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

Rookies aren't the only ones that need help. 27 and 254 are apparently in the same boat, as are hundreds of others.

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

This.

And this.

And this. And all the other stuff. Watch out FRC, VEX Mentor of the Year is in Adage Mode.


Adam, it's true. We track down rookies (and are available remotely), but often times the teams we help aren't actually rookies, just people that would like a little help. Maybe lower-resourced, maybe new or less experienced mentors, maybe just a lot of underclassmen...this year we had a couple good teams that just couldn't work it out alone this time, specifically that wanted a pyramid. I was almost as proud watching them climb as I was us!

Even collaborating with another mid-level team can bring us both up and strengthen the whole community.

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

Happy problem to solve!

So the rule change I propose is: "If you are a regional winner in a year then in the next year you must work with a rookie team or the lowest ranked team in your 15 mile radius. At least 50% of your student roboteer and mentor time from last season must be spent on the efforts of the rookie team. " Finances are hard, so that's not part of this.

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

What about those of us that don't have any other schools in a 15-mile radius? :)

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

Skype. ;)

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

I'm being silly. I spent every Sunday with a second-year team this past year; they're the next closest school at 20 miles. :D

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

Zero teams ;)

That was easy. Our towns are spaced out quite a bit here.

50% is an impractically large amount of time, you're talking about thousands of hours for another team. That's likely more than that team even works.

We have helped most local teams, and will always helped when asked. I don't think mandating it is helpful or necessary; especially since winning a regional doesn't at all imply you're capable of helping someone else.

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

This is a horrible idea and wouldn't be effective. You can mandate things like this, they need to happen naturally.

Plus pretty much every team that is capable of helping other teams is already doing so.

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

I am a huge proponent of helping teams but I agree with Cory. I wouldn't want to work with a team that is being forced to help. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Teams spend a long time building programs that work for them and finding ways to do the most for their students, their community and the greater robotics community. I wouldn't want to do something like this if it drives away elite team mentors or even makes their robots slightly worse on the field (robot performance is one way to inspire students). Teams should decide how they weigh the values of their teams, FIRST encourages certain ones and awards explanatory examples of them. There are teams that value Safety, Spirit, Coopertition, GP, and a whole list of other things.

Also 50% is just way to high, I give a lot of time to other teams during build season but nowhere near 50% of my time. This year that would have been well over 200 hours, that's just not possible (most other teams aren't even awake during a lot of the hours we work).

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

I'm not sure "rule" was supposed to mean as in Section 4.5.1* of the 2014 Administrative Manual. More of a norm. While I agree every regional winner may not be up to this, I have to say we were surprised by the help we could give when we started. Some days I still think of my coach's button as being from the team that went 2-9 at Pittsburgh '07.

I'd say the take-home is more to push yourself outside your comfort zone (your team), even if it's just a little. You might be as surprised about what you can do for the community as you are what the community can do for you.


*I didn't check what this actually is now.

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

I completely agree, you can go through our Chairman's stuff and see what we do for other teams, it's a pretty huge amount. I'm just saying that if a team decides that their time is better spent working at food pantries in their community or petitioning their state senate or something else that is fine. I strongly believe every team should work to improve the greater FRC community but I'm just saying there are other ways to do it besides helping rookie teams. There are way more teams than there are rookie teams so we can all find different ways to help. Spectrum does make it our main mission to help young teams, but that doesn't mean we should force that on other teams.

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

I've been thinking more about the specifics of a limited "out of bag" experience after "bag day". Here are some ideas:
- give all teams X hours 'out of bag' between the first 'bag day' and their first event. (I'm not dealing with the district model here, since I have no experience with that; I assume a team competes at one or more regionals, and possibly champs.)
- Those X hours can be used anytime (there can be a minimum, such as one hour or two hours, but no weekly maximum. This allows a team competing in week 1 the same number of hours before their first competition as a team competing for the first time in week 5; they may have to use them in a more concentrated manner, but the same would be true of a team competing in week 4, that had to ship their robot in week 1). This helps to equalize things for teams that have to ship, and for teams competing for the first time in different weeks. (Of course there is an advantage to having extra weeks before competition, even with the robot in the bag, but I don't think that can be avoided.)

