. They can register for a week 1 or 2 event and finish their season early. If they qualify for world championship, it is up to them whether they want to continue to improve their robot or not. If they want to improve their robot, they can only work 9 hours a week on the robot. That will keep them from working on the robot nonstop for those who do not have self control. If they don't qualify which most teams don't, their season will be over and they can go back to doing other things.

Feel free to propose anything and modify these if this proposal does not make you happy. If you are neutral about it, please support it so other people can be happy, okay?

[aryker]

The problem is that it's not really a deadline anymore because teams are working around it. And if we opened up build season then the deadline would be by your competitions basically.

Not saying I agree with opening up build season, just stating those points.

Good point. Personally I have never seen this as a huge problem because most people on our team(students, teachers and mentors alike) are about ready for a break by stop build day, so we enforce it as a hard deadline.

[EricH]

The problem is that it's not really a deadline anymore because teams are working around it. And if we opened up build season then the deadline would be by your competitions basically.

Not saying I agree with opening up build season, just stating those points.

A proposal: All robots MUST bag at the 6 week mark. Teams are expected to enforce a tools-down policy--this includes practice robots and software development.

After 1 week, robots may be unbagged for up to 15 hours a week, in time increments of no less than 1.5 hours and no greater than 3 hours (noted on bag-and-tag form), with the exception of recognized demonstrations which may run for up to 5 hours per unbag per day but count against the total allowed for the week (and appropriate documentation should be provided to inspectors--photo, signature of key FIRST person who was present on the lockup form--keep it mild here, just to show that there was actually something going on as far as demos and it wasn't just a workday). All work is allowed.

The intent is to strike a balance between robot work and the rest of "life"--take a week to catch up, then you get some time to work on the robot.

Or, here's a novel approach: Put the robot in a crate and ship it... :p


That being said, I like the hard stop.

[Caleb Sykes]

Here's an idea, how about instead of eliminating bag day for all teams, FIRST says that any teams that are willing can opt-out of bag day provided they do the following:
Donate some amount of money, say $2000, directly to FIRST
Spend some amount of time during the build season, say 100 hours, volunteering with other FRC teams

Teams that don't build practice robots wouldn't opt out, so nothing changes for them. Many of the teams that currently do build practice robots would opt-out of bag day instead of building another robot, netting FIRST thousands of dollars and getting thousands of extra hours of support to teams that need it.



I'm being facetious of course, but honestly, it is possible that I would like this better than what we have now. All of that money and effort that high-caliber teams put into building a practice robot could easily be channeled into things that are more beneficial for the teams themselves as well as for the entire community.

[Karthik]

We already saw design convergence with the systems that are easy to modify in many years. It didn't ruin anything.
2011 - Minibots
2015 - Can Grabbers
2012- Bridge Balancing devices (stingers)

I bolded one statement for emphasis. I'm not really sure that I agree with this. I think the teams who were first to come out with dominant versions of the mechanisms you described above would disagree. By the end of 2011, nearly every competitive team in St. Louis had a <1.5 second minibot. Our team has never been more burned out than we were this year because of the constant iteration caused by the Canburglar wars. Frankly, the can wars from last season are a major reason I'm not even remotely excited about the upcoming season (and frankly, I barely even participated in Canburglar iteration, compared to the rest of our team). Burnout is a real thing.

Now, regardless of what I just wrote above, the big question is will eliminating "bag day" reduce or increase participant burnout. I think it's obvious that it would allow for more polished robots. As for burnout, I'm really not sure which direction it would go. I do know a lot of teams need to be saved from themselves.


I also think that design convergence might not be too bad since, depending on how drastic a change, it could be unreasonably expensive for most even given the time.

Yup. The design convergence was bad on minibots and can grabbers because they were small and could be done at a relatively low cost. (I say relatively. For some teams the money spent on these arms races would be more than many teams spend on their entire robot.) However, doing a full redesign similar to what 33 did in 2009, or 254 in 2015, is something that very few teams can pull off; both due to a lack funds and a lack experience.

[Ian Curtis]

I'm surprised more people haven't brought this point up already. I always viewed stop build day as beneficial because of the experience it gives to the students--namely, the experience of a hard deadline that everyone would prefer to be just a little bit further away.

As CEO of an engineering consulting company, I see these at work all the time, and every time I do I'm grateful for the experience I had on my high school FRC team that prepared me for it. It's valuable for these kids to learn that no one is going to wait on you in the real world, and that whenever you see a deadline on a calendar you should treat it as immovable and plan accordingly. I know my clients appreciate this approach, and I can't think of a single situation in life where this mindset would steer anyone wrong.

When stop build day goes away, we will trade a very squishy deadline for one that is absolute. Should you fall short of stop build day goals, you have at least a week (and often many more) to decide and implement your withholding strategy. Should you not finish your robot by the event, you have no fallback since your Sunday robot can't earn you any points.

Honestly, in both approaches students get great exposure to hard deadlines that no amount of pleading can move. I think removing stop build day potentially makes the teaching deadlines more memorable (or at least more painful) since you don't have the safety net of the withholding allowance.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." -- Douglas Adams

[Jared Russell]

The design convergence was bad on minibots and can grabbers because they were small and could be done at a relatively low cost.

...and because the scoring mechanic underlying both minibot racing and can grabbing was a winner-take-all, asymptotic race to the bottom.

[Mark Sheridan]

A proposal: All robots MUST bag at the 6 week mark. Teams are expected to enforce a tools-down policy--this includes practice robots and software development.

Just to nitpick this. some students on my team delay their participation in week 6 so they are rested and ready to dive in with the practice bot after bag day. Its also a good time for peer review of code, to clean up while week 6 is still fresh in your mind.

I personally don't like the concept of bag day but I do think it provides closure for my team and permits them get needed rest. There are those like me, who are too excited and immediately want to play with the practice bot.

However we did get very burned out this year, we asked ourselves almost everyday if we would be more upset if we did not give our best. We gave up on the can war to keep our sanity.

[AllenGregoryIV]

...and because the scoring mechanic underlying both minibot racing and can grabbing was a winner-take-all, asymptotic race to the bottom.

I think this is the key point, my statement about not ruining things was meant to be more about the watch ability of robots and diversity. Those game mechanics were unquestionably broken.

[Jared Russell]

I just want to point out (again, as is annual tradition) that those who go "tools down" on "stop build day" are already making a choice. Don't pretend that you're not.

The only barriers to continuing to iterate on your robot legally are (a) the expense and extra work of building a practice robot (a few thousand dollars and many person-hours, which is significant), (b) fitting your post-bag modifications into your withholding allowance (which IMO has not been a problematic constraint in recent years), and (c) the feasibility of transporting your modifications to your next event (which is an issue, albeit a big one, for a small number of teams like my international and Hawaiian friends).

What tenable arguments could there possibly be for keeping the stop build day?

Fairness? Totally out the window. In fact, there are artificial obstacles to continuing to work that make it harder for a low-budget, low-hour team to keep up.

Preventing duplication of successful designs? (a) Copying happens to some extent already, but (b) it will never happen to the same extent as in Vex and FTC because it is much more difficult and nuanced to copy and perfect something in FRC. Moreover, I think that games that converge to a single optimal solution are fundamentally not very good games.

Saving us from ourselves? I sympathize with this and know all-too-well about burnout, but still don't think it's a convincing argument. Again, you are already making a choice and are more than welcome to continue to do so if build season rules are relaxed. For every "in the real world there are hard deadlines" point, there is a "in the real world, nobody keeps you from working yourself to death" counterpoint. I work at one of the most competitive companies in the world, and see at least as much value in the latter lesson as in the former.

Preventing escalation of the competitive arms race? This is already present to some extent, but every single year there are tons of examples of teams that succeed despite a disciplined approach to build hours. Look at 67 in any year - they are the prototypical example that proves that a team doesn't need to spend 80 hours per week in their lab to build a world-class robot. I actually think that removing the stop build day would remove barriers to competition rather than add to them.

[PayneTrain]

Since I have obviously never been in a situation where my team has developed something everyone wants to copy, maybe it can be explained by someone with that experience. Why do you think the potential for increased design convergence is a bad thing? As far as I can see, design convergence has a net positive for both teams off the field and the on-field product.

The only defense I have seen is anecdotal evidence to where design convergence already exists in the current environment only where conditions can easily present itself (a lightweight, simple and potentially even fully COTS solution to an over-weighted game mechanic).

[FTC5110]

I would love to hear the perspectives of FTC and VRC teams on this line of thought. They have an even larger competition window and much more affordable robots, making strategies like this even more feasible.

This is very common in VRC. By the time we get to VEX Worlds in April, design convergence has usually set in, with 2-3 designs that have been extensively cloned/copied. Some teams really like this, others really don't.

In VRC it becomes very difficult for teams to design something unique and innovative yet still remain competitive because of the design convergence. Although it's fun seeing a design so good teams attempt to duplicate (sometime almost screw for screw) the downside is having them on the other side of the field and your team loses the match. The single worst part is knowing you'll probably do worse arriving at a competition with something innovative versus just following the convergence crowd.

FTC is a different story because materials are less constrained giving teams more scope to build innovative robots that can't easily be copied without someone doing all the engineering again. You can actually make something different and win. Design concepts do converge somewhat by the FTC world championship but implementation is always different and this often determines match outcomes.

Time limits? Our team participates in both VRC and FTC with the later usually constrained to about 8 weeks of actual build work followed by perhaps 4 weeks of fine tuning. Wouldn't want the season any longer to be honest. VRC being a full 12 month season actually gets boring and we usually have a little fun in the first few months then just sit back and observe trying hard to figure out something innovative that will be a match for the convergence crowd.

[waialua359]

Preventing escalation of the competitive arms race? This is already present to some extent, but every single year there are tons of examples of teams that succeed despite a disciplined approach to build hours. Look at 67 in any year - they are the prototypical example that proves that a team doesn't need to spend 80 hours per week in their lab to build a world-class robot. I actually think that removing the stop build day would remove barriers to competition rather than add to them. "world-class" robot with world-class engineers.:]

[Basel A]

Removing stop build day would be tremendously helpful to my team and others like us. We're a mid-level team, maybe the 50th to 60th best team in Michigan. Building a practise robot is both a significant financial burden and a significant temporal burden. A few $k can go a long way (an extra event, new tools/equipment, extra stock/components/motors). As for time, building a practise robot takes enough time to hurt the quality of our robot at our first competition. Over the course of the competition season, the practise bot makes up the ground, but not having to build one at all would immediately make our robots better.

I'm honestly not sure which teams making this change would hurt. I suppose it would narrow the gap between the teams who have to struggle to make/use a practise robot vs. those that do it pretty easily. But those teams aren't the type to shy away from competition.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

I have to start off with a nod to Dave Lavery. Go check out his "six weeks" speech from Championships. I think that speaks volumes about our motivation.
While there are likely equal reasons for both views, I personally have some other reasons to keep the six week build.
One of the greatest things that grabs casual observers and potential sponsors is the statement that every robot on the field was built in six weeks or at competition. The additional development time is never discussed because, for those people, it is irrelevant. The memory trigger is watching any robot on the field with the thought that it was the result of a team approach to a six week build and design.
While students are constantly under a time constraint for projects in their academic life, very few schools actually teach techniques on how to best accomplish great results in a limited amount of time. The six wek build does that with mentor help.
I have been around long enough to know that the best built robot is not going to win just because the team has a lot of resources or time. Likewise the best design is not going to win every time because there are other factors like driver fatigue, mechanical breakdowns, and miscommunications.
Yes, we are one of those teams that builds a practice robot. Yes, we continue to improve designs after the build. No, we are not a team that has a lot of resources. Yes, we are a team of very driven students who feel a need to make improvements, assist other teams and play a part in improving the overall competition. One of the things that has not entered into this discussion is the value of the additional learning experience in planning the robot modification that can only take place a competition. We always talk about how we are training our students for a life in industry. Well, no industry sits back and does not make improvements to it's product. Many of them need to plan on improvements in the field. (Hubble to name just one.)
So for my money, I am all for keeping the six week build. I don't think we could attract as many sponsors and supporters without it. I don't think we can provide a quality, real world, experience without it. I don't think the competition will improve without it. (I suspect it actually may suffer.)
On a personal note, I often surprise my coworkers with the solutions and direction on projects we are given. I attribute that with my work on the team. If you think six weeks is not enough time, you need to work in live TV. By the time you have realized you screwed up, your work is on it's way to Mars.

[GKrotkov]

I had heard of this proposal before, and hadn't thought about it much beyond a knee-jerk reaction of something along the lines: "Oh, hell no! Don't take my bag day away!" So when this thread popped up, and I saw some folks I respect a lot arguing the other way, I figured that it'd be better for me to actually think about it, talk to some students on 1712, and come out with an opinion I felt I could defend. I can say confidently that my answer (and the answer of a lot of students on 1712) is still: "don't remove bag day." The main reasons for that (burnout and time limits) have already been covered in this thread, but I'd like to throw a personal example into the ring. Feel free to nitpick or criticize, I promise you that I won't be offended.

Bag day absolutely helps keep FRC viable for me. When I joined the team, I mainly characterized myself as a musician and performer, and they are still major factors in my life. For the 2 years I've been in FRC, I've always pushed the envelope as regards time management: it's difficult for me to maintain the grades that I require of myself, be a strong part of 1712, and keep music in my life. During build season, other parts of my life get pushed to the side and I focus on robotics. Asking for students to sacrifice other aspects of their life for 6 weeks is fair, given the massive benefits that FRC brings. It is not, however, reasonable to expect that students give much more than that, because we're getting to the point where it will prevent students from joining, or even continuing with the team. (I certainly do less after bag day. I still work, and work a lot, but no longer to the exclusion of other parts of my life.)

I am now more interested in CMU/MIT than Juilliard/Oberlin; in Randy Pausch than Placido Domingo; in data storage and analysis than in opera. I don't think it's overly narcissistic of me to consider that a success for FRC; it seems very much like what FIRST was founded to do. If bag day were removed and our build season schedule extended, however, then it may not have been possible. The "responsible" decision for me would have been to not join my FRC team, not be exposed to engineering as a possibility, and stay with music and performance as paths for my life. That would have been a shame. Ignoring the time demands of students with other interests detracts from FRC's appeal to students who aren't already interested in STEM.

That said, the compromises from previous threads look like really good ideas.

[Nathan Streeter]

I've made my stance clear for a long time, the six week build season negatively impacts lower resource teams to a greater degree then large resource teams to the detriment of the entire program.

