The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
 

In the Stereotyping of Successful Teams thread, we stumbled onto the age old topic of the 6 week build season and how it effects competitiveness and mentor burnout. Instead of hijacking that thread, I felt it appropriate to start a new thread.

These were the relevant posts leading up to this thread:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...2&postcount=81

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...3&postcount=83

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...8&postcount=84

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...3&postcount=87

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...1&postcount=92

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...0&postcount=93

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

My opinion falls on the side of eliminating the 6 week time constraint as being beneficial to the concept of mentor burnout. Eric's point about work expanding to fill a deadline is dead on, however a team may have an option now of not meeting EVERY single day for 6 weeks. My expectation would not be that the team stops after 6 weeks anyway, but that they spread the stress from a concentrated 6 weeks, to a less concentrated 8-9.

The way I see it, teams who build a full practice robot and work through the entire competition season, are going to no matter what, unless the rules explicitly disallow this action. These teams will have a second robot, they will have extra software development time, extra time to refine mechanisms and shake out bugs (disclaimer: we are one of these teams).

If you lift the restriction of teams having access to their robots, it will be pretty much the status quo for our team. However, for teams that do not have a practice robot they will now have the ability to tweak and tune right up to a competition. Its hard for me to see how removing the 'lock up' portion of the season as doing anything but raising the floor and allowing teams who would otherwise not have the means, access to fine tuning later in the season.


As for mentor burnout- there is no reason a team cannot artificially create a 6 week build season, either by putting a hard cap at 6 weeks, or by spreading 6 weeks worth of meetings over 8 or 9 weeks. I know for my team, having a few more weeks would definitely lighten the load earlier in the season, allow us more refinement on the design side- which means less wasted money on not fully vetted prototypes.

I do think this topic is a very good one and am very curious to hear many different sides of the argument though...

-Brando

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

Thanks for putting together this excellent recap thread.

As a lower resource team that has just started to build a practice robot.
I feel that a 6-week build limitation is hurting us more than helping.

Building a practice robot is a lot