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.