If we remove the build season limitation across the board we will see a dramatic increase of the quality of the product that we put on the field in front of the public.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, and think it's the most compelling and important argument against the 6-week build season. Yes, the top teams (and a growing number of middle tier teams) build two robots... expending more resources, etc.... but they'll always expend a lot of effort and will probably compete marginally better without the "6-week" system. The difference is that the teams that don't have the resources to make a second robot can suddenly have a far more developed product at their first event if they still put in at least as much effort.

[MrForbes]

The difference is that the teams that don't have the resources to make a second robot can suddenly have a far more developed product at their first event if they still put in at least as much effort.

I think the major "resource" that teams need to improve their robots, either in 6 weeks or in a longer time, is effort. Getting the motivation to put in this extra effort is the tricky part. Having the time available is not the issue--we've heard from a few self proclaimed low-resource teams that consistently produce great robots in 6 weeks, because they effectively use all the time available.

Teams that have their act together can build a great robot in 6 weeks, or 12 weeks. Teams that don't have their act together will probably build the same so-so robot in 12 weeks that they now build in 6 weeks.

[techhelpbb]

The reason I personally am not a fan of the 6 week build season is that it gives one the idea that we stop. Been doing this long enough to know that FIRST teams rarely stop at 6 weeks. I am a people leader at my job (it's part of my duty) and if someone on my team with the crazy hours we work took 6 weeks of their time to do this every possible non-work/non-sleep hour and then more and more time outside of that I would ask them to think over the impact this quasi-deadline is having on them.

However there is a learning issue at work here and after a good long time I am making efforts to decouple it. I can't teach a really motivated programmer or CNC machinist (that's right I am treating these young adults as young professionals with a skill) a large amount of what I could teach them in a mere 6 weeks. MORT (FRC11) does MORT-U between September and just before Thanksgiving 2 nights a week. Even that is not enough. It's not merely a MORT thing, or a MAR thing or even an FRC thing. They have the same issue at NextFAB (http://www.nextfab.com/) and that has little to do with FIRST at all. Also that commitment of 6 weeks every night is really hard for me at a personal level considering the scale of my responsibilities (I work in Manhattan and Mount Olive is 2.5 hours each way).

So I am slowly gathering machine tools light enough to be mobile and FRC parts to make it possible to decouple from MORT the programming and CNC efforts. Then, even in the summer when we have limited access, we always have a shop and access to robots. Still on the fence on where we will work but everything is mobile and 115VAC so where ever it is we will make do. Plus this decouples from the charitable corporation and the school so if I decide to help out some other venture with the tools I am free to do so.

If the learning opportunities are not interrupted by demotivating factors I really think the 6 week build season is ample if you have enough people to share the load which does often directly work against new teams. I have rarely seen a new team that came into FIRST with all of the required skills to compete with the veterans, mind you, many learn impressively fast but the playing field is hardly level. It has taken me 20 years to decide to commit what amounts to $15k to building tooling that doesn't actually serve my business purposes (I can do my job and run my businesses with a cheap printer, laptop and Internet). Now I just need to make it finally happen and see how many students commit their time to this opportunity.

[Jon Stratis]

Personally, I'm rather swayed by the international team argument - if we remove bag day, it automatically puts those teams at a disadvantage, as they have to be hands off the competition robot while it ships. Having had teams from Hawaii or China at my events before, I don't want to see them decide to just to local events so they have that extra week or two to work on the robot. We'd miss having them and the different experiences they bring to the event!

Also, having the 6 week deadline directly amirrors how things go for me at work as a software engineer. You spend a lot of time working on a release, with a known target date. You meet that date and package up your "dot-zero" release. Then you turn around and start working on the "dot-one" release, fixing everything you didn't have time to fix within your schedule, or addressing bugs that were found late in the process. There's a lead time between finishing the release and going live, and as a result your under time pressure to finish the "dot-one" release so you go live with that instead of the "dot-zero". Then it goes live and your customers find all sorts of stuff you missed. So you go back and start working on fixing those in a "dot-two" release, again under a time crunch because you don't want to tick off your customers for too long.

In FRC, your bagged robot is version 1.0. You keep working on improvements, and practice day at the event you change it to 1.1. Then you see how it does on the field, design other improvements, and address those for version 1.2 at your next event. Take away stop-build, and your short changing that cycle, in my opinion.

[techhelpbb]

Also, having the 6 week deadline directly mirrors how things go for me at work as a software engineer. You spend a lot of time working on a release, with a known target date. You meet that date and package up your "dot-zero" release. Then you turn around and start working on the "dot-one" release, fixing everything you didn't have time to fix within your schedule, or addressing bugs that were found late in the process. There's a lead time between finishing the release and going live, and as a result your under time pressure to finish the "dot-one" release so you go live with that instead of the "dot-zero". Then it goes live and your customers find all sorts of stuff you missed. So you go back and start working on fixing those in a "dot-two" release, again under a time crunch because you don't want to tick off your customers for too long.

So technically I help lead several hundred software developers. A project with a timeline so short it negatively impacts the people doing the work and produces broken product that no one thinks meets any of the expectations is a project not scoped correctly.

I think the 6 week timeline can be met with significant pressure on the people driving it. I also think what comes out from all of the FRC teams is pretty darn impressive and definitely most people can see it being competition worthy.

So I would propose:

1. We should have a deadline that is a longer by just a few weeks.
A. So that the commitment is not every night and weather has less impact which can be dangerous.
B. The teams that get close have a little more time to get to the destination.

2. There should be more study of what makes new teams successful with an eye towards improving that experience.

I know work tends to grow to fill the time you give it. So realistically there will be people who will waste just as much time with more time. However one can always point out the expansion of the technical problem by people who lack the foresight to see the outcome before hand. I am pointing out the actual level of commitment for this challenge is higher than is required from my teams at a professional level and if at a professional level I worked my employees like this I would loose some of them to jobs that pay just as well, produce just as many results and do it by working smarter.

[Nemo]

There is a mistaken impression that 45 days is the traditional build season length, therefore 45 days is the optimal balance of avoiding burnout and producing good results.

We could go shorter OR longer, and people would adapt to make it work. Your team's definition of a sustainable, "sane enough" pace is going to change depending on the length of the build sprint.

We could have any length of build season from 3 days up to a multi-year season. We've seen what RI3D build sprints look like. A team could try to sustain that type of around-the-clock, break-neck pace through 100% of every day of the entire 45 day build season. But they don't.

The longer the time period you look at, the lower the maximum level of average sustained output a human will be able to provide. If people are close to their max over 45 days, that means their level of average sustained output would have to be less over a longer period of time.

Try to imagine the other extreme. If FIRST released the 2020 game after this year's Championship, then this year's 8th graders could start working on their senior year FRC game before they even get to high school. If the system was like that, would everybody automatically start working on it (plus 2019, 2018, 2017 games) for 4+ years running as if it was a long version of the 45 day build sprint? That would cause everyone to get get fired / get divorced / drop out / suffer various health problems / have a mental health breakdown and so on. But really that wouldn't happen. People would adjust their behavior.

1) A longer build season would change some behaviors of FRC teams.
2) If a team tries to sustain a schedule that actually isn't sustainable for them over any length of time, it isn't the rest of the teams' fault for forcing them to do that.

[GreyingJay]

I would be in favour of a slightly longer build season. 8 weeks maybe?

A few posts back someone said that a team that doesn't have its act together will produce the same so-so robot in 12 weeks as it would have in 6 weeks. That sounds like a derogatory comment, but it's probably true, and I would take the viewpoint of "well in that case, why not?" If not for a better quality robot then for better mental sanity for all the students and mentors and parents involved. A longer build season would be a little bit less stress and that might actually mean the difference between giving up at the 11th hour and just slapping it together, or having the ability to say "ok, let's take a break, rest, and look at it again tomorrow".

I have worked on software projects that "required" a lot of overtime due to overly aggressive schedules, and everyone who has been in this position knows that the work you produce at 11pm on a Sunday night is not the same quality as the work you produce during the regular weekday.

Having a slightly longer build season would also be a little more forgiving for those teams that don't "have their act together". The team I was on last year had a good pedigree but was hobbled because of (a) some design churn and (b) one of their manufacturing sponsors promised to make some parts and were two weeks late getting them. That resulted in everything "sliding to the right". It happens to the best of us. I like that there IS a stop build day, though, because you do need to deal with this in the real world.

[marshall]

Also, having the 6 week deadline directly amirrors how things go for me at work as a software engineer. You spend a lot of time working on a release, with a known target date. You meet that date and package up your "dot-zero" release. Then you turn around and start working on the "dot-one" release, fixing everything you didn't have time to fix within your schedule, or addressing bugs that were found late in the process. There's a lead time between finishing the release and going live, and as a result your under time pressure to finish the "dot-one" release so you go live with that instead of the "dot-zero". Then it goes live and your customers find all sorts of stuff you missed. So you go back and start working on fixing those in a "dot-two" release, again under a time crunch because you don't want to tick off your customers for too long.

I think it is worth mentioning that many software development shops are moving to continuous integration and software release cadence is being shortened. I live in the DevOps world (mostly on the Ops side but I speak the language of both camps) and it's an interesting analogy to what we (my team) go through with building two robots in FRC.

[techhelpbb]

I think it is worth mentioning that many software development shops are moving to continuous integration and software release cadence is being shortened. I live in the DevOps world (mostly on the Ops side but I speak the language of both camps) and it's an interesting analogy to what we (my team) go through with building two robots in FRC.

Agreed. The team I lead is a DevOps team in an environment shifting towards our model:

The trick is that merely releasing frequently is pointless if the quality control feedback is not there. One needs to recognize that a 2 week scrum in an agile workflow is a soft deadline. One is supposed to evolve scheduling that matches the feedback from the working results. It's not unusual that major corporations merely setup 2 week scrums and make hard unyielding deadlines like it's a health check and then they realize that 'done' is not 'done'.

To make CI/CD work you have to work like a manufacturer. You have to adapt at each checkpoint changing direction to yield the best result with the resources you have. It's not just continuous deployment and integration it is also continuous improvement. I can't not express how many times that 'continuous improvement' part is totally lost on the people who think tossing Jenkins in will fix all their issues.

With just 6 weeks there is really a limit to what can really be delivered. It's a soft deadline that building 2 robots does change but at the cost of 2 robots. It's like forking a software development project because you know you are going to come up short.

[Collin Fultz]

I did an informal poll at last year's IRI, walking around the pits asking teams if they had a practice robot.

I don't still have my notes. If I remember correctly, 3 teams there had not built a practice robot. Two were in district areas and felt that they no longer needed to with the unbag time. One was from a regional area.

The remainder of teams at this event had a practice robot.

[MrForbes]

If we had a 6 week build season, and at around week 5 it was then extended to an 8 week build season, then I think the extra time would help many teams. But if we know that we have 8 weeks, we'll try to do more, and still not get it done in time.

[marshall]

I can't not express how many times that continuous improvement part is totally lost on the people who think tossing Jenkins in will fix all their issues.

Yes! It's a lot like picking out a wrench and saying "I'm ready to build a robot now!" when in reality you need multiple wrenches, other tools, training, and a team who has bought into the idea of building the robot in the same way! I feel your pain, trust me.

[techhelpbb]

If we had a 6 week build season, and at around week 5 it was then extended to an 8 week build season, then I think the extra time would help many teams. But if we know that we have 8 weeks, we'll try to do more, and still not get it done in time.

This is an obvious concern that people will not exercise good foresight. The less you really know about the competition and the hardware the more likely this will happen.

In DevOps we fix this with a checkpoint. Show your work and tell us how you will reach the end in 2 more weeks. It serves the same purpose without replicating the robot which is cost ineffective. Perhaps teams could be required to show their work to their peers in the area. I mean we ask for documentation which, in theory, should show the plan.

The way FIRST works now is very waterfall. We give you 6 weeks. Then judge how complete you are at the hard stop at the first competition you show up to. However some teams manage to slip a little more time in by taking it out of the time they have between the 2: stop build and competition. I am pretty sure we can all tell if you have no drive train at all by the end of 6 weeks you are in trouble.

[the programmer]

A lot of people are saying that eliminating build season will benefit low resource teams. I think the exact opposite would happen.

Right now, even if you do build a practice robot, it's a clone of your bagged robot that you use for driver practice and to test modifications. By eliminating stop build day, you don't stop teams from building a second robot, but you make that second robot a completely new iteration on the first.

High level teams have already proven that they have the time and money for this but the majority of the FRC community does not.

What this means is that instead of getting some advantage out of building a second robot, which some high level teams (610 if I'm not mistaken) have foregone, it now becomes almost impossible to compete at a high level without building a second robot.

My former team has built two robots since 2011 and my current team will start building a second robot this year. However, even with building two robots, the end of build season brings the intensity of our schedule way down.

Do, while I sympathize with the teams who don't have time to practice in the six week window, know that by eliminating the six week build season, low resource teams would have an even harder time keeping up and to be competitive, a build season intensity schedule would be required all the way through champs.

[Michael Corsetto]

Do, while I sympathize with the teams who don't have time to practice in the six week window, know that by eliminating the six week build season, low resource teams would have an even harder time keeping up and to be competitive, a build season intensity schedule would be required all the way through champs.

We are going to build three robots (1 comp and 2 practice) for 2016.

Why?

The competition season is longer than the build season.

We will do more development and iteration during the competition season than the build season.

We want two robots to iterate faster during the competition season.

I think its clear that the gap is wide between us and low resource teams because we have the money to buy 3x of robot parts, and get to play with two robots post-stop build, and low resource teams get to play with zero robots post-stop build.

You make the call if the gap shrinks when low-resource teams get to play with their one and only robot while we're playing with our two or three robots.

We meet 4 days a week.

-Mike

[Jon Stratis]

So technically I help lead several hundred software developers. A project with a timeline so short it negatively impacts the people doing the work and produces broken product that no one thinks meets any of the expectations is a project not scoped correctly.

So you've never found a bug in your production code? Never had a customer ask for a change to a feature you just released? Never asked any of your employees to work late or spend a little time on the weekend to get something out the door on the scheduled date? Honestly, that sounds like fantasy to me. There are always bugs. There's always stuff your customers are going to want done differently. And there's always stuff that won't go quite as planned, requiring either extra time or dropped features to hit your deadline (which, sometimes, is imposed on you by forces outside your control).

[Drivencrazy]

... a build season intensity schedule would be required all the way through champs.