- No 'out of bag' time after the first competition (except at the event itself). This helps to equalize things for teams that compete more than once.

Another idea would be to give teams X out of bag hours, which could be used any time (even after the first competition), but count pit hours at competition in some way against the total. So a 3-day competition would count as 18 hours "out of bag", a 2-day competition as 12 hours (or lesser amounts, these are just examples). This would help equalize things between teams that can afford to compete in multiple events, and those that cannot.

Another idea would be to allow teams to swap hours out of bag for withholding allowance. So for every 'out of bag' hour not used, from the total allowed, a team would get Y pounds of withholding allowance. This would allow teams that CAN'T use all their time (due to a need to ship their robot early to an early competition), to have a bigger withholding allowance so they could take more fabricated parts into the competition.

There are a lot of options here for trying to level the playing field. I love it.

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

Interesting quote that showed up in my spotlight from 2005.

I thought it was appropriate.

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

IKE and I are working on a letter to FIRST. With so many bag and unbag entries, the current Robot Lockup Form will be very difficult for robot inspectors and there will be many pages. Would somebody like to draft a new form so we can include with the letter when we present it to FIRST?

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

Very good point. What about something like this? It can handle 44 discrete (un)bag operations instead of 18. I get the impression the original form was designed to be able to "read down" and compare the tag numbers, but as an inspector I find it's pretty cumbersome anyway (small space + handwriting), and my bigger slowdown is checking that the times work out. This fixes the latter, and if FIRST is ok with confirming the last 3-4 digits of the unlock tag (which is what happens at events anyway), it'd be easier to do both. Otherwise the form can accommodate the full tag for unlocking.

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

I hope IF a different system were implemented across FRC, we may be able to push for something electronic for this. Something like logging into TIMS, "Checking the robot in" and then "Checking the robot out", etc. Inspectors at the event would then just need to look at to make sure A. the robot had been 'checked in' and that B. the team had not 'checked out' the robot for more than X number of hours.

Just an idea (it saves a couple trees as well...)

-Brando

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

Also provides for better enforcement with less potential for problems on written forms due to confusion.

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

This change is reasonably easy to add to the rules as it stands right now. There's some communication and approval work, but it's doable. Adding a section to TIMS adds cost and complexity. I think it would make sense to talk about a paper system for now with a side note that an electronic system would be nice to have in the future.

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

The only problem is it requires a team to have reliable internet access at the time.

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

What is the value of documenting all of the bag and unbag events? Is it really necessary? Could it be as simple as, the robot must come to the event in a sealed bag. An adult team leader must affirm on a form that the team has adhered to the robot access guidelines.

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?

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

I don't see how submitting photos would help anything.

If a team is going to cheat, a simple photo is not going to get in their way.

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

No, but it significantly reduces the paper trail. The inspectors would have a list of teams, before the event, with a checkmark (or not) letting them know which teams are compliant and which may need some prodding. In addition, RDs or SMs can reach out to teams who do not submit a picture in a timely manner and possibly catch issues before the event even begins.

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

I'm still arguing against the premiss of being more concerned about bag and tag than we are with all the other rules. I would much rather know if a team failed to comply with the frame perimeter rule early than if they did with bag and tag. The teams that get caught failing bag and tag aren't gaining a competitive advantage because they are normally the teams that haven't even read the rules. It's usually the teams that either are barely hanging in there or it was just an honest mistake by a team (forgetting a form in the hotel room is extremely common). Why do we punish these teams and give the inspectors more work?

Why add the overhead that comes with bag and tag except to put up some false sense of checking into the system? The teams that are going to cheat are going to cheat, luckily I strongly believe that none of the cheating teams ever win since so few would put in the actual hard work it takes to beat a strong team that follows the rules.

