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

That's basically all we do now anyway. I've seen so many bag and tag mistakes, huge holes in the bag, completely unbagged robots, no forms, etc. The team only gets a time penalty of having to find the Regional Director and the LRI and get them to sign the non-compliance form. I've never seen a team be disqualified for Bag and Tag mistakes.

We don't even need another affirmation since teams have to sign that they followed all the rules on the inspection form anyway. If a team is willing to sign that after knowingly breaking the rules, I imagine they would be willing to falsify bag and tag paperwork.

The bag and tag paperwork only lets us find the unintentional mistakes and explain the proper procedures to teams. It doesn't actually prevent cheating in anyway, similar to the BOM.

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

How did you deal with this?

Was it treated the same as an unbagged robot?

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

Agreed...

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

Basically, it depends on the severity of the hole and when it was formed. It mostly falls on the LRI to decide if the teams needs to fill out the non-compliance form or not. Several times the hole are put in during transport (like bringing it through a doorway into the event), most of the time teams just get a pass for things like this. The bigger issues are holes that have been there for a long time and are big enough for someone to in theory work on the robot. In those cases the team gets a good talking to from the LRI and they have to do the non-compliance form.

These aren't uncommon occurrences at all, I expect about 3-5 at every event I go to. Teams were much better this year than last since it was the 2nd year for Bag and Tag at all events. We still even had a robot without a bag at championship.

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

Yeah, I don't understand the Bag and Tag rules... Why not just have an affidavit that says you stopped building when you claim to have stopped building?

The honor system is the honor system, and those who have none will cheat, while those who have some will not. The system as-is does nothing to change that.

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

It is an honor system, but if the robot is in the bag, its much easier to control the urges to worked on the comp bot. If it is unbagged, then I suspect even honorable students/mentors might get too carried away and do something with the robot. The bag protects against the urges.

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

Fair enough. I can only agree with that!

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

I understand the bag, I just don't understand the form. It's just more work for inspectors to go around and check all the forms. The forms don't actually stop anyway from cheating, maybe there is some deterrent that we would somehow know and catch them, but I doubt it.

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

They put the team on record signing a form that says "We followed the rules", and having a team on record is better than a general assumption that rules had been followed. Agreed it doesn't detour cheating, but I think it's a necessary evil.

What would detour cheating is for Refs/Inspectors/FIRST to actually lay down the hammer and tell teams who cheated that they are not allowed to participate in the event. Eventually events have to start saying "no" to these teams. As an example, based on what teams failed to do, they rack up 'points' on their team, and once they reach a number of 'points' they can't play. Like, so you need 10 to be disqualified, and based on the severity of the rules, your team is given points. If those points are >10 you can't play, and those points have a half-life every season, so it will take some time to heal your mistakes, detouring a team from making more mistakes.

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

I agree with Tetraman about needing "some form to have teams go on record", but I don't agree on dropping the Hammer. Not that I don't think it is ethical, I just don't think you understand the normal"issues" we see in inspection as LRI's. Most teams don't cheat, and then leave an evidence trail that you can clearly call them out on (I actually believe very few teams cheat the rules intentionally). Usual issues are a team forgot their form, or tore a hole during transport, or ran out of tags. This year we did have a couple of teams that knowingly went past close of pits, and I had 1 student that for some un-explainable reason cut a hole in the bag with his pocket knife. We policed the folks that went past pits closed with a longer time penalty at their next FiM event. Large holes or missing sheet gets a special form filed. The student that cut a hole got a rather staunch lecture from his mentor, the initial inspector, and the LRI.

I actually think you could just have a mentor and student read the unbagging rules out loud, and sign a form agreeing that they complied. It won't likely stop cheaters from cheating, but it might leave a bad spot in their conscious.

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

I would much rather have a system in which teams upload a picture of their bagged robot to TIMS on stop build day.
As far as unbagging-bagging-unbagging before the first event: If it takes an eight-year veteran several read-throughs to understand it, how is a rookie team going to get it? I think it creates a bunch of unnecessary paperwork and will ultimately lead to shredded bags and messy lock/unlock forms. I'd much rather it be hands-off the competition robot until the first event.

To me, the tl;dr of this thread is precisely what the published author wrote a few pages ago: FRC is a big task, people get burnt out, there are many solutions - increased time is a possible solution for some teams, but isn't a one-size-fits-all fix.

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

They have a form they have to sign without the bag and tag form, it's at the bottom of the inspection sheet at each event. The team mentor and captain have to sign that they have not knowingly broken any rules. I completely agree that that should stay. I just think the bag and tag form is redundant. There seem to be much easier/better ways to cheat in FRC than the bagging rules anyway if a team had that poor of a moral compass.

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

At both our events this year, there were teams using high-capacity, off-board compressors not controlled by the robot. In both cases they were told to stop by event officials, and in both cases they didn't stop and were still allowed to compete.

I agree that most teams likely do not cheat, but when caught, I have no problem with FIRST dropping the hammer -- indeed, I wish they would. There's no reason to have rules if they aren't going to be enforced.

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

I'd prefer it if the responsibility and burden of demonstrating compliance was shifted to the pre-event period. Submit the form (or better, photos) online and well in advance. Then there's no worry about lost forms, and less use of the annoying and quasi-punitive non-compliance procedure.

I also don't like the UI of the current form (or the proposed one, for that matter). What information is really important, and is there a need for the rest of it? What does it mean when the inspector signs off on it? Who is authorized to approve a bag opening, and under what conditions? Why not summarize the rules on the front (with fewer lines), and put additional lines on the (optional, if unsupported by the printer) back of the sheet or an attached page? Which information should really be stored by FRC, and not by the team?

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

As much as 'd love a smart phone app that just lets you take a photo and automatically handles the rest (for both teams and inspectors :)), I wouldn't envy the FIRST NH team that's tasked with going online. Managing both the technical and team aspects will only get harder as we go to more districts or successfully push for universal unbag time. In addition to TIMS-style crashing* at 11:55pm EST/PST on stop build, MAR and FiM teams can already complete 6 discrete (un)bag operations in a single week.

That's a lot to ask FIRST in a single letter, and I'd be concerned that conflating the two would risk the entire thing being discarded for the trouble.

*As much as I dislike the forms and the inspection lag they create, and as much as I appreciate FIRST, it's not famous for its online UIs. And not just those subject to shock loading either--have you ever tried to get a new person through a VIMS signup?