Required? Absolutely not. There's nothing that says every team HAS to compete at the same level. As Mike so clearly states, right now the best teams do keep up the intensity, and most likely ramp up as more information becomes available on other teams and new strategies, during the competition season. As you said, your team brings the intensity down after the build season. Those are choices that every team makes and every team can continue to make if there is no bag day. The difference would be how effective your time can be during the competition season. If you don't meet at all now, you could continue to not meet and play with the same robot you start the comp season with. If you do meet and currently build two robots, you could potentially drop it down to one robot and still perform the same functions. If you meet and build three robots now maybe you can get away with two and maintain efficiency. Nothing is ever going to completely level the playing field and I don't necessarily think we should try. But this will help teams who want to be competitive and have the drive but not the resources compete at a higher level.

[Jon Stratis]

Agreed. The team I lead is a DevOps team in an environment shifting towards our model:

The trick is that merely releasing frequently is pointless if the quality control feedback is not there. One needs to recognize that a 2 week scrum in an agile workflow is a soft deadline. One is supposed to evolve scheduling that matches the feedback from the working results. It's not unusual that major corporations merely setup 2 week scrums and make hard unyielding deadlines like it's a health check and then they realize that 'done' is not 'done'.

To make CI/CD work you have to work like a manufacturer. You have to adapt at each checkpoint changing direction to yield the best result with the resources you have. It's not just continuous deployment and integration it is also continuous improvement. I can't not express how many times that 'continuous improvement' part is totally lost on the people who think tossing Jenkins in will fix all their issues.

With just 6 weeks there is really a limit to what can really be delivered. It's a soft deadline that building 2 robots does change but at the cost of 2 robots. It's like forking a software development project because you know you are going to come up short.

Comparing the build season to agile development is a seriously flawed comparison. Stop build day is not the last day of a single sprint - it's the last day of the entire release, which was composed of many sprints (for my team 6, one sprint per week, which is a little shorter than most agile shops).

[techhelpbb]

So you've never found a bug in your production code? Never had a customer ask for a change to a feature you just released? Never asked any of your employees to work late or spend a little time on the weekend to get something out the door on the scheduled date? Honestly, that sounds like fantasy to me. There are always bugs. There's always stuff your customers are going to want done differently. And there's always stuff that won't go quite as planned, requiring either extra time or dropped features to hit your deadline (which, sometimes, is imposed on you by forces outside your control).

In about the last 10 months I've worked about 1,000 hours of time over a 8 hour work day specifically because someone scoped a project with too little time to make the core delivery. Bugs or not.

That's not a little over time. That's basically 70 hours a week. All because someone didn't actually think about the scope, or did not understand the scope, of the core deliverable.

There's a great big difference between mostly there and off by a mile. In some cases you build a massive piece of computing infrastructure at break neck and break your necks doing it. In others you build a robot that has to accomplish 2 tasks: compete and educate. A lot of people compete but we should be honest: how many can claim that with a little more time they wouldn't have been able to educate better?

Comparing the build season to agile development is a seriously flawed comparison. Stop build day is not the last day of a single sprint - it's the last day of the entire release, which was composed of many sprints (for my team 6, one sprint per week, which is a little shorter than most agile shops).

Correct it's a hard stop that, because of the way it's done, is not a real hard stop.
You can literally buy yourself more time by buying parts for more robots.
My point was it should be a soft stop: we should checkpoint at the 6 week mark such that we close the loophole.

[Jon Stratis]

In about the last 10 months I've worked about 1,000 hours of time over a 8 hour work day specifically because someone scoped a project with too little time to make the core delivery. Bugs or not.

That's not a little over time. That's basically 70 hours a week. All because someone didn't actually think about the scope, or did not understand the scope, of the core deliverable.

There's a great big difference between mostly there and off by one mile.

And how does that compare to the 6 week build season? In my experience, it is entirely possible to build a successful robot in 6 weeks. It's also possible to blow your own schedule and not meet the deadline. Figuring out how to deal with that, the importance of checkpoints and adjustments along the way is a crucial part of engineering.

[Kevin Leonard]

For most teams, I think removing the stop build day is a positive thing. It will make teams able to be more competitive and remove the need to build expensive practice robots.

However, teams who have to travel long distances to compete are at a disadvantage with the removal of stop build. If I have to ship my robot out a week in advance of an event, I lose that week of time to build and iterate. If you're a team that plans on attending a week 2 and 4 regional, for example, you lose out on week 1 and week 3 that your opponents have to iterate.


I would prefer one of the compromises illustrated earlier in the thread here (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1506290&postcount=39), but given the choice between having a stop build day and not having a stop build day, I'd prefer not having it.

[Amanda Morrison]

I need some break in the spring to work on my senior design project, so I want there to still be a limit.
By this point families want their members that they loaned to the team back. College work needs to be caught up. Yards and houses that have been ignored need worked on. Prepping for classes and other jobs needs to be done. Winding down and catching up on sleep is a health problem that needs to be addressed. I also miss being home enough to cook some meals.
I hate stop build because it's an obstacle when working with my team, but I love it because it saves me from myself
...most people on our team(students, teachers and mentors alike) are about ready for a break by stop build day, so we enforce it as a hard deadline.
For the 2 years I've been in FRC, I've always pushed the envelope as regards time management: it's difficult for me to maintain the grades that I require of myself

I wanted to point these out as this theme continues in this thread. How many of us are holding FIRST's competition structure responsible for our own lack of time management/self restraint during build season?

So asks one very, very guilty party, herself. I didn't quote those to single anyone out - I am rarely one to find an adequate life balance when I have a goal in mind. Competition structure amplifies this. How many people want to show up to the table completely outclassed? I am reading that we are concerned with our individual 'me' times, but what I think we're really saying are these points:

- To stay competitive, we'd have to completely revamp the comfortable and expected structure & schedule we've had in place for our team, especially where our own personal limitations/boundaries have been set. This may mean someone else may have to help pick up the slack when leading the team or the build.

- To do what's best for our teams with this new deadline, we'd have to determine if our current competition strategy changes in any way based on the resource levels of our team and the competitions available to us, and decide what would work best for us/in our region (e.g., "Early or late regional?", "Regional location"?). We already do this to a point, but our first year of this new competition structure would be a big question.

- It is a relative unknown how my team will react to having the extra time. I do know what needs to be accomplished in six weeks. I don't necessarily know what we can create in 8, 10, 12 weeks, or how to schedule that, limit that, budget that. It's an unknown, well, because we haven't done it before.

I have mixed feelings, and it brings up a lot of questions for me.

Why is design convergence bad? What are the students learning that they would not learn otherwise?
Why is the deadline of my first competition date (which is known before build season) any different than the existing, somewhat-by-choice deadline of stop build day?
How does day 1 of competitions change without teams seeing a different robot on CD and then working like crazy to change/needing to refine their bagged robot?
How would my team change their overall meeting schedule for a late regional? An early one?

All of these could be a thread on their own. What I have realized from the fact-based points brought up in this thread, and did not previously consider, is that FIRST would have to seriously think through how this would affect teams that must ship to their events due to location, and if that disadvantage is severe.

Most other assumptions here are in fact speculations made without any real data, so I'm weighing those as personal viewpoint without factual analysis.

I don't know if lower-resource teams will have a tougher time, or find it easier to have a more competitive robot. Even if not as competitive as the top tier.
I don't know the percentage of teams that already build a second robot or at least a partial build. I was surprised by Collin's post.
I don't know if higher-resource teams will spread out the work, or continue to work at a six week schedule with bonus for driver training.
I don't know how the challenge of the game will change any of this. Minibot year vs. endless recycling vs. FIRST Frenzy with many tasks.
I don't know if more teams will experience burnout, or if it may relieve burnout with the added burden of finding someone else to help.

I have been on teams on both extreme ends of the spectrum - from extremely successful seasons to one-and-done regionals where we came in last or nearly last with a completely non-functioning robot. I'm still pondering how this schedule would have changed those teams, but the above questions are still kicking around in my brain. I think my next step is an old-fashioned pros and cons list. :)

[Jessi Kaestle]

This topic seems to come up every year, and on average the general consensus here seems to trend towards eliminating Stop Build Day. I have two main counters to this trend.

Mentor/Team Burn-Out and Level-Loading Higher and Lower Resource Teams: I grouped these together because they are connected when it comes to the lower resource teams. Though some have brought it up, it seems to me from reading this thread that some here have lost sight that Chief Delphi is not a proper sampling of FIRST Robotics Competition Teams as a whole. Most lower resource teams that I have talked with drastically reduce how long they meet in the weeks between stop build day and competition. So when deciding if mentor (and/or student) burn-out would happen, remember that you should be thinking of the teams that struggle to have enough mentors (and/or students) during build season due to the current time commitments already being a massive deterrent. As a result I don’t think the elimination of stop-build day will level-load these teams with their higher-resource counterparts, if anything it might just move them further down the bracket in terms of competitiveness.

Teaching Real-World Engineering: This to me is the larger, if not largest, reason to keep stop build day. Whenever I am explaining FIRST to someone who is deciding if they are going to provide me something* based on what the program is I ALWAYS use that it teaches “Real-World Engineering” as a selling point. Then go on to explain that the students have a strict timeline, budget, and build constraints like they will once (if?) they get an engineering job post-grad. In addition to being a selling point, it is also a good teaching point. Once these students enter the work force they will not have a deadline that they get to decide (teams decide which events they do, if we eliminate stop build day, this will become a bigger deal than it already is), nor will they have extended time to study and analyze the competition then completely rework their work to take advantage of the lessons they learned from their competition.**

*the something could be team based such as funding or mentors; student based such as a scholarship or university admissions offer; event based such as volunteers; or personal based such as a job offer.

**This already happens to an extent, but I envision would get worse if stop build day was eliminated.

[techhelpbb]

And how does that compare to the 6 week build season? In my experience, it is entirely possible to build a successful robot in 6 weeks. It's also possible to blow your own schedule and not meet the deadline. Figuring out how to deal with that, the importance of checkpoints and adjustments along the way is a crucial part of engineering.

Sure anyone should be able able to assemble the KOP and have a driving robot and very likely an end effector in 6 weeks.

Will assembling that KOP teach you about programming? Not so much.
Will assembling that KOP teach you about CNC? Not so much.
Will assembling that KOP teach you electronics? Not even a FIRST goal for the most part (hence we provide the control system).

My point: what is your goal to merely build a robot to show up on the field?

My goal is not just to build a robot, it's to educate and mentor students in the skills that built that robot. So will I be successful? Sure I will reduce my scope till we succeed at the price of my goals which are larger than the time provided.

I can do this even faster. I can just build the robot myself with 2 or 3 trained engineers and let the students watch and learn how it is done. Accumulating none of the tactile education they could have gotten. Heck I've built military robots I can just show up and hand them the controls teaching them with the right amout of money you can buy someone else's hard work. Military probably prefer this anyway: drone pilots that when they retire no longer have drones.

[Nemo]

We will do more development and iteration during the competition season than the build season.


This is important to me, because I find improving a marginally effective robot to be the most inspiring part of FRC competition. Stopping at a robot that almost works or sort of works is sad. The stop build date leaves a lot of teams stuck at that point in the process.

[MrForbes]

techhelpbb: You already have the rest of the year to learn all that fun stuff.

I'm surprised how many people seem to think that you can improve teams' time management skills by simply giving them more time. It doesn't work that way.

It only takes 3 days to build a robot.

[techhelpbb]

I think my next step is an old-fashioned pros and cons list. :)

I support this but I worry that such a rubric would be royal pain to scope.
This would require some serious thought to do and I doubt it would be as straight forward as a vote with no context.

I guess the first step is to agree there's a good reason to consider it and that it will result in action from FIRST who governs all this.

techhelpbb: You already have the rest of the year to learn all that fun stuff.

I'm surprised how many people seem to think that you can improve teams' time management skills by simply giving them more time. It doesn't work that way.

It only takes 3 days to build a robot.

Actually we really do not have the whole year:

It is very likely you can loose the summer if the school is where the tools are and the tools are not mobile.

If the students participate in other activities it is hard without a structure provided to keep them engaged. Yes the deadline serves this purpose but there are better ways.

On the other hand, as I pointed out before, weather can be dangerous and storms do not move just because someone sets a deadline. Also a lot of business have critical deadlines in those first 6 weeks of a year. When it comes down to it this is about time management: do you manage the time that pays the bills and feeds you family or do you manage the time for something that extends critical missing skills into your school system that taxes the money you earn to continue to operate?

Again I can build a robot in 1 day with the parts in my barn right now. What does it do for my community to do that?

[marshall]

It only takes 3 days to build a robot.

I can be done in less time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uyr-WSKnbQ) ;)

[Michael Blake]

This may have been mentioned earlier and I missed the post but I remember a video back in 2011 where Dean Kamen was explaining a purposeful _feature_ of FRC was the 6 Week Build-period.

Dean explained that he wanted FRC teams to have a close to real-life engineering experience where students were given a substantial project to complete, like professional engineers get everyday, without the best budget and not enough time.

I believe he said a survey was done of engineers asking generally how much time their bosses give them to take a concept and then deliver a working machine and the average time came out to 6 weeks--so that's the genesis right there.

I think we need to look at 6 week build as a baked-in pillar by the founder.

On our team since our 2nd season/2012 we have built full-twin practice bots (minus the powder coating) and we just keep whacking-on-it (our term for being iterative - lol) and moving the improvements over to the comp bot till our season ends--we never stop improving/learning.

But we're a well-funded team, hopefully again this season, and I get the cost barrier to some teams to producing a 2nd practice bot. However, there's a way around this, not perfect but it works, and is the approach we took in our Rookie year/2011 when we unexpectedly were on the Alamo winning alliance and on our way to Champs.

What we did was take a load of pictures and exact measurements of our only bot before it was bagged/tagged and impounded for Champs and then we built an inexpensive wood-framed replica of the chassis/structures in order to add an extensive Minibot feature that was completely missing from our competition bot. We put the wood chassis on casters and hand pushed the "bot" to approach and line-up for Minibot deployment--it worked really well in the shop and when we dismantled and installed on the bot in St. Louis everything fit perfectly.

Because of this approach of finding a way to make it work... we were able to have a new offensive capability that resulted in Ranking 17th in Archimedes in 2011--though no one picked us--yes it still stings. ;-)

I only provide this info to highlight that there are ways to achieve success even with a 6 Week Build-period _and_ not enough money to have a second practice bot.

--Michael Blake

[Oblarg]

We are going to build three robots (1 comp and 2 practice) for 2016.

Why?

The competition season is longer than the build season.

We will do more development and iteration during the competition season than the build season.

We want two robots to iterate faster during the competition season.