We don't even have online submission of BOM or a way to check the withholding allowance. Both of these systems are basically just honor code* why can't bag and tag be the same.

*yes inspectors look at the BOM but it would be very easy to falsify one if a team was inclined to do so.

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

Which is exactly the reason I'm in favor of an online checkin during February. If a team doesn't do bagntag properly, there's a good chance there are bigger issues at play that should be tackled early. This could throw up a red flag that FIRST needs to contact these teams - whether it's an issue of noncompliance or ignorance.

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

How hard is Bag and Tag, really, even for the Districts? The MN State Championship has Bag and Tag rules similar to Districts - we allow 8 hours of unbag time, used in a minimum of 2 hour increments. This was the second year for the event, and we've only had 2 Bag and Tag issues. The first year, one of the teams failed to bag their robot after their last event (Penalty: No work time or practice matches allowed - they could only touch the robot for inspection prior to their first Qualification match, but since it was the first year and things were a little confusing, we allowed them to play), and this year one of the teams had a different interpretation of "minimum of 2 hour increments", thinking that the last unbag period could be less than 2 hours in order to "use up" the remaining time (Penalty: They got a lecture from me and allowed to continue on their way this time, as they met the intent of the rule and the 8 hour total time, if not the strict letter of it. Since they now know better, the penalty next year would be more severe if this same team has another issue).

As long as we have a stop build day, I think Bag and Tag (with the form) is valuable. As it stands, there is NO robot rule that goes unchecked. We look at everything regarding the robot to ensure the rules are followed, and that includes Bag and Tag. If we stopped requiring a form and stopped checking it, it would only encourage teams to become more lax with it.

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

I've just read this entire thread, all 440 posts since yesterday and now I'm definitely feeling burnout!

I think most perspectives have already been addressed so I have little to add except to say that I both admire the all-consuming effort from mentors of elite teams, yet also feel sorry for them to some extent.

Once you've achieved an exceptional level of performance, the pressure from sponsors, students yourself and the wider community to stay on that hamster wheel must be intense.

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

Granted, I do not want to tell any team they can not participate just because of a mistake or two, and as you have described those are not what I would consider bannable offenses. I echo Patrick's post about the compressors. THAT is the sort of thing that should cause a team to no longer compete at that event - ignoring the order of the RIs.

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

^^^This. As a student, although I know that my entire team would like more time to build the robot, the whole point of the bag and tag deadline is to teach kids about real-world deadlines.

Also, a longer build season would certainly mean student's grades would suffer more than they already do. Not cool.

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

I don't understand the idea being thrown around that "we need bag and tag so kids can learn about deadlines". There's still a deadline without it! The deadline is now the date of your regional. If you're attached to 6 weeks as a concept - that is an issue separate from "stop build, wait, and compete" vs just "compete".

The bag itself has no impact on whether or not there is a hard deadline. The only way there would not be a hard deadline is if the regional was actually delayed by teams not being done with their robots.

If we got rid of Stop Build, we could always make Week 1 the same week as the former Stop Build day. Everyone who wants a 6 week build season without wanting to feel disadvantaged could choose to go to a Week 1 regional.

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

Interesting thread revival.

I for one would be very interested to hear how people approached this year's build season differently compared to previous years.

For me, this was the first year I did not feel "burned out" but I still felt some exhaustion at the end of the 6 weeks.

3467 tried something a little differently in that we imposed no meetings on Wednesdays (on top of no Sundays) and on long Tuesday & Thursday meetings we had "quiet time" for a few hours in our classroom and encouraged students to study to stay on top of school. We also met a little less on Saturdays (start an hour later and tried to end a little sooner). During week 6 we did shift to high gear meeting Sunday at the start of the week and met for nearly 8 hours each day including Wednesday leading up to our scrimmage event. We took Sunday off after a pretty good run at Scrimmage then regrouped on Monday/Tuesday to bag.

