Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

So far, all my team is compromising is sanity :P
Every weekday 2-10:30pm and weekends all day, my (small) team has been meeting in a garage and living room. We all hope it works out. Good luck to all you teams out there, may your robot reflect your design choices accurately!

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

And after you can do all that on a physical robot, try all those abilities in a single 2:15 match...

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

Well, this year has really just been laid out for my team. We are doing everything right it seems, we have a 30 ptn climber, and an accurate shooter as well as many style points on this years bot. Most years we struggle, but this year its just easier. We thought out many designs and we just seemed to pick the right ones. We are ahead of schedule this year, for the first year ever.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

Got a video of the climber? Thus far only a single 30pt climber has been posted and it wasn't fully working yet so I'm curious to see what you have if you are willing to share it.

This has been a hard year for us, solid designs but incredibly slow going on everything else. We will be machining all this week at our current rate. Hopefully we will be climbing in some form by this weekend but I'm a little skeptical at this rate. I'm getting very nervous about time...

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

No video just yet, we've only tested it with the climbing mechanism clamped onto the base. And it sort of worked, we have bugs still to get it working 100%. But we use the corner ;) The climber is our #1 priority this year, so we've made a huge effort to make sure it works. We'll have a video once build season ends probably, mainly because our bot won't be complete until then and I'm sure you know how I feel on that haha. The sooner the better!

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

I hope 2014 is 2x as hard :P

difficulty makes it that much more fun at competition (yes, spending 72 hours cranking away in the pits does count as "fun" in my book)

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

The trade-off is, of course, that you make it that much more daunting for new teams, which already have a rough time of it.

The one thing I'd like to see this next year is a field containing only elements that are easily mocked up to acceptable accuracy with commonly available resources. It's not good game design when a large fraction of the teams have no way of seeing if their mechanisms really work until they get to a bona-fide practice field of some sort. 2008 was a good example of this done right, as were 2010 and 2011. 2013 was most definitely not; that pyramid was a killer.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

I agree in every point. especially the pyramid thing. that was pretty ridiculous. It would be tricky for new teams to do stuff if it was much harder.

What I fail to understand is this: Sometimes I see rookie teams with EXACTLY a kit bot, the same one they built at kickoff! they did absolutely nothing at all in 6 weeks, except make bumpers. I understand some teams have trouble here and there, but c'mon, screw on a 2x4 or something!

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

I will admit, I used to think along these lines, back when I was a student on 449; I'd walk down the "rookie row" at competitions and wonder, "how could you only come up with this?" It's not such a mystery to me, anymore. Here's a thought experiment that might make it easier to understand:

Imagine that you are a on a rookie team, with no mentors with FIRST experience. All you have is the kit of parts and what materials are available on the FIRST website. No one on the team has any real conception of what's involved in building an FRC robot; not of the time required, of the fundamentals of design, strategy, nothing. You lack raw materials, a machine shop, a working knowledge of the control system. What do you do in six weeks?

From what I've seen, unfortunately, this is the reality for many rookie teams; they get started with no idea of what they're getting into, and it's as much as they can handle to field something which moves at competition. Can you imagine getting a handle on the robot control system with no prior electronics experience, simply by trudging through FIRST's arcane documentation? Yes, there are other resources available, of course - and teams that take advantage of them will be much better for it - but not every team knows about them.

Last year was my first year mentoring a rookie team (4464), and it was eye-opening. Even more eye-opening was the DC team to whom we opened our build space halfway through build season, which consisted, essentially, of 5 students and a high-school teacher with no FRC experience. Had we not done this, and provided instruction, they would not have fielded a working robot; we had our members show their team, step-by-step, how to assemble a working kitbot, control system and all. Our team had been fortunate enough to have a reasonable preseason training program, and the students were familiar with all of the important parts before kickoff. Their team hadn't.

I'm currently involved, in a small capacity, with helping two new teams get off the ground this preseason. Both of these teams have access to people with FRC experience, but it's increasingly clear to me that were they not so fortunate, simply fielding a moving robot itself would be a reasonable achievement.

It's easy to become jaded when you've been with a successful team; the basics seem simple, and it's hard to imagine how anyone couldn't manage them. Take away the resources, the knowledge, all of the experience in the working memory of your team, however, and how much would you realistically be able to do?

Note that this is not meant to say that all (or even most) rookie teams are not capable of doing well (4464's first season was about as successful as I could have dreamed), rather that it's easy to overlook the things which enable that success, and to overlook how a team might end up without them.

The obvious question to ask, then, is how can we improve this? The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is one of "you don't know what you don't know." A rookie team with no conception of the demands of successfully fielding a FRC robot, of the magnitude of the difficulty, doesn't know that they should be devoting large amounts of time to looking through available resources and preparing. I don't think the problem is fundamentally that the resources don't exist for rookie teams (though certainly there could be more of them), but that they're not made visible enough and it's too easy for people to start a team when they really don't have the resources to succeed. A lot of this fundamentally stems from human psychology and cognitive biases which we all deal with; we tend to be wildly over-optimistic in our judgments, and it shows markedly in situations like this.

I could go on, but this is getting sort of long-winded and I think I've covered the crux of what I wanted to say. I will note that I do not think FIRST, on the whole, should be made all that much easier; the challenge is necessary for the proper functioning of the whole system. I think any improvement in this area has to come from better communication of the magnitude of that difficulty.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

It just takes time and committed students. Not to say a rookie team can't come out of the gates, it's just hard. Time is a team's greatest asset for garnering community and dedicated student support.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

My first year in FIRST I was the only mentor of brand-new team 827, and my college education (particle physics and Deaf education) left me extremely lacking in practical know-how--so much so that I went back to my undergraduate physics department and gave a presentation on the many things I left there (as a B+ student) not knowing. My students knew nothing. We were in way over our heads, and had no idea what we were getting into.

We didn't know where to look to get ideas, we didn't know where to look to get help, and we didn't know what we didn't know. Were it not for the mentorship of a nearby team, we would not have fielded a functional robot. As it was, we fielded a robot that could score some points and do okay.

FIRST is hard, and FIRST is particularly hard on rookies, who are trying to learn everything from the ground up. This is why I believe that the single best thing a team can provide to rookies is mentorship and training.

Switching gears for a moment, Ri3D shows that a dedicated group with some decent tools and general know-how can make a robot much more functional than your average rookies tend to make; I think the program is awesome as "you can do it!" inspiration and a crash-course on prototyping.

Where this applies to game difficulty is, IMO, reflected in a post of mine much earlier in this thread that somebody spotlighted: this game wasn't too difficult, but many teams (including ours) made it too difficult by biting off more than they could chew.

A rookie team without the resources to build a pyramid probably shouldn't be attempting anything more than a 10-point climb anyway.

That said, it would be nice to not have field elements that are so huge and that can't be assembled/disassembled (because let's be honest, the bolt-together pyramids weren't stable enough for real use); most teams don't have dedicated build space with room for a field, and it's hard to share space with a 1000-square-foot pyramid.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

Certainly not to detract from your statements, but let it be known that the pyramid is 100 square feet, not 1,000.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

I meant 1000 cubic feet, whoops! (And yeah, that's an estimate).

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

B*h*(1/3) ... 333 cu ft. ;)

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

We made a quarter pyramid, to spec, with some 2x4s and metal pipe. Wasn't terribly difficult to do.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-W...it?usp=sharing