I think its clear that the gap is wide between us and low resource teams because we have the money to buy 3x of robot parts, and get to play with two robots post-stop build, and low resource teams get to play with zero robots post-stop build.

You make the call if the gap shrinks when low-resource teams get to play with their one and only robot while we're playing with our two or three robots.

We meet 4 days a week.

-Mike

This, I think, is the crucial point right here.

And I hear the people who are talking about burnout. I am very nearly burned-out myself at this point, having invested far more of myself in FRC over these past few years than was at all wise for a college student (in fact, I am still deciding to what extent I will be involved this coming season, even though I will have graduated by then - I do not think it would be healthy for me to repeat what I've been doing). But a six-week build season did not make the burnout any less bad, because as has been noted, work never really stops after the robot is in the bag.

In 2014, I spent the entirety of my spring break scrambling to hobble together a practice bot so that we could debug and drive test a design that was put in the bag without ever having actually run. Sure, this was a "choice" - but the "choice" was between this and a guaranteed flop at our first regional. How many mentors do you know who'd have chosen the latter? And the fact is, we barely got that practice bot together, at rather huge out-of-pocket cost to some of our students' parents, to boot. The cost to our team from not having access to our robot after bag day was massive.

I do not think this is a cost that is equal across teams of wildly varying resources, and for that reason I think the bag day should go.

[Jon Stratis]

Sure anyone should be able able to assemble the KOP and have a driving robot and very likely an end effector in 6 weeks.

Will assembling that KOP teach you about programming? Not so much.
Will assembling that KOP teach you about CNC? Not so much.
Will assembling that KOP teach you electronics? Not even a FIRST goal for the most part (hence we provide the control system).

My point: what is your goal to merely build a robot to show up on the field?

My goal is not just to build a robot, it's to educate and mentor students in the skills that built that robot. So will I be successful? Sure I will reduce my scope till we succeed at the price of my goals which are larger than the time provided.

I can do this even faster. I can just build the robot myself with 2 or 3 trained engineers and let the students watch and learn how it is done. Accumulating none of the tactile education they could have gotten. Heck I've built military robots I can just show up and hand them the controls teaching them with the right amout of money you can buy someone else's hard work. Military probably prefer this anyway: drone pilots that when they retire no longer have drones.

Again, your missing the point. You can build a SUCCESSFUL robot in 6 weeks. Over the past 9 years, my team has only made significant changes at competition twice. We've been finalists 3 times, winners twice, and almost always play in eliminations (usually as captain or first round pick). And all of that is done with a student led team that emphasizes training and experience over getting the perfect robot out. Sure, if it was just the mentors on our team building, we'd be done in a week. But the mentors do very, very little building.

The point is, the schedule may be a limiting factor to how much you can do, but it shouldn't be a limiting factor in producing a successful robot if your team can develop a good process and plan for the season.

[Rangel(kf7fdb)]

I could see arguments to both. As a team that builds a practice bot, I'm sure our team is for removing stop build day since we work through competitions season anyways. That being said, low resource teams or teams with not so time committed mentors might not like the change. Stop build day is a good excuse for mentors to not have to work for another 6-8 weeks and although building a practice bot is an option, it's a HUGE obstacle a team has to overcome both financially and time wise in order to continue working after stop build day. By removing the obstacle, their really isn't that great of an excuse to stop working other than the fact that you don't want to and all the less time committed mentors would be looked at as real bad guys. Heck the rest of the school might look down upon the team if they stopped working after 6 weeks when their season is 12. So yes while teams that don't want to work past 6 weeks could just decide not to, there is a lot of pressure to continue working, especially if the students want to(let's be real, most students would want to).

I'm okay with whatever FIRST decides. Especially since the scenario I laid out is probably the reality of the majority of FRC teams. Even some higher caliber teams as indicated in this thread shows this.

[techhelpbb]

Again, your missing the point. You can build a SUCCESSFUL robot in 6 weeks. Over the past 9 years, my team has only made significant changes at competition twice. We've been finalists 3 times, winners twice, and almost always play in eliminations (usually as captain or first round pick). And all of that is done with a student led team that emphasizes training and experience over getting the perfect robot out. Sure, if it was just the mentors on our team building, we'd be done in a week. But the mentors do very, very little building.

The point is, the schedule may be a limiting factor to how much you can do, but it shouldn't be a limiting factor in producing a successful robot if your team can develop a good process and plan for the season.

That's fine. You built the robot and it placed highly in competition.
My point is that building the robot is not enough.
The fact you can take longer to build the robot is not always about adding features.

Team 11 & 193 (both in Mount Olive High School) both student led teams build generally at least 3 robots sometimes 4 in 6 weeks. Sometimes we add on a few prototypes as we go. One major reason we split the team was because with so many people on just Team 11 wouldn't get the full experience they could have. Now we facilitate that at the cost of a whole extra team.

So it's not just about building the robot. If it was I wouldn't need FIRST.

[gblake]

This may have been mentioned earlier and I missed the post but I remember a video back in 2011 that I saw where Dean Kamen was explaining a purposeful _feature_ of FRC was the 6 Week Build-period.
...
I think we need to look at 6 week build as a baked-in pillar by the founder.
...
--Michael Blake
YES!

The program's founder(s) and eminent spokesmen, are publicly proud about this. It's definitely a feature, and not a problem.

I don't remember ever hearing one of them complain that the best (or any) on-field robots needed a few more weeks of work put into them. I don't remember ever hearing them complain that participants aren't receiving enough vocational training.

I do remember hearing them encourage everyone in FRC spend time adding/inspiring new participants, and helping rookies or struggling vets have a good, inspiring, experience.

Encouraging everyone to invest any excess competitive passion into looking outward, rather than inward, remains my 2¢

Blake

[techhelpbb]

I do remember hearing them encourage everyone in FRC spend time adding/inspiring new participants, and helping rookies or struggling vets have a good, inspiring, experience.

Encouraging everyone to invest any excess competitive passion into looking outward, rather than inward, remains my 2¢

Blake

That's actually my point. I am not sure that we are making this easily accessible with that deadline. So even if we can inspire we are inspiring people to do something hard and in the process we are raising the cost to them.

However we are often not raising the costs (consider all the various kinds of cost) in the same way for everyone. Pardon me for saying but I see no study that shows what the impact of this deadline is. Shouldn't that be the barometer: an act of scientific understanding?

I mean I understand the value of our leaders here, but then again no organization can run on shear good will alone.

[Jared Russell]

I think we need to look at 6 week build as a baked-in pillar by the founder.

So for my money, I am all for keeping the six week build.

Asking for students to sacrifice other aspects of their life for 6 weeks is fair, given the massive benefits that FRC brings. It is not, however, reasonable to expect that students give much more than that, because we're getting to the point where it will prevent students from joining, or even continuing with the team.

Teaching Real-World Engineering: This to me is the larger, if not largest, reason to keep stop build day.

Except you can already keep building after 6 weeks if you want to! Current "stop build day" is only a stop build day if you are unwilling (or financially/logistically unable) to continue working on your withholding allowance and/or a second robot.


In FRC, your bagged robot is version 1.0. You keep working on improvements, and practice day at the event you change it to 1.1. Then you see how it does on the field, design other improvements, and address those for version 1.2 at your next event. Take away stop-build, and your short changing that cycle, in my opinion.

I think (the general lack of) local access to good practice fields is what short changes the cycle. Many teams don't put their "1.0" robot on anything resembling an FRC field until their first competition, and then they have to react and scramble to adjust without their robot in their shop. This is why year after year, the stats show that robots get dramatically better after their first event.

I agree that if you made build season 8 or 10 weeks long and don't address this, many teams will show up to their first event with little more than slightly more polished versions of the same robots they show up with now. The difference is that getting to 1.1 and 1.2 (and in some cases 2.0) has fewer barriers. The difference between your 1.0 and 1.1 robots can be the difference between a student having a wholly disappointing experience and an extremely rewarding one - every team should have that opportunity, and shouldn't have to work through artificial barriers to do so!

[marshall]

YES!

The program's founder(s) and eminent spokesmen, are publicly proud about this. It's definitely a feature, and not a problem.

I don't remember ever hearing one of them complain that the best (or any) on-field robots needed a few more weeks of work put into them. I don't remember ever hearing them complain that participants aren't receiving enough vocational training.

I do remember hearing them encourage everyone in FRC spend time adding/inspiring new participants, and helping rookies or struggling vets have a good, inspiring, experience.

Encouraging everyone to invest any excess competitive passion into looking outward, rather than inward, remains my 2¢

Blake

At the risk of poking the bear...

Is it disingenuous to say to people that "these teams built these robots in just six weeks" when in fact it is often 10 or 12 weeks for many (not all) of the top teams?

I know that I've had more than one comment from a mentor that they didn't expect to invest more than 6 weeks into the FRC build season only to find out that they invest a lot more time.

EDIT: Changed a word.

[IKE]

At the risk of poking the bear...

Is it disingenuous to say to people that "these teams built these robots in just six weeks" when in fact it is often 10 or 12 weeks for many (not all) of the top teams?

I know that I've had more than one comment from a mentor that they didn't expect to invest more than 6 weeks into the FRC program only to find out that they invest a lot more time.

I would say a robot is a lot like a home. There is likely a date when the house finished being built, but that doesn't mean your finished making it your home.

If the goal of the statement is a nice sound-bite for an investor/reporter, I think you can generally make that statement and sleep at night. If you are trying to warn a prospective mentor, then I think it is wise to give a range. IE, this is the minimum amount of time we would be looking for to still be considered a mentor. Maximum amount of time can vary up to XX hrs/week for potentially 4 months...

[AllenGregoryIV]

At the risk of poking the bear...

Is it disingenuous to say to people that "these teams built these robots in just six weeks" when in fact it is often 10 or 12 weeks for many (not all) of the top teams?

I know that I've had more than one comment from a mentor that they didn't expect to invest more than 6 weeks into the FRC build season only to find out that they invest a lot more time.


I'm going to commit to stop talking about the 6 week build season. I moved to calling it 45 days a few years ago but I think I'm done with that too. At this point if anyone says "All the teams have only six weeks to build their robots.", it's pretty much a lie. If that is helping get sponsors we shouldn't be doing it anymore since it's not the truth. Does "building a robot in 6-12 weeks" sound all that less impressive?

From and including: Saturday, January 9, 2016 (Kickoff)
To and including: Saturday, April 30, 2016 (Last Day of Championship)
Result: 113 days

#113Days

[gblake]

At the risk of poking the bear...

Is it disingenuous to say to people that "these teams built these robots in just six weeks" when in fact it is often 10 or 12 weeks for many (not all) of the top teams?

I know that I've had more than one comment from a mentor that they didn't expect to invest more than 6 weeks into the FRC build season only to find out that they invest a lot more time.

EDIT: Changed a word.If I understand you correctly, what you are writing about are some of the reasons I would love to see this thread morph a robust discussion of the extremely complex subject of how to have a true 6-week build season, even if what gets built in that period might not be *every* single thing a team takes to a competition.

Human nature, and North American culture, being what they are, I don't expect that will happen; but that doesn't mean I can't lean in the direction of a cultural change. ;)

Blake

[techhelpbb]

If I understand you correctly, what you are writing about are some of the reasons I would prefer to replace this thread with a robust discussion of the extremely complex subject of how to have a true 6-week build season, even if what gets built in that period might not be *every* single thing a team takes to a competition.

Blake

We need an award for best robot built entirely at the competition ;) with a runner up for the most neatly organized box of parts.

http://static.themetapicture.com/media/funny-sarcasm-point-kidding.jpg :D

[Nemo]

Having a Week 0 scrimmage event is just as good as having a bag day for the purpose of creating an incentive to meet a deadline ahead of a team's first event.

The Bag and Tag deadline is purely a disadvantage for our team from that perspective. We already have a strong incentive to get to a functional state in 6 weeks, and we already continue working after that 6 week period ends. Bag and Tag only adds cost and hassle. Purely artificial and unnecessary cost and hassle, I might add.

[Rachel Lim]

Teams that already do well will continue to do well without a bag day.
Teams that already struggle to build a robot will continue to struggle without a bag day.
Teams that already don't use all the time they have will continue to do so without a bag day.
Teams that already have trouble allocating time properly will continue to have trouble without a bag day.

But teams that are able to build a decent robot in six weeks but don't have the funds to build a practice robot built benefit from the elimination of a bag day.


Speaking as someone who has to deal with the school/robotics balance, and from a team that will probably take the lack of a bag day to mean we can put off making decisions even longer, I would definitely miss the bag day. But it's my (or my team's) own responsibility to allocate time properly.

It doesn't make sense to punish a very specific group of teams because of a rule that to many basically doesn't exist.

[MrForbes]

But teams that are able to build a decent robot in six weeks but don't have the funds to build a practice robot built benefit from the elimination of a bag day.

Interesting take on it, Rachel. I think we fall into this category, yet I don't see how we'd benefit from eliminating bag day. We can build a decent robot in 6 weeks, then we get to stop for a little while and relax. I really like that.

[JVN]

As a supplement to this discussion, I posted a poll here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=139390

[the programmer]

You make the call if the gap shrinks when low-resource teams get to play with their one and only robot while we're playing with our two or three robots.


Michael, in the end, once you bag your robot, you can build as many practice robots as you want but all you can do is fine tune the one you have in the bag. By opening up the build season, you can look at competitions, see what works, and build a completely new robot from scratch. The majority of teams can't do that. By keeping the six week build season, you're limited to minor changes to your robot, which can be achieved without a practice robot. In my opinion, this helps low resource teams be competitive and allows teams to dial down their schedule after build season.

[Nemo]

Mentor/Team Burn-Out and Level-Loading Higher and Lower Resource Teams: I grouped these together because they are connected when it comes to the lower resource teams. Though some have brought it up, it seems to me from reading this thread that some here have lost sight that Chief Delphi is not a proper sampling of FIRST Robotics Competition Teams as a whole. Most lower resource teams that I have talked with drastically reduce how long they meet in the weeks between stop build day and competition. So when deciding if mentor (and/or student) burn-out would happen, remember that you should be thinking of the teams that struggle to have enough mentors (and/or students) during build season due to the current time commitments already being a massive deterrent. As a result I don’t think the elimination of stop-build day will level-load these teams with their higher-resource counterparts, if anything it might just move them further down the bracket in terms of competitiveness.


Let's imagine that we never had a build deadline, and it was identified that low resource teams were having a hard time getting mentors and students to commit for the full 9-12 weeks. As a fix, somebody in our alternate universe proposes that we reduce the build season to 6 weeks. I think that proposal would be poorly received by the community, because it limits the high performers instead of lifting up the low performers.

