Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

It's satisfying to hear that there was at least a speech planned for team 1538. I'm sure there must've been some reason for not reading it. Hopefully FIRST will display the holy cows more in the future.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

I traveled to St. Louis this season as a volunteer (working on Newton, great times there!). I have attended the Championship since 2000, including 2003, (the infamous Houston year), and every year it was held in Atlanta. However, this was my first visit to St. Louis. Here are my thoughts, as a "seasoned" FIRST veteran.

The team I mentor was fortunate enough to have a Dean's List finalist this season, but by no means had a "championship caliber" robot, and so didn't qualify by merit. We do have a team policy of trying to attend the Championship every 5 years (via pay your way/wait list), such that the majority of our members have the chance to experience it at least once in their high school career. We decided for the years between, we would only attend if we met the merit based qualification criteria. Our last trip to the Championship was in 2009, when we qualified via the Rookie All Star award at our local regional. The students who attended the Championship in 2009 were still excited and shared what a great experience they had with younger students right up to their graduation this past year. As per our policy, we decided to sign up for the Championship early this season, being the 5th year since our last Championship berth. With the wait list system working as it did this season, we didn't find out we had a Championship invitation until Wednesday, April 17th. Literally a week before the event. We had made preliminary plans to attend, researched hotels and flight options back in January, but most of that information/early reservations had been cancelled or expired due to lack of commitment. We scrambled, made some late night phone calls, had to split the team between hotel rooms for a night, but managed to pull it off and make it. (Which is why I signed up to volunteer and booked travel plans much earlier).

Our robot? Seeded in the mid 90s in our division. It's probably a safe bet we were one of your partners that "put up a combined 6 discs". Heck, we missed a match because our whole team was at the Dean's List ceremony that went over time. Do we care that our robot didn't perform? Absolutely. Did we try our best to fix it and improve it? Absolutely. Was it Championship caliber? Absolutely not. Were our students super inspired by the atmosphere, walking on the dome floor, seeing and playing with "elite" teams, hearing the roar of the tens of thousands of spectators, learning the iterative design and build processes and stories of other teams? You'd better believe it. These students will be talking about this experience, and using it to improve our team and robots for the next 4 years, until we either qualify with a Championship caliber robot, Chairman's or EI awards, or another 5 years elapses.

Sometimes it takes a trip to the Championships to give your students that extra inspiring kick in the pants to get them motivated enough to really work on designing, building, and iterating "Championship caliber" robots. Would you seriously want to keep teams like mine from attending the Championships so the "elite" can play one or two more matches or be less "at the mercy of the scheduling gods?"

"Is this a championship or is it an exhibition?" It's a celebration. It's inspiring. It's the end of a crazy season. It's both, championship and exhibition. If you want purely performance based competition, that's what IRI is for. The quality robots and teams will still succeed regardless of pairings or match numbers (if scouters actually provide useful information). The rest of us are there for the experience above all else. Or at least, that's what brings me back year after year.

I'd also like to add that I didn't see the Chairman's Award video for The Holy Cows, nor did I see an 1114 follow-up video from last year.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

I meant the follow up video, I don't know if that has been done for the years CMP has been in St. Louis. I remember in Atlanta, the previous year's Chairman's award winning team produced a video highlighting their impact in the community as a lead up to the announcement of the current year's winner. I have seen 1114's Chairman's Submission video, and it really is one of the most inspiring things. I was hoping for the follow up.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

I understand what you mean. In 18 days I will be a college graduate with a degree in Business Administration and in the Fall I will begin a Master's of Youth Development.

FIRST promotes and celebrates Science and Technology and yes a majority of the scholarships are for those fields BUT it takes all types of people to make up a FIRST team. That is why I really like Non-Engineering Mentors Organization(NEMO). There are students and mentors who just are not science and technologically inclined. They help keep the team running. These people so much for the team and gain so many skills you normally would not acquire in high school. Without the fundraising team or those people who can creating marketing materials to gain sponsorships there would be no team.

FIRST may not be outwardly celebrating non-STEM careers but I just checked the scholarship list and was amazed to find 58 scholarships that can be used for any course of study. In my mind this shows that they know and understand that not everyone will go into STEM. This number is sure a lot more than when I was a junior or senior in the program.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

This is far more eloquent than anything I have written, and pretty much hits the nail on the head. We were a rookie team this year, and while our robot ultimately did what we wanted it to (scoring ~30-40 points per match), it certainly wasn't able to compete in a strict sense on a championship level. That said, I don't think it would be possible to overstate how much our team got out of this trip, and the opportunity to compete in championships. It was one of the most inspiring, rewarding things I have ever participated in, and the amount of enthusiasm it has given our members for the coming years is nigh-indescribable.