Overall this was the best build season I have been a part of. Student participation was greatly impacted since they had more time to study which meant they had more meaningful time to help in the shop. The mentors also penciled out a general schedule of the build season with weekly tasks and deadlines on design to help move the build season along. Overall we worked harder to push the team more at the beginning of the season as we knew weeks 1-3 was where our "burn" was created by not utilizing that time effectively. I had seen build schedules used in the past but never have I been able to stick to one getting behind almost instantly. It wasn't until the end of week 3 that we got behind on a task which was related to order delays out of our control. Overall by the end of the build season we blew the schedule by a day completing the practice robot one day later than we had hoped. We built two robots much faster than our team has ever made one robot and while its too early to say if it was a successful season, our team has been very pleased with our efforts thus far.

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

This. A million times this. Engineering in the real world is done under the looming threat of deadlines. The bottom line is that if you are assigned to a project at work and given 6 weeks to complete it, your boss is not going to care if you could make it better if you had 14 weeks. You have your deadline, and you are expected to abide by it. This is an invaluable lesson for high school students to learn. Remember, all the technical skills FRC gives you can also be learned at college, or even on the internet. What makes FRC such a valuable program is the less tangible benefits it provides.

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

Coming from a students perspective, I feel there is not a real good reason for the bag. Most of the issues I have against it have already been addressed but in all honestly, if you go to a event for another type of sport/competition you build/practice up to that event. I intern at a local world class manufacturing sponsor here in the area, the projects that I do as well as the engineers and other employees, don't work on their projects up to a certain point (lets say 3 weeks before their deadline) then stop, close up shop. They work, prototype, design, and refine until the deadline. I can see where F.I.R.S.T. is thinking the bag is the deadline but why not the actual comeptiton. This just causes teams to build double of everything, doubling the cost of the already expensive robots we make and actually causes more burnout then just making the build season open. Again, most of what I have said has been presented already.

Thats my 2¢

P.S. Good luck everyone!

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

Does anyone remember where bag-and-tag came from? From the old 'ship date' requirements. Why did we have ship dates? So teams local couldn't work on their robot until the last minute when out-of-town teams would lose days, or weeks, of time shipping their robots. There are still teams that have to ship their robots in advance of their events.

Maintaining bag-and-tag keeps the amount of robot access the same for everyone. It also rewards the teams that build a practice robot. If building a practice bot is too taxing on a team's mentors/students/funds and leads to burn-out... then perhaps a practice bot isn't for that team.

95 is, and always has been, a relatively small team. In many years prior we got by through working hard, too hard in my opinion. Mentor burn-out has always been a significant problem. In recent years, especially this year, we've taken several steps to reducing mentor burn-out: taking Sundays off, meeting from 530-830pm instead of 430-9pm during the week and 9am-5pm on Saturdays instead of 8am-6pm. Each coach is also encouraged to take a night off every week.

This has forced us to work efficiently, design within our means, design for fabrication and assembly, utilize CAD and CNC fabrication equipment more heavily, and spread out the design and management tasks so we can tolerate missing 1-2 coaches every night. All of these are very good practices that translate very well to real-life and have lead to the least-stressful build season in my 5 years of being head coach on 95. Not unrelated to this: I am now the longest continuously-active head coach on 95 that I'm aware of, and I haven't even been threatened with divorce!

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

Bag and Tag developed/was first used in Michigan in 2009. It would have been ridiculous to ship robots to districts, so this was the solution devised. I'm sure someone else can chime in with more details. 2011 was the first year it expanded outside of Michigan, where most events where Bag and Tag (not all were, ie. we had to bag for NJ but then had to ship our robot for Philadelphia). 2012 Bag & Tag became the default for all events.

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

I agree entirely. It still makes perfect sense for a majority of teams who attend local events, districts or otherwise.

My point is that the reasons for shipping, and bagging/tagging, are still relevant: it prevents some teams from getting an unfair advantage over other teams who are simply further away from the nearest FRC event. Consider teams from Brazil, HI, Israel, etc. who would loose whole weeks shipping their robot to an event while a team down the street can work up until the night before.