Problem: >50% of FRC teams build robots that essentially can't play the game.
Solution: Give teams more time.

Regarding weeks 7-12 in our current setup:
1) Top teams use that time - they have the money and commit the time to utilize it.
2) Some teams can't use that time effectively because they lack funding to make a practice robot.
3) Some teams can't use that time effectively because their people won't or can't commit that much extra time.

If we get rid of the bag deadline, that helps group #2, but it doesn't help group #3. Is that a good reason not to help group #2?

[Alan Anderson]

Regarding weeks 7-12 in our current setup:
1) Top teams use that time - they have the money and commit the time to utilize it.
2) Some teams can't use that time effectively because they lack funding to make a practice robot.
3) Some teams can't use that time effectively because their people won't or can't commit that much extra time.

If we get rid of the bag deadline, that helps group #2, but it doesn't help group #3. Is that a good reason not to help group #2?

You would need to characterize group #2 better before a useful answer can be arrived at. Group #2a currently doesn't work past week 6 because they lack funding, but could take advantage of more time if they had it. Group #2b has never thought about asking people to work longer because they don't have the funding to do so under today's rules, but if they did ask they'd find themselves alongside Group #3.

So you'd be helping some of Group #2, and you'd be contributing to frustration and/or burnout of the rest. It's a tradeoff, not an obvious win.

And don't forget Group #4, who can't work longer on their robot because they must pack and ship their robot since they're traveling to a distant competition.

[Michael Corsetto]

Michael, in the end, once you bag your robot, you can build as many practice robots as you want but all you can do is fine tune the one you have in the bag. By opening up the build season, you can look at competitions, see what works, and build a completely new robot from scratch. The majority of teams can't do that. By keeping the six week build season, you're limited to minor changes to your robot, which can be achieved without a practice robot. In my opinion, this helps low resource teams be competitive and allows teams to dial down their schedule after build season.

Erik,

Please define "minor changes"

I'm not sure you understand the scope of work some teams are accomplishing within the current rules set.

References:

2011 Minibots
1678's 2015 Can Grabbers
1114's 2015 Harpoons
973's 2015 robot between their 1st and 2nd regional
1678's entire 2013 robot (minus drivetrain)


1678's 2013 robot is my favorite example. The hanger, shooter and pick up system were entirely different between stop-build and CMP (we actually took the pick-up system as carry-on on the plane to Saint Louis!)

I understand where you are coming from. However, this "building robots from scratch" you are talking about, which puts low-resource teams at a disadvantage, already happens. We just pay more to do it because this large plastic bag gets in our way every year ;)

-Mike

[Brianna_G#839]

I still like the 6 week build season with being able to have our second robot being built and practicing. Imagine what St. Louis would be like with not as experienced drivers as we have when able to practice with our second robot.

[Drakxii]

Personally I really like 6 week format, it feels very fitting to an engineering project in the real life. Including the radical changes with short windows and/or weight limits. Also it gives a good amount of time in the fall for training.

Now if they were to change it they should just move kickoff to first weekend in October. Then start competitions in mid January So instead of 6 weeks you have 10 full weeks (ignoring holidays). Teams would have lots of time to practice, not have to worry about shipping/painting/cutting times as much and wouldn't have to meet as long during build season. Also could spread out districts, district champs and champs.

Now while I doubt that would happen any time soon, there would still be teams that show up with robots that didn't work or were just boxes on wheels.

[Jon Stratis]

That's fine. You built the robot and it placed highly in competition.
My point is that building the robot is not enough.
The fact you can take longer to build the robot is not always about adding features.

Team 11 & 193 (both in Mount Olive High School) both student led teams build generally at least 3 robots sometimes 4 in 6 weeks. Sometimes we add on a few prototypes as we go. One major reason we split the team was because with so many people on just Team 11 wouldn't get the full experience they could have. Now we facilitate that at the cost of a whole extra team.

So it's not just about building the robot. If it was I wouldn't need FIRST.

I'm glad you build a lot of robots every year. Even if the season was twice as long as it is now, my team (and many, many others, probably well over 1/2 of FIRST) wouldn't have the funds to do so. I still don't see, however, how this plays into the length of the build season or whether we should have a stop build day. Even with a stop build day, what's stopping you from going year-round and building 20 robots each year? If getting MORE the the required number of robots done in 6 weeks is possible, why is that 6 week limitation a problem?

[aldaeron]

For me, the build season is a major selling point like Al mentioned. When you tell the general public that a bunch of high school kids built this fantastic robot in 6 weeks - they are always astonished. I typically correlate this to a real world competitive bid for a project demo - if you don't have a working demo at the deadline, you're out!

The main thing I worry about with regard to the 6 week build season limit is newer teams that compete for one or two season and then fold. The first year I mentored we failed spectacularly (caused by our lack of knowledge of "what works in FRC" training resources). While it was a great "learning experience" for the kids, most of them did not return the following year.

I recall seeing some statistics recently about returning percentage of rookies being quite poor (someone better at searching - help me out here). My experience is that FRC can be quite a steep learning curve and that with more time, newer teams would be more successful and want to keep participating.


My suggestion is to keep veteran teams on the 6 week schedule and allow rookies an extra 1-2 weeks before bagging. My reasoning is that they would get to see other robot reveals, catch up if they are behind, tweak their design slightly based on reveals of top teams or get in some driving practice to ultimately make more competitive robots. Since many regions have pre-ship scrimmages rookies would be able to see their robot in action and then make some tweaks over a longer period (typically there are only 3 days between scrimmage and bag). This would hopefully improve their experience and make them want to return. I realize that in some cases, this could be abused to give these teams an advantage.

Similarly, 2nd year teams that performed poorly in their rookie year could apply for an extra week and FIRST could allow this on a case by case basis.

I am assuming a bad experience is the primary reason teams do not return, though it can also be loss of funding/sponsor/teacher/etc. I also realize the logistics of this proposal could be significant. I am confident CD can help shape this into a better idea.

In my experience the best measure for student success has been the ratio of students to mentors. The more time students get to spend with mentors the more they learn and the more they get out of the program. With a longer build season for rookie teams I think there would be more time for students and mentors to work together. Most new mentors I have met seem to ease into FRC and only come once a week.

Since this discussion comes up every year, I think FIRST should poll teams about build season changes as part of the year end survey (or perhaps a pre-season survey).

-matto-

[Nemo]

So you'd be helping some of Group #2, and you'd be contributing to frustration and/or burnout of the rest. It's a tradeoff, not an obvious win.

Only group #2 (or group #2a if you prefer) is spending more time than they did before. You can call it "increasing burnout" for that group, but I call it making a choice to gain a benefit in exchange for time. Any team that doesn't want to spend additional time can exercise some free will and choose not to spend the additional time.

[techhelpbb]

I'm glad you build a lot of robots every year. Even if the season was twice as long as it is now, my team (and many, many others, probably well over 1/2 of FIRST) wouldn't have the funds to do so. I still don't see, however, how this plays into the length of the build season or whether we should have a stop build day. Even with a stop build day, what's stopping you from going year-round and building 20 robots each year? If getting MORE the the required number of robots done in 6 weeks is possible, why is that 6 week limitation a problem?

You can, and as I pointed out previously the team I mentor soon will be, in a position to go year round in some fashion. However you can't build a robot before the official start of kickoff without knowing the challenge and after that you only have 6 weeks unless you buy enough parts to make at least a second robot.

The issue is we need to build a 2nd robot, and sometimes per team (we have 2) to be competitive and have time to train the drivers on that year's robot even with 20 years of experience in how to build FRC robots. That's at least 2-4 control systems cost and the load of both this work on the mentors and the contributions on the local community. To some level that scales with the number of participants and to some level it does not.

Also it's one of motivation. Once the season ends you've quick burned the time. Mistakes are being made you can't undo and you burn your resources out. Plus when you go to your respective work leaders and tell them it's merely 6 weeks you are not being honest. It's not really 6 weeks. If you go year round you have a side job you probably pay to work. If you go less than year round it's very likely more than 6 weeks. So how would you expect those mentor employers to react to your mere 6 week engagement turning into 10, 12, 16 weeks when they expected it to end?

I know that if I start doing this year round - I am trading the sprint for the long term vision otherwise my coworkers will rightly ask which is my real job.


The main thing I worry about with regard to the 6 week build season limit is newer teams that compete for one or two season and then fold. The first year I mentored we failed spectacularly (caused by our lack of knowledge of "what works in FRC" training resources). While it was a great "learning experience" for the kids, most of them did not return the following year.

...

Similarly, 2nd year teams that performed poorly in their rookie year could apply for an extra week and FIRST could allow this on a case by case basis.

I am assuming a bad experience is the primary reason teams do not return, though it can also be loss of funding/sponsor/teacher/etc. I also realize the logistics of this proposal could be significant. I am confident CD can help shape this into a better idea.


I know that when we started FRC11 (which was FRC8 the first year) that we all thought that a poor showing would work against our ability to find the funding to continue. A poor showing worked directly against our personal motivations to pour our personal funds in to secure the resources we couldn't get funded by sponsors. It also enabled any detractors to argue we were less than capable making the problem much worse. It is not 20 years ago but these human problems are still the same human problems and that is still the same 6 week build season.

[Jon Stratis]

The issue is we need to build a 2nd robot, and sometimes per team (we have 2) to be competitive and have time to train the drivers on that year's robot even with 20 years of experience in how to build FRC robots. That's at least 2-4 control systems cost and the load of both this work on the mentors and the contributions on the local community. To some level that scales with the number of participants and to some level it does not.

This right here is your biggest assumption - that you need to build two robots to be competitive. As I said, my team never has, and except for two years hasn't even designed improvements after stop build, yet we've been to elims a bunch, finalists a bunch, and winners twice. Yeah, we weren't close to Einstein, but you don't have to be up that high to be competitive or successful with your team.

You are choosing to put that added work on yourselves because you feel the benefit outweighs the cost - but it's not something that is required to be competitive.

[Lil' Lavery]

The main valid argument I've seen for the "stop build day" is that it would discourage teams from going to Week 1 regionals. However, I argue that teams would go anyway due to locality and the fact that everybody has only had the 6 weeks anyway- it would change very little. However for teams that don't have the funds to build two robots and/or go to only one local regional, the benefits would be immense. Personally I would vastly prefer the extra time to drive, test, and improve things, as we usually go to week 3 and 5 regionals.

There are already teams that avoid week 1 events. Some do it because they don't like being "guinea pigs" for a new game. Others do it because they want more time. 1712 falls in the latter category.

While in a regional format, you can put a bad event behind you and pick up a clean slate in your next event with an improved robot. In the district format, if you have a really bad event, you've essentially condemned yourself to missing DCMP and CMP. 1712 learned that the hard way in 2013. We simply weren't ready for our week 1 event, and missed the eliminations as a result. Despite great improvements at our 2nd event, we missed DCMP because we had put ourselves in a massive points hole. We still competed in week 1 in 2014 because we hate back-to-back events even more than we fear week 1, we skipped out on the very local (and very awesome) week 1 event in 2015 and are doing so again in 2016. It makes much more sense for us to have the extra time to work on our withholding allowance and test our programming on our development chassis (as well as get some lessons learned from watching earlier events). Even if we're competing against teams who are now going into their second event, guaranteeing we have something functional prevents us from prematurely ending our season.

If bag day was removed, I anticipate this aspect would become far more pronounced. Especially in the district format.

[Rangel(kf7fdb)]

This right here is your biggest assumption - that you need to build two robots to be competitive. As I said, my team never has, and except for two years hasn't even designed improvements after stop build, yet we've been to elims a bunch, finalists a bunch, and winners twice. Yeah, we weren't close to Einstein, but you don't have to be up that high to be competitive or successful with your team.

You are choosing to put that added work on yourselves because you feel the benefit outweighs the cost - but it's not something that is required to be competitive.

To add to this. I know 610 didn't have a practice bot in 2013 but that didn't stop them from becoming world champions and being one of the top robots of that year. Were they the absolute best? I think most would agree they weren't but they were definitely good enough to be competitive and good enough to have a chance at going all the way as they did.

[techhelpbb]

This right here is your biggest assumption - that you need to build two robots to be competitive. As I said, my team never has, and except for two years hasn't even designed improvements after stop build, yet we've been to elims a bunch, finalists a bunch, and winners twice. Yeah, we weren't close to Einstein, but you don't have to be up that high to be competitive or successful with your team.

You are choosing to put that added work on yourselves because you feel the benefit outweighs the cost - but it's not something that is required to be competitive.

Respectfully I disagree.

It may be that your team's circumstances enable you to get this absolutely right and your drivers trained in 6 weeks. However plenty of other teams have this issue beside Team 11 & 193 (who has stuck with one robot as they desire). So I'd love to see a poll of how many teams build a 2nd robot because they feel they need to and as an option because they want to.

It's hardly just an engineering issue. There's weather. There's logistics. There's the 2 pizza problem (remember we are student led and there are a lot of students). (http://blog.idonethis.com/two-pizza-team/) The fact we hold the FLL championship for NJ, an FTC competition and an FRC district event. Again when you compare teams you need to really think about what loads are on those resources.

Sure we could make some choices to make the problem smaller - the point is making these choices comes at a price not just for our teams.

Also do not discount luck in the competition itself. Sometimes the difference between success and disaster is just luck. For example Tom posted below that your region matters. That's just luck you happened to have competitors between you and your achievement that weren't better able to stop you or get lucky themselves.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

You are choosing to put that added work on yourselves because you feel the benefit outweighs the cost - but it's not something that is required to be competitive.

The amount of work needed to be competitive varies by region. It would be hard to be a perennial contender at SVR without the use of a second robot unless you got VERY lucky in your early design choices.

[Michael Corsetto]

This right here is your biggest assumption - that you need to build two robots to be competitive. As I said, my team never has, and except for two years hasn't even designed improvements after stop build, yet we've been to elims a bunch, finalists a bunch, and winners twice. Yeah, we weren't close to Einstein, but you don't have to be up that high to be competitive or successful with your team.

You are choosing to put that added work on yourselves because you feel the benefit outweighs the cost - but it's not something that is required to be competitive.

You are assuming that your team's record qualifies as "competitive".

I suppose we (and many others) may have different definitions of "competitive".

-Mike

[zinthorne]

Awesome that we get to discuss this again.