So, yes, I do think that there is a lot of utility in making some sacrifices as to the tightness of the competition to allow teams to attend championships without qualifying based strictly on robot quality. I imagine most people who have attended championships would agree with this. The question is thus how many of these teams can feasibly be admitted before the effect on tournament quality outweighs the benefit. This is, admittedly, a very tough question.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

I just wanted to say I realize I was extremly insensitive earlier and should watch my self a bit better. My most sincere appologies to those who I have offended. I realize that the message I wanted to convey did not come accross right. Libby, thank you for the meaningfull insight into what the award is truely about. I hope that my lone and shamefull actions only reflect on me and not my team. I just want to say sorry everyone.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

I'm glad to hear that it wasn't just some gross oversight, although it did not turn out as planned. I was very disappointed in the speech and lack of video. The speech that was given gave no information about the phenomenal team that is 1538, and I said out loud to my friend afterwards "That could have applied to literally any Chairman's team". The CCA speech should not be among the shorter speeches given. I've seen an unfortunate trend in recent years that give the appearance of de-emphasizing the CCA (such as announcing it at the concert in 2011 with no prior information given to anyone that it would be presented there, and also with a criminally short speech). This needs to change, there is no excuse to cut the most important award presentation of the season short.

Other improvements that can be made based on my experiences this year:

-8 matches at champs is unacceptable, period. I remember a time when we were guaranteed 10 matches. What happened to that? It worked in favor of the team I was with this weekend (1983), but the effects on the results were obvious.

-Reffing this game was a nightmare, too many judgement calls of 3 or 20pt penalties caused many inconsistencies between events. Vantage point mattered a lot, and a lot of calls were missed because refs just couldn't or didn't see it.

-Field consistency. The tolerances on the pyramids were atrocious. If the dimension tolerances are 1/4", they need to remain 1/4". The pyramid itself was also prone to coming apart, and I saw many instances of teams tipping it up or causing it to skew. The carpet also was prone to coming up around the pyramid base and caused several issues, and several replays

-RTS/Scoring. It did improve over the season, but it still wasn't good enough to eliminate the need to hand count, which not only greatly increased the field reset time, but also was the cause of several scoring errors (including Einstein).

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

Sadly, Paul Lazarus is no longer doing those videos. It's too bad - I miss them.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

Thank you for owning up to your mistake, and claiming it was yours and not your teams. I've met your team, been to your build space, and am very close to an alumni from 1100 I know they are fantastic and hope one day you too will have a space in the Hall of Fame.

That being said, yes, HoF teams sometimes have large sponsors that "foot the bill" per-say. What you do know is the team I was lucky to be a part of was fortunate enough to, at the time, have full sponsorship from one large corporation. What you might not know is students on that team don't come from money. Many of us have parents with second jobs, and worked through high school ourselves. I fund-raised thousands of dollars over four years on the team. We are blessed to be in such a close proximity to Motorola that they decided to sponsor us.

Motorola was not the group that decided to send computers to Africa, volunteer their hours at events, and organize hurricane benefits. The people on the team were. Nowhere did Moto force it's engineers to help the students and stay late at night, they did it themselves. Motorola didn't make the students want to help out in the community, we did that ourselves (albeit with some pushing from our parents some-days). I've said it before and I will say it again, teams are not who sponsors them, they are the people that make them up.

I guess what I am trying to get at is that yes, it does stink to lose to a team who seemingly is sponsored by a huge company you are correct in saying that it hurts, hurts bad. But sometimes it takes something like that to get kicked into high gear and change something about yourself and your team. DO BETTER. GET BETTER. Volunteer man-hours don't cost anything but your time so put it in and make change.

/end commentary

What I would change is have the fields broadcast to the pits. I really wished I could have seen more dome action.

The Chairman's speech was VERY short, thanks Libs for letting us know it was going to be longer.

Also, Einstein went long. But this is year 11 for me and it has yet to be short...

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

The 2008 winner was the last to get a video produced by Paul. I miss them as well.

I am totally ok with the team making their own videos (1114 did an AMAZING job) as long as they are shown.

Marc brings up a good point, it would be cool if teams could do a 1 minute or so follow up video with what they have done since winning the CCA.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

This x1000.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

As others have said, the number of matches was too low. The complaint of 8 matches at CMP is certainly valid. The low number of matches at regionals needs to be addressed as well. At North Star, the schedule gave us 8 qualifying matches. Like many teams, it was our only regional. My students wanted more of an opportunity to use their robot and to work out the bugs. I feel that, for the cost, they should have had more playing time.

I can get on board with the district argument (or any system that increases playing time). I think there is tremendous inspiration opportunity with increased playing time. The compressed learning/testing/failing/rebuilding/succeeding that occurs during competition is a huge part of what makes my students come back (with their friends!) for the next season. It is also very gratifying to show off all of your hard work to the parents and sponsors.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

Thank you for giving this perspective. I can't agree with you any more, because this almost exactly describes my team's situations, aside from that we qualified with RCA. The competition is named "For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" for a reason. I think FIRST has pretty much nailed the balance, even though I know there are plenty of people that disagree.

Re: 2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative
 

I've been doing this a long time and my only real negatives are as follows:

- I've build a lot of stuff in my day, and I found the pyramid difficult and frustrating to build
- The small frame perimeter was an absolute nightmare to fit everything into, but I'm not entirely opposed to it. After 13 years of robots, we're running out of space.