Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Luck!

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

I am sorry if I misinterpreted your message nuggetsyl.

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Um what?

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Even if your company doesn't operate like that, things are more complicated if there are competitors and substitute goods.

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

I disagree in the strongest possible terms.I am less worried about volunteering, and more worried about being there for the team. Even six weeks is about the upper limit for me.More on this later.

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6) The overall level of competition will go up.

Why do I think these things?

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

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

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

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

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

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

---------

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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


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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Isn't that the goal of this organization?

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Work expands to fill the available time.

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

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

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

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

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

Build Sprint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Do you think they stopped working after 6 weeks?

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

+1!

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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


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

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


Ahem... I would like to point out that most teams do figure out a reasonable schedule. Then at about Week 4, somebody looks at the calendar, realizes that they're behind even where they wanted to be, which is probably behind period, and goes pedal to the metal. (I know you were competitive this year--but did you stick to a reasonable schedule?)

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

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

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

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


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


FIRST is a mirror of real life. If June 7, 2050 is the best day for a Mars launch, and NASA is sending something there, they want the hardware on the rocket, upright, and ready to launch on or before June 7, 2050. Not a day later. Preferably a day or 30 earlier. If you are building the payload for that rocket, there are going to be deadlines--you really don't want to miss those. There is going to be a fixed amount of time--it might not be 6 weeks, but there are a limited number of man-hours that can be put into the project between the contract award date and the launch date. And you better make that deadline.

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Depends on the prevailing philosophy and corresponding goals.

IMHO:

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

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

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

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

-Rich

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

An example: The router fiasco of 2012.

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

-Adam

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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


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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this. Our team as a whole took 2 weeks off total before worlds, but we'll send people home or tell them not to come if it's starting to visibly wear them--everyone individually has had much longer off. Additionally, 7 of those 14 days were the first Tuesdays and Fridays of January. If build season was longer this schedule would last longer, because we'd make it that way. We've gained a very firm understanding of what happens if we work our students and mentors too hard for too long: the end product (the robot, team and inspiration) gets worse, not better.

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mike

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

+1. It's a sprint but teams have to pace themselves.

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Probably because you just have to powder coat your bot...:D

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you think it would have been better or worse?

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

For me, certainly the latter.

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This year we chose to do the latter, and from a robot design and build perspective, we were successful. Unfortunately, we forgot one little detail. Having time to practice does you little good if you don't have a place to practice. We are currently working to fix that problem, but that's the topic of another thread...

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

This thread seems to involve three separate questions:

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

So how do we fix it? I think we're on the same page that the burnout itself is the problem (despite disagreeing on whether a longer season would increase or decrease it).

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

(a) Thank you, and (b) yes you could.

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

My bad-- really should have kept up on that Q&A!

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

+1 to this.

On top of that, some of us students play a spring sport, that happens to begin right after build season is over. For most of spring, I am running competitions and games in parallel, going to state Latin conventions, and playing in my church and jazz bands, giving me little time to do the work I need to (I still get it done, somehow). If build season was expanded, I would be willing to cut my sport, but would not be happy about it, and would most likely end up ruining myself after trying to do sports, robotics, music and AP homework.

I vote, as a very active student, to keep the 6 week season. It fits my schedule nicely.

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Oh, I forgot one thing. BONUS TRIVIA!

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





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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

1. Add.
2. Too much. 10 lbs max.
3. Yes - this can be minimized with near-perfect mentorship and time management practices, but yes.
"Reasonable cost" is arguable, but there is this.

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

um ...

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

Agreed! Could not agree more.

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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


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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

I had a similar idea back in 2007 (I keep things like this in my "Bad Predictions" file):
That thread has some other relevant thoughts in it, also. It was about creating ways to force teams to design and THEN build, which I think is very relevant to the problem of build-season burnout.

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

Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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