The unintended consequences will be rampant, but in the end, there will still be three basic categories of FRC teams at competition:

top level teams, who work year round and take advantage of every opportunity and loophole available to win more;
low resource, low knowledge teams, who will come to competition with poor quality robots, and
teams who are willing to work ridiculously hard, but cant yet be called "elite" (if they ever get that far)


In other words, the rich would stay rich, the poor would stay poor, and a bunch of us would just keep chuggin'. So we might as well keep it the way it is.

My opinion.



I agree with this alot.

I like the stop build day. If we were to get rid of it, I feel like it would create an even bigger disparity between the elite and rookies. The elite would have several robots by the end of the season, and there would be a lot of cloning... Also think of all the fun times that we would miss. 1114's harpoons would not be such a cool big deal! They would be pre-build to a specific robot that would play like junk in quals so they would be picked. Part of what i think makes FRC so great is the pressure. The pressure to get your design. It simulates a real world job where you must finish a project by a certain time. Getting rid of stop build day would I believe lower the fun and lower the number of unique designs, and working with what you have.

[AdamHeard]

Removing stop build day won't make the elites better.

The elite teams already are skipping stop build day via practice bots. Elite teams already are doing complete robot rebuilds

[MrForbes]

You are assuming that your team's record qualifies as "competitive".

I suppose we (and many others) may have different definitions of "competitive".

-Mike

John might have a definition of "competitive" that is relevant to most teams.

[Paul Richardson]

I've seen a few responses mentioning design convergence if we were to eliminate robot bagging. While I'm not necessarily against this, I do see a way to put a bit of a damper on it. We are already required to submit a Bill of Materials, though it's not looked at too closely. If you wanted to limit in-season changes, implement a "feature-freeze" using the BOM.

Teams would submit a BOM online after 6 weeks listing the normal stuff, plus a short list of their robot's subsystems and 'Planned Additions'. These would need to be specific (say "Floor pickup for Game Piece A" and not "Change robot to be better"). Basically, you can make additions, but only if you came up with the general concept of it on your own. This doesn't really prevent copying subsystem designs so much as copying strategies.

This would not prevent can-grabbers from 2015 or minibots from 2011, because everybody would have put those things on their Planned Changes list. It was obvious from the design of the game that those mechanisms would be important. I see this as more of a game design flaw rather than something the rules need to address. Even if we had strict bag rules and no practice robots allowed, teams would just make them at competition.

This would not prevent redesigning existing subsystems (copied or otherwise). Teams routinely redesign intakes, shooters, and such, replacing their original designs under the existing withholding allowance rules. This wouldn't change.

This would prevent a team from copying something like 118's bridge hanger from 2012 (had it been legal). If you don't declare at 6 weeks that you might build a device for hanging from bridges, then you can't add it later. Similarly, probably a lot fewer teams would have had stingers.

This would also prevent a team from copying something like 71's unique drive system from 2002. A team would have to have planned to build a high traction 'walking' drive. If they simply planned to 'drive' they'd be able to change wheel types/sizes, gear ratios, and other tweaks. Switching from tank to H-drive would also need to be declared ahead of time. Teams would be limited to functionality improvements for their existing subsystems, not functionality additions.

Minor Bonus Effects: Encourages stopping design in favor of drive practice/polish, discourages overworking after 6 weeks, and encourages teams to take a better look at the rules.

My Personal Opinion: No bag, no limits. My BOM system would be harder on the bottom group of teams than the top because of the experience difference. Many teams didn't think about can-burglars at all last year because running out of cans was so far off their radar. It'd be frustrating to see all these designs you aren't allowed to build. That's not inspiring or fun.

[AllenGregoryIV]

The elite teams already are skipping stop build day via practice bots. Elite teams already are doing complete robot rebuilds

Not even just elite teams. Spectrum is by no means elite but we did a full rebuild this past season and we copied ideas we saw from other teams. (Thanks 118, and others). It was a very hard decision to scrap 7 weeks of work for a new idea but we know our robot wasn't competitive. It took a very long time to get the new "cloned" robot working half way descently. This was definitely a rushed job and better clones could be made with more time but largely it would require you to be be building your clone through most of competition season. You would not have any time to actually test it at a real event. Almost any clone is going to be worse then the orgional (for an entire FRC robot) because you don't have all the experience gained from the prototyping and design phase.

I think 2014 is a good place to look to see if the majority of teams would really clone another robot. It was pretty clear early on that 254 had a very special design once you saw the robot. A lot of teams could have probably used withholding and COTS parts to build something that cloned their robot, but to my knowledge none of the elite teams did that because they believed tweaking and getting better with their own robot had a better likely hood of success. The equation wouldn't change all that much if you got rid of stop build.

[pabeekm]

John might have a definition of "competitive" that is relevant to most teams.

I’d argue there's a definition of "competitive" that we can all agree with; it’s a drive to always do things better, gain more experience, and meet new personal bests. I don’t care how many banners a team has: if they have that drive, they are a terrifying and inspirational competitor who will eventually earn any measure of success they want.

It's worth noting that extra time on the robot can make a team more competitive in that respect, whatever their on-field goals are. It's an opportunity to put extra passion to work and learn more as a result. Practice bots aren’t necessary for teams to succeed on the field, but they can push a team’s experience and performance to levels they couldn't reach otherwise. That may sound cheesy, but it's true and awesome.

[gblake]

I’d argue there's a definition of "competitive" that we can all agree with; it’s a drive to always do things better, gain more experience, and meet new personal bests. I don’t care how many banners a team has: if they have that drive, they are a terrifying and inspirational competitor who will eventually earn any measure of success they want.

It's worth noting that extra time on the robot can make a team more competitive in that respect, whatever their on-field goals are. It's an opportunity to put extra passion to work and learn more as a result. Practice bots aren’t necessary for teams to succeed on the field, but they can push a team’s experience and performance to levels they couldn't reach otherwise. That may sound cheesy, but it's true and awesome.
That's an admirable suggestion, but I'll bet you a lunch that 90% of the folks using the word "competitive" in this thread, mean "builds a robot that has a strong chance of doing well during tournaments".

I doubt many use it to mean what you just described, or to mean simply "able to compete". Able to compete is probably the more correct definition (if a dictionary was consulted, or if we focused on the etymology of the term).

If I won my bet, the definition of "doing well" would still be a big source of fuzziness, but it is definitely tilted in the direction of participating in the eliminations.

In my experience, "competitive" is a notion that means so many different things to so many different people that I have learned to avoid it. Using it creates waaaay too many opportunities for talking past one another. Parts of this thread are good examples of that.

Blake

[Rich Kressly]

It's been a pretty long time since I considered all these things - my last "on team" FRC experience was 2010. At that point, after a decade in the game, I was pretty much toast, but not totally because of "the game" and "the robot" but more because of the totality of game, robot, outreach, school integration, work with area teams as an SM, etc, etc.

So, with that in mind, I'll provide you with no answers, but rather I'll pose additional questions ...
- What's the best use of time for an FRC team when mentors are with students?
-Is more time on "the game" and "the robot" a good thing in terms of culture change or does it "only" provide better competition robots?
-What metrics should be used to measure this stuff?
-does having unenforceable rules (even if everyone is honest and gracious) make any sense?

I'm honestly not sure, even after all this time, exactly where I stand on the overall issue - I'm just adding questions to the pile. I think, if I were back on a team, I'd lean toward JVN's kickoff-to-competition and spread out the meetings, "teach" more, get home before my whole family was asleep ... and probably shut the "robot switch off" at some point and use more "in season" time for outreach, community service, etc.

The one thing I am sure of is I don't want good folks to burn out ... however, I can't say I know the exact cause of burnout in FRC or if it's even the same thing for all who need a break.

[Jon Stratis]

That's an admirable suggestion, but I'll bet you a lunch that 90% of the folks using the word "competitive" in this thread, mean "builds a robot that has a strong chance of doing well during tournaments".

I doubt many use it to mean what you just described, or to mean simply "able to compete". Able to compete is probably the more correct definition (if a dictionary was consulted, or if we focused on the etymology of the term).

If I won my bet, the definition of "doing well" would still be a big source of fuzziness, but it is definitely tilted in the direction of participating in the eliminations.

In my experience, "competitive" is a notion that means so many different things to so many different people that I have learned to avoid it. Using it creates waaaay too many opportunities for talking past one another. Parts of this thread are good examples of that.

Blake

For me, competitive means playing saturday afternoon. Playing Saturday means your team is excited and energized. It means you have something positive to bring back to your school and tell them about how far you got. And we've seen enough upsets to know that anything can happen, so long as you're playing saturday afternoon.

[JVN]

For me, competitive means playing saturday afternoon. Playing Saturday means your team is excited and energized. It means you have something positive to bring back to your school and tell them about how far you got. And we've seen enough upsets to know that anything can happen, so long as you're playing saturday afternoon.

Based on last year... Einstein or nothing, then? :)

[marshall]

Einstein or nothing

QFT.

[Brandon Holley]

Personally I really like 6 week format, it feels very fitting to an engineering project in the real life. Including the radical changes with short windows and/or weight limits. Also it gives a good amount of time in the fall for training.

I love the title of this thread because the myth really is this exact statement above. The 6 week deadline is arbitrary. As has been beaten to death in this thread already, our team changes almost nothing about our work style/pace after bag day. The deadline is the competition! Its why every team continues to make changes and improve their robots throughout an event, because the real deadline is when autonomous starts on your next match. When that match is over you get a new deadline of another match, maybe a few minutes from then, maybe a couple weeks from then, you get my point.

My biggest sticking point lies in the almighty dollar. FIRST is run on free money. Money that flows in from sponsors, governments, stipends, endowments and communities. FIRST doesn't generate cash, this is obvious- so its why spending money intelligently and efficiently is really important to me. The way the build season works now inherently is more expensive than any other method. It pushes teams to pay for ultra fast shipping, buy duplicates of many expensive components (both mechanical and electrical) and really lean on fabrication sponsors to deliver duplicate parts and assemblies. This is because the rules are opened enough outside the bag that you can gain fundamental advantages by spending money.

To me this is just crazy. Why are we spending money on this stuff when we are an organization funded by others? Maybe I'm in a minority, but this to me is one of the most compelling reasons to consider a change. I'd much rather spend some more money on tools for our lab, stipend mentors, cover travel costs, etc!

-Brando

[MrForbes]

The way the build season works now inherently is more expensive than any other method. It pushes teams to pay for ultra fast shipping, buy duplicates of many expensive components (both mechanical and electrical) and really lean on fabrication sponsors to deliver duplicate parts and assemblies. This is because the rules are opened enough outside the bag that you can gain fundamental advantages by spending money.

Interesting...we don't spend money on this stuff. And we're one of the bigger fish in our small pond.

I guess you can find fault with the game, or you can find fault with how you play the game?

[techhelpbb]

Interesting...we don't spend money on this stuff. And we're one of the bigger fish in our small pond.

I guess you can find fault with the game, or you can find fault with how you play the game?

In fairness there's a lot of reasons why you need more than the spend of money alone and the need for fast shipping to determine if there's a fault in a team rather the competition.

Hence the need to ask questions about making a practice robot in my other topic.

For example:
1. Is your team really 2 teams in the same school who share spaces and some basic parts?
2. Do you run FLL, FTC and FRC competitions from your school?
3. Is each of your teams larger than 75 people?
4. Is your team student led?
5. Does your team compete in MAR (we can see you are in AZ)?
6. What technologies has your team decided to use (do you CNC, powder coat, CAD/CAM)?

Not that our teams should not seek out every opportunity to succeed but pretty clearly concerns exist beyond our teams and we are not new to this. Between FRC11 and FRC193 we tend to have very different build styles. The FRC11 team is the older students in their last 2 years and they tend to use the CNC and mass manufacturing skills more. The FRC193 team are in their 1st 2 years of high school and tends towards classic build where hand tools are often adequate. There are upsides and downs to these approaches and also how optimized your team is with either.

[Brandon Holley]

Interesting...we don't spend money on this stuff. And we're one of the bigger fish in our small pond.

I guess you can find fault with the game, or you can find fault with how you play the game?

I really dislike comparing individual team's methodologies and styles because there are so many factors to drive teams to do what they do, im not going to even attempt to list them. What works for you, may not work for another team.

Would you disagree that being able to spend money on these types of things is a fundamental advantage a team can have? Of course spending power will always be an advantage for some teams, but there is a inflection point to me where being able to spend into a 2nd robot or a redesign gains a team a serious advantage. If there wasn't, would the teams that do it, do it?

-Brando

[Ryan Dognaux]

Our team takes a few days off and then keeps right on working after bag day with our practice robot. The 6 week deadline truly is just a suggestion if you have the resources to build 2 robots. I understand that the 6 weeks deadline is 'part of the challenge' but isn't the challenge already challenging enough? There are still tons of teams that field robots that barely function at all. How is that inspiring?

Even if a team only met to work & practice for a single weekend prior to their actual regional event, just think how much more productive Thursdays would be for everyone. I know it would allow us to actually use Thursdays for practice instead of integrating our modifications that we made to the practice robot.

[Kevin Leonard]

5254 had an incredibly successful season last year for a second year team, despite not having a practice robot. 2 Regional Finalists and quarterfinals in Carson is nothing to scoff at.

But do you know what the difference between the medals 5254 won and the banners they COULD have won? The ability to access the robot between competitions.

5254 lost in Finger Lakes finals due to 2 dropped cans. One of the features they were unable to implement between regionals (that they implemented for championships) is a can stabilizer.

5254 is a small, low resource team that is fundraising like crazy right now so that we can have a practice robot for the 2016 season. Because we don't want to lose like that again.

[Michael Corsetto]

Our team takes a few days off and then keeps right on working after bag day with our practice robot. The 6 week deadline truly is just a suggestion if you have the resources to build 2 robots. I understand that the 6 weeks deadline is 'part of the challenge' but isn't the challenge already challenging enough? There are still tons of teams that field robots that barely function at all. How is that inspiring?

Even if a team only met to work & practice for a single weekend prior to their actual regional event, just think how much more productive Thursdays would be for everyone. I know it would allow us to actually use Thursdays for practice instead of integrating our modifications that we made to the practice robot.

This effect is multiplied between a teams first event and second event.

One of the magical aspects of Districts is one fee gets you two events. Teams are inspired to improve between events as they see their creations succeed and/or fail in the heat of the event.

The current system severely limits how much teams can exercise this new-found inspiration, mostly because of a plastic bag.

Well put Ryan.

-Mike

[plnyyanks]

One of the magical aspects of Districts is one fee gets you two events. Teams are inspired to improve between events as they see their creations succeed and/or fail in the heat of the event.

I would love to see some analysis like Jim Zondag did in another thread (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1506616&postcount=24) but that shows separate OPR growth curves for district and non-district teams.

I would speculate that district teams would increase their OPR more over time when compared to regional teams attending multiple events, possibly related to their unbag window in between events.

If I have time, I'll try and crunch some numbers this afternoon.

[jman4747]

If you are able to wait a week to get something and still get adequate practice in then that's fine. If you could get them in a week sooner, under the same conditions, you gain a week of practice or whatever you want to do. You could stop working a week sooner and have more down time before the next competition. Thus eliminating stop build day gives you that sort of option, which you don't have to use.

We would use the time to make a drive base with some weight thrown on to act as a defense bot to practice against. Way way cheaper and easier option than making a copy of our main that still serves a huge purpose.

I guess if you wanted to be a defense team you could build a fully functional scoring bot to practice against. :p

EDIT: If things are better in moderation than why binge on FRC for six weeks? Why not spread out your time?

[AdamHeard]

Interesting...we don't spend money on this stuff. And we're one of the bigger fish in our small pond.

I guess you can find fault with the game, or you can find fault with how you play the game?

Seems like your implying that inspiring excellence in students is a fault in how one plays the game?

[gblake]

Interesting...we don't spend money on this stuff. And we're one of the bigger fish in our small pond.

I guess you can find fault with the game, or you can find fault with how you play the game?

Seems like your implying that inspiring excellence in students is a fault in how one plays the game?Adam,

MrForbes can certainly answer for himself, but if I can be allowed a guess ... I think he might be saying that "less" can be "more" (much more) .

To my way of thinking, I want to jump on his bandwagon and suck every bit of wisdom that I can out of his team's approach, before I even think about copying the rushed shipments, and two-three robots approach(s).

The JVN vs Copioli contests, MrForbes' comments, and other related evidence, tell me that the search space for ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce) contains a heck of a lot more dimensions than just the calendar-days that a build-season lasts.

That evidence also strongly suggests that those other dimensions might be much more important than adjusting how long the current build season lasts.

Blake

[Citrus Dad]

We are going to build three robots (1 comp and 2 practice) for 2016.

Why?

The competition season is longer than the build season.

We will do more development and iteration during the competition season than the build season.

We want two robots to iterate faster during the competition season.

I think its clear that the gap is wide between us and low resource teams because we have the money to buy 3x of robot parts, and get to play with two robots post-stop build, and low resource teams get to play with zero robots post-stop build.

You make the call if the gap shrinks when low-resource teams get to play with their one and only robot while we're playing with our two or three robots.

We meet 4 days a week.

-Mike

I will point out that the $ cost of building a 2nd and 3rd robot is not substantial. Our robot build budget has not changed substantially as we add robots. Our increased budget has gone into other capital equipment purchases, stocking a set of new classes, and increased team members.

[MrForbes]

Seems like your implying that inspiring excellence in students is a fault in how one plays the game?

Probably not...but I might be implying that inspiring excellence in students does not require spending lots of money.

[Rick]

Here's another argument to the end of bag and tag: The monumental waste of resources.

FIRST put a lot of focus on recycling in the last year across all of their programs. You could argue however, that to be a top team, you had to use so many extra resources.

Think of all the raw materials that get wasted on building a second robot.
Think of the thousands of giant bag and tag plastic bags that get used once or twice and then thrown out.
Think of the miles of wire, the tons of metal, the blood, sweat and tears wasted across FRC because you are separated from your robot after build by a few mils of plastic by an arbitrary rule.A removal of bag and tag would help middle tier and low tier teams the most and save so much money, time, and material resources across the program.

[Michael Corsetto]

Adam,

MrForbes can certainly answer for himself, but if I can be allowed a guess ... I think he might be saying that "less" can be "more" (much more) .

To my way of thinking, I want to jump on his bandwagon and suck every bit of wisdom that I can out of his team's approach, before I even think about copying the rushed shipments, and two-three robots approach(s).

The JVN vs Copioli contests, MrForbes' comments, and other related evidence, tell me that the search space for ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce) contains a heck of a lot more dimensions than just the calendar-days that a build-season lasts.

That evidence also strongly suggests that those other dimensions might be much more important than adjusting how long the current build season lasts.

Blake

Blake,

You are completely right, there is an overwhelming evidence that adjusting the days on the calendar is not the only dimension for "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)".

My question is:

Will removing stop-build be one of the many "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)", or is it one of the "ways-to-NOT-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)"?

I am proposing this:

Removing stop-build is simply one of many "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)"

I believe discussing other "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)" is tangential to this thread.

-Mike

[AlexanderTheOK]

http://i.imgur.com/Nr7t7WZ.png?1

[Michael Corsetto]

MrForbes can certainly answer for himself, but if I can be allowed a guess ... I think he might be saying that "less" can be "more" (much more) .

"300 points and we could have done... less?"

[gblake]

Blake,

You are completely right, there is an overwhelming evidence that adjusting the days on the calendar is not the only dimension for "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)".

My question is:

Will removing stop-build be one of the many "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)", or is it one of the "ways-to-NOT-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)"?

I am proposing this:

Removing stop-build is simply one of many "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)"

...
-Mike
A) because I believe lengthening the build season is so unlikely (for an overwhelming majority of the teams) to affect the root causes and symptoms that people are hoping to affect, and
B) because I focus on FIRST's as a program that uses competitions, but doesn't exist to *be* competitions; I think we should park lengthening-the-build-season in the examined-but-rejected-because-of-very-low-ROI pile.

We/FIRST have better/bigger fish to fry. YMMV

Blake

[AdamHeard]

A) because I believe lengthening the build season is so unlikely (for an overwhelming majority of the teams) to affect the root causes and symptoms that people are hoping to affect, and
B) because I focus on FIRST's as a program that uses competitions, but doesn't exist to *be* competitions; I think we should park lengthening-the-build-season in the examined-but-rejected-because-of-very-low-ROI pile.

We/FIRST have better/bigger fish to fry. YMMV

Blake

Mike, Myself, Jim, others (as far as I can tell) aren't advocating in lengthening the schedule at all, just skipping bagging.

Any team that doesn't want to use more doesn't have to.

Elite teams are already working in this time anyway.

By keeping the status Quo FIRST is essentially endorsing a full open season for high resource teams, and a 6 week build for low resource teams.

[KrazyCarl92]

I think we should park lengthening-the-build-season in the examined-but-rejected-because-of-very-low-ROI pile.

How did you go about determining this was a lower return at a higher investment? Is it not a plausible scenario where it is a greater return on a lower investment?

[gblake]

... just skipping bagging. ...
Elite teams are already working in this time anyway.
By keeping the status Quo FIRST is essentially endorsing a full open season for high resource teams, and a 6 week build for low resource teams.
Well, I propose moving in the other direction and working to shut down the egregious post-44-days modifications (not easy to do, but worth the effort, I think) (fixes are one thing, wholesale rebuilds are another).

It's certainly not a forgone conclusion that what I'm calling competition-creep is the right direction to move the FIRST programs. While many folks seem to think that is the right direction, I'm advocating going in the other direction.

Intelligent people can reach different conclusions. These are my opinions.

[gblake]

How did you go about determining this was a lower return at a higher investment? Is it not a plausible scenario where it is a greater return on a lower investment?The long answer is long.

The short answer is the prima facie evidence supplied by the highly-visible "build a robot in a weekend" fun stunts, and by the posts written by folks like MrForbes.

I don't see a strong (certainly not strong enough) correlation between the length of the build season and a team's ability to successfully participate in the tournament part of inspiring students. Other factors appear to dominate, and I would much rather see the organization and the community of participants focus on those other factors, instead of on build-season-length or on creating/enhancing a second build season by eliminating bagging (if I understand the intent of eliminating bagging).

Blake

[techhelpbb]

The long answer is long.

The short answer is the prima facie evidence supplied by the highly-visible "build a robot in a weekend" fun stunts, and by the posts written by folks like MrForbes.

I don't see a strong (certainly not strong enough) correlation between the length of the build season and a team's ability to successfully participate in the tournament part of inspiring students. Other factors appear to dominate, and I would much rather see the organization and the community of participants focus on those other factors, instead of on build-season-length or on creating/enhancing a second build season by eliminating bagging (if I understand the intent of eliminating bagging).

Blake

Per my first post in this topic:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1506349&postcount=57

The inability of FIRST to grasp the evidence of the imbalance of their time/cost/quality pyramid (the top is scope) has driven me personally to decide that the 6 week build season means - literally nothing to me.

So I am preparing to make it so I have the ability to mentor any student in FRC that wants to do it and can make it there, in a mobile way eliminating the location access roadblocks, for CNC and programming. To put it bluntly: I can certainly run a makerspace with these tools even if FIRST disappeared. I can do it year round and I can therefore budget the costs (time, money, resources, etc).

I've already spent far to long, going on 20 years, watching people dance around this limit. If this was a job and similar passion had nothing to do with it: I would have quit because the cost to me is being utilized poorly. Actually in retrospect I have left 3 jobs for this sort of activity which would have held back my career had I stayed.

Keep in mind - I will still:
FRC - Mentor & Volunteer: CSA/FTAA/Small parts
FTC - Judge
FLL - Judge at NJ State level

However 20 years of FIRST, since I was basically 20 years old, have taught me if people won't move - do what's right.

[T^2]

Well, I propose moving in the other direction and working to shut down the egregious post-44-days modifications (not easy to do, but worth the effort, I think) (fixes are one thing, wholesale rebuilds are another).

It's certainly not a forgone conclusion that what I'm calling competition-creep is the right direction to move the FIRST programs. While many folks seem to think that is the right direction, I'm advocating going in the other direction.

Intelligent people can reach different conclusions. These are my opinions.

You're advocating removing the ability to improve robots between events? Would that change make the FIRST experience reflective of an actual engineering process? I'm just an ignorant student, but I was under the impression that engineers don't usually just throw their first prototype out the door, without testing in real-world conditions, and then later decide not to make improvements when they are able to.

[gblake]

You're advocating removing the ability to improve robots between events? Would that change make the FIRST experience reflective of an actual engineering process? I'm just an ignorant student, but I was under the impression that engineers don't usually just throw their first prototype out the door, without testing in real-world conditions, and then later decide not to make improvements when they are able to.FIRST's build season does resemble a competitive proposal sprint, and other real-world business activities.

Using the business analogy, those that would wait until the 44th day to finish and then throw their first prototype out the door wouldn't be businesses for very long. Who said you had to use the entire build season producing one prototype that you throw out the door?

Iterate during the 44 days. During those 44 days use simulations, and other methods to predict and test performance. Use those 44 days be an engineer, or a whatever. That is more than enough time to take care of that part of the inspiration process.

OK - Now for the post-build-season part of the discussion.

At the competitions, I recommend spending as much of your time as you can, focusing outward, rather than inward. There is an excellent pay-off.

Yes, businesses, computer scientists, cooks, engineers, farmers, etc. all improve their products when they have a chance. With that in mind, if FIRST was focused on being a competition, instead of on *using* a competition, I would be making a strong case for placing maximum emphasis on the competing (the scramble to claim a banner). But it's not and I'm not. Other people have different opinions.

In my way of looking at things, there is nothing at all (well, very little *) wrong with telling teams that they will be given a challenge, that they will be given 44 days to create a solution to that challenge, and that when they go to the competitions they will be able to see how their solutions measure up against what the other teams bring.

Is it necessary to make it possible for teams involved in FRC to do everything they possibly can (outside of or inside of the 44-day window) to win a banner??? The answer is, "no." The universe does not require it. Instead it's a choice FIRST can take, or not.

Is it useful to allow for teams involved in FRC to do some iterating after 44-day window? The answer is, "maybe." There are strong arguments in favor of it, but there are also strong arguments that anything more than the the bare minimum puts the program on a slippery slope that can lead to plenty of unnecessary problems that can poison the well. Again, that's a choice FIRST can take, or not.

FIRST can say when you should put your pencil down. FIRST can say that once the pencils go down, the solutions get graded. FIRST can say that further iteration occurs in between then and the next season. FIRST doesn't have to operate that way; and they sort-of do, sort-of don't, operate that way at the moment, but they could operate that way if they cared to.

If I understand things correctly (I might not), some people I respect began the program wanting teams to spend 44 days producing their solutions, and to then test those solutions during a few high-excitement competitions. Reading between the lines, I think that those founders wanted the teams to invest time outside those 44 days in fruitful pursuits other than full-tilt (or even half-tilt) revamping, completing, etc. of their solutions. I like that model. I think it is wise.

Does that clear up my point of view for you? Mine isn't the only viable point-of-view, but I like it, and I think it's a very useful one.

Blake
* If a team shows up at a competition unable to play, sure help them put something useful onto the field (and make a note about helping them before the competition next year). That is an entirely different kettle of fish than using the withholding allowance to lug in wholesale replacement mechanisms or extensive modifications.

[techhelpbb]

FIRST's build season does resemble a competitive proposal sprint, and other real-world business activities...


That does not mean that business today, that helped wreck a global economy, is a smart model to copy. I would like to inspire to do more than break your butt to win then often under deliver which is all too common in business today. I'd like to inspire to improve. (see below)

At the core - I ask merely for honesty. I suspect the greatest fear is if you tell perspective schools what this really is like: they will run from it because this is no simple quick commitment or fast win. This is basically 2 years before you become an 'overnight success'. That is the reality and clearly we prefer to put lipstick on it.

Added - Think about this. Today the computer on your desk is more than powerful enough to send a man to the moon. More than powerful enough to figure out the parameters of nuclear power. You have Internet so fast that only a nation state could dream of it 30 years ago. Yet our business have delivered Twitter, Facebook and first person shooters. Even today I find myself counseling students that: with a cheap Internet connection, a cheap computer from Walmart and a cheap All-In-One printer they have something that would takes years of work to gather 20 years ago. Yet people still can not find work with the barrier that low. Yes there is a problem with what we call the high bar.

[Ed Law]

It's probably about time we had this discussion again. For reference, here are a couple previous discussions on similar topics.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=116658
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=126848
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116789

P.S. Awesome to see Bill posting again.


IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.

Competition Weeks Robot Access Time Proposal

Introduction

The FIRST Robotics Competition is full of many dedicated mentors and students, who try to improve on different aspects of how FRC works to inspire more students, grow more teams, create a more sustainable program and increase efficiency. Many of these passionate folks share thoughts and ideas on www.chiefdelphi.com. In a thread on “mentor burnout”,a lot of ideas and thoughts were shared on causes and possible improvements to the long standing FRC season model. The purpose of this letteris to examine a possible change that will improveFRC as a whole.

During the “mentor burnout” discussion, access to the robot was often mentioned on both sides of the burnout issue. The discussion centerson the stop-build date for therobots. Some mentors and students feel that not having a stop-build date wouldforce teams into an exhausting four month build season in order to stay competitive. They also believe that copycatting could run rampant if teams had enough time to rebuild their robot after watching others compete. Others believe that quite the opposite is true. They believe that the short six week build season and limited robot access is to blame for the herculean efforts during build season.Meanwhile practices to stay competitive outside of build season via withholding allowance, practice robots, and radical redesigns are only achievable with substantial monetary and time commitmentsmaking them possible for onlyteams with the highest levels of resources. This group thinks they could “raise the floor” of the competition by making it easier for lower resource teams to do the things higher resource teams already do.

This letteroffers a compromise of keeping the stop-build datewhile expandingunbag time in order to find a happy medium between the completely-open and the six-week-constrained competition models. The basic proposal is to allow some unbag time every week for repairs, development on both mechanical and software fronts, driver practice, and robot demonstration. This proposal is supported by many of the users on the Chief Delphi forum as a good compromise.

The proposal is broken into the following subsections:
1. Stop Build Day – No Change
2. Hands off Period – New addition
3. Unbag time – New Addition
4. Withholding allowance – GDC/FRC Discretion
 
Stop Build Day – No Change

- Prevents team procrastination
- Prevents complications inevitable with a major change

This proposal advocates keeping a build season of the current six week length with a firm stop built date at least one week before the first competition for several reasons. The primary driver behind this is to avoid procrastination on the robot up to the competition. We want teams to have functioning robots when they go to compete. Allowing teams to work up until the competition date will substantially increase the number of teams fieldingnon-fully functional robots. (This procrastination effect can be seen at work in many collegiate “build and compete” competitions such as Formula SAE, Mini-Baja, andSolarcar.) We also recognize that teams have learned to work within the constraints of the six week season and that people, in general, are resistant to change. Not altering the current build season prevents any unforeseen negative complications, logistical or otherwise, for both FIRST and the FRC teams.


Hands-Off Period after Stop Build Date – Add (propose one week)

- Mitigates student and mentor “burnout”
- Prevents week one teams from being at a disadvantage

This proposal advocates a mandatory hands-off-robot period of approximately one week for several reasons. The driving factor for this is preventing burnout. We recognize that the current 6 week build season asks a lot from bothstudents and mentors. Allowing a week for participants to cool down mitigates burnout while reinforcing the Stop Build Date. It also eliminates any disadvantage that teams competing in week one would otherwise be at. While some teams could get around this one week hiatus with a practice robot, the overall need for a practice robot will be greatly reduced by the additional time teams will have to work with in the following weeks.


Unbag Time for each week following “hands-off” week (propose 8 hours/week)

This proposal advocates using theRobot Access Period already in place for district teams to across all of FRC. While non-district teams have a practice day at their competition,unbag time has some distinct advantages which make it preferable over a practice day. In nearly every case, it is more efficient for teams to update and test their robot in their own shop where they have access to all of their tools and don’t have to wait in lines to use a practice field for five minutes at a time. This extra time before the competition allows teams to be more prepared coming into the event resulting in a faster inspection process, shorter lines for the practice field, and potentially more matches as extra time opens up that was previously reserved for practice and inspection. From a learning perspective these unbag windows complement the six-week build season in teaching time management as students plan out how they want to use their 8 hours in one-hour increment. From a publicity standpoint, with 8 hours of unbagtime, teams can now demo their robots during the competition season furthering FIRST’s goal of “making it loud”.

While district competitions already have unbag time implemented for weeks on which a team is competing, this proposal advocates expanding un-bagging to every week. The reason for this is simple; we want to give teams as much opportunity as possible to succeed. A 2012 survey conducted by FRC team 33 at the World Championship shows that the vast majority of the top 100 (OPR) teams at the event had some sort of practice robot or practice system. What the survey effectively shows is that the very successful teams have already implemented an artificial unbag window when they improve and drive a second practice robot they built in addition to their competition robot. While it is unrealistic to ever expect lower resource teams to build a practice robot, we can mitigate the need for one by expanding access to the competition robot, allowing teams to take the robot they finished on Stop Build day and improve it to make it the best it can be.

It is important to stress that the intention behind the iteration phase is for teams to improve their robots – not build new ones. Controlling the amount of access time will allow FIRST to directly limit how easy it is for copycats and clean sheet re-design to occur. We expect many teams might copy an element or reverse engineer a part of another team’s robot. However,teams actually enjoy this sharing and semi-open source nature to the competition and feel that it is an important part of iteration and continuous improvement.

This addition will not only improve FRC, but will mitigate mentor burnout in addition to adding an important iteration phaseto the FRC engineering process. The overall idea is pretty simple: allow for unbag time over the course of the competition season.

Here is a summary of the benefits for this element:

• Drastically reduce the need to build a practice robot, save time, money and reduce stress.
• Some teams that used to build a practice robot can now meet less hours per week and still be able to finish the competition robot. Reduce burnout.
• Middle tier teams that did not build practice robots before will be more competitive and the gap will be narrowed between the top and middle tiered teams.
• Teams that can only afford to attend one event will have the same amount of access to their robot comparing to teams that attend multiple events prior to the competition.
• Veteran teams can now help the rookie and bottom tier teams since they have access to their robot during the 8 hours each week. This will raise the bottom and narrow the gap and make the event more competitive and exciting to watch.
• Allow pre-inspection to take place by volunteers* (piloted at MEZ during unbag time window before week 3 Detroit event this year).
• Allow real world development phase, students more inspired by learning from improving their robots.
• Allow robots to reach their full potential.
• Do in-season sponsor/advertising/media (making it loud) visits without requesting special waivers/approvals.
• More in-season scrimmages can be held to benefit all and not just teams with practice robots.
• Additional run time on competition robot allows for some level of durability testing which results in improvingthe reliability of robots at competitions.

*The pre-inspection event at the MEZ this year was not an official inspection, but a review with teams during their unbag time for repairs that would be difficult to do at an FRC event. These repairs included frame perimeter violations, bumper issues, wrong wire sizes, and general pneumatics compliance issues. In 2012, only 30/40 teams were ready to compete when matches started. In 2013, 36/40 were through inspection, and an additional 2 made it through inspection before their first match. The two that were not through were likely by choice of the team (a no-show, and a team that would not accept help). With more weeks available of un-bag time, more “pre-inspection” events could be established to help with the major issues being caught before teams make it to their events.


Withholding Allowance – Keep and modify by FIRST each year as needed

This area can largely be left to the discretion of the GDC based on how much they want teams to change their robots over the course of the season. Current weights have been large enough to do major system redesign efforts or make repairs to a frame. Some teams have relied on it in order to make a pseudo-practice bot utilizing easily removable parts of the competition robot.


Keep Season Short as Option

There will be teams that do not like changes and want to keep everything the way it is. There are also teams who want to work 6 weeks and stop but also want everybody else to stop for fear of being at a disadvantage. This proposal can allow teams that option. All they have to do is go to a week 1 or week 2 event and they will be on an even playing field with other teams.


Implementation

Since there will be a lot more bag lock and unlock to keep track of, we propose to modify the Robot Lockup form. One example is attached (designed by the coach of Team 1640 who is also a robot inspector at events). We want to make it easier for robot inspectors to check the hours. Instead of checking if teams exceeded 8 hours each week, all the robot inspectors need to check is the total number of opened hoursprior to the competition. What it means is 8 hours per week on average. For example, if a team attends a Week 4 event, they can have up to 32 hours of access time. For a team that attends a Week 2 event, they can have up to 16 hours of access time. They can use all 16 hours in the first week and 0 hours in the second week. This makes it fairer for teams that have to crate and ship their robot, and make it more flexible for other teams with limited access to their shop.

 
Summary

By allowing for additional unbag time over the competition season, FRC can benefit from creating a development/iteration window that currently only exists for teams building practice robots or competing at many events within the district system. This development time increases teams’ competitiveness and improves their overall likelihood of having a successful season. By keeping the traditional six weeks and Stop Build day, FRC will keep procrastination to a minimum and continue to exhibit real-world deadlines. We think that this proposal is a win-win for teams and FRC as a whole and we sincerely hope that you will support it.


Warm Regards,

Isaac Rife (Team 33 mentor, BAE Systems Engineer)
Ed Law (Team 2834 coach, Chrysler Engineer), Kristen Law (Team 2834 team captain, 2013 Dean's List Winner)

[Mark Sheridan]

IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.

+1 for this. this is my favorite so far. Seems like a fair compromise. It would make more teams more competitive and therefore more inspirational.

[JesseK]

I once read a postulation about procrastination, that it happens due to the psychology behind perceived energy it takes for a person to think through and do something. As someone becomes more adept at something, procrastination is much less likely since the perceived energy is much less lower. Examples are chopping veggies or getting a technical person to write a paragraph for a FRC award. That concept - energy to think through something - is something I face daily as a software engineer. Some days I only do 8 hours (compared to my wife's 10+) but I am mentally exhausted after those 8 if I've been working on brand new concepts.

I think that burnout is much less of an issue as the veteran status of teams becomes more prevalent. As we get better at competition and better at training 'the next generation', the energy we spend coming up with new concepts is far less than it used to be. As designs for things like gearboxes and drive trains converge, we focus the creative energy on the game challenges rather than finagling the fundamentals. So I think FRC's culture is more aligned with removal of the stop-bag day than it ever has been before.

However, I think we'd need a formal poll sent to all teams.

On the plus side, there wouldn't be so much conflict over who to spend Valentine's Day with. I'm sure that applies to other situations that are inevitable for individuals in the first 3 months of the year.

[IKE]

IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.

FIRST did ask for the survey data I took. We tried to interview someone knowledgeable about the team for the top 25 OPRs in each division that year. I don't know if I told teams I would publicly share their data or not, so I would rather not publish the table, but we asked a handful of questions. One was: "Do you have some sort of Practice Robot?" The four divisions came in between 75% and 88% of teams from those top 25 (some divisions we only got to 20 of the 25 teams). We then asked teams to assign an estimated "percentage" that the practice was similar to the competition robot. This varied from 10% (usually a modified version of the previous year and only used for driving practice) to 100% (only 1 team claimed that). The average came in around 60% (averaging a number given to a subjective value is.... well another number...) with the usual Einstein suspects coming in between 90-99% IE very very similar. This was a fun discussion to have, and a couple teams were oddly specific (I got a 97%, a 98%, and a 95.2% from three teams I have a lot of respect for).

This survey fostered the idea as I was surprised that a couple of really good teams actually stopped build practice bots because they typically had access to 3 districts (and 3 x 6 hrs. un-bag) plus a district championship to gain experience. I am not sure that they were top 1% teams, but they were within that top 4%. 6 hrs. of unbag split into 3 x 2 hr. sessions is a decent amount of access for practice, test, and tune. I know a lot of really great teams spend way more than that, but it truly is a nice chunk of time for a team. If teams had similar chunks each week, they could do some pretty impressive stuff.

**********************************************
I really pushed for this as I think FIRST misses out on the inspiration of product development/improvement. Watching the documentary on Slingshot, and all the iterations they went through, I was reminded of how little refinement we get to do.

[GeeTwo]

.. We then asked teams to assign an estimated "percentage" that the practice was similar to the competition robot. This varied from 10% (usually a modified version of the previous year and only used for driving practice) to 100% (only 1 team claimed that). The average came in around 60% (averaging a number given to a subjective value is.... well another number...) with the usual Einstein suspects coming in between 90-99% IE very very similar. This was a fun discussion to have, and a couple teams were oddly specific..

Curious - I would have considered "Woody," our prototype robot in 2014 to be around 60% similar to "Buzz" even though they were built of different materials, because Buzz was built in aluminum to the dimensions worked out in lumber on Woody, and all of the functional points were implemented similarly. Our 2015 practice robot was north of 95%, only decorative and completely inconsequential differences like abandoned mounting holes. Anyway, was 60% the mean value? What were the median (50th percentile) and mode (commonest answers)? I suspect that this did not look at all like a normal distribution, even among teams with similar OPRs. It would be lovely if you could post a histogram.

[Brandon Holley]

This survey fostered the idea as I was surprised that a couple of really good teams actually stopped build practice bots because they typically had access to 3 districts (and 3 x 6 hrs. un-bag) plus a district championship to gain experience. I am not sure that they were top 1% teams, but they were within that top 4%. 6 hrs. of unbag split into 3 x 2 hr. sessions is a decent amount of access for practice, test, and tune. I know a lot of really great teams spend way more than that, but it truly is a nice chunk of time for a team. If teams had similar chunks each week, they could do some pretty impressive stuff.

I remember answering your survey questions about this- and we are one of those teams you are describing who stopped building full scale practice robots. The past few years we've been playing 4 times before DCMP, and then getting DCMP before heading to CMP. It was actually becoming more work to maintain the practice bot as we swapped 'end effectors' and subsystems back and forth.

We will usually have several 'test bucks' for software or specific mechanism design, but a vast majority of our practice is done on the competition robot before ship, during unbag windows and through practice matches at competitions. We really emphasize being ready to go out of the bag so we can cycle the practice field many times and tune and tweak.

Would I prefer to have a practice bot? Yes definitely. However, it does take a considerable amount of effort for our team as we do all of our own fabrication. It's been working for us thus far, and we're continuing to refine our process!

-Brando

[IKE]

Curious - I would have considered "Woody," our prototype robot in 2014 to be around 60% similar to "Buzz" even though they were built of different materials, because Buzz was built in aluminum to the dimensions worked out in lumber on Woody, and all of the functional points were implemented similarly. Our 2015 practice robot was north of 95%, only decorative and completely inconsequential differences like abandoned mounting holes. Anyway, was 60% the mean value? What were the median (50th percentile) and mode (commonest answers)? I suspect that this did not look at all like a normal distribution, even among teams with similar OPRs. It would be lovely if you could post a histogram.

Median varied between 0.7 and 0.9 depending on the division. Mode was 0.95 for all divisions. 95% usually meant functionally equivalent with all major systems and close enough to do code development, but possibly different enough that some tuning may be required.

Yes 125 answered back in 2012 with a Practice bot that was 40% representative. I don't have my field notes to know what that meant for that team for that year*, but usually that was similar drive train, or something to hook the shooter up to while tuning.

I also had helpers doing some of the interviews, so it may not have been me doing that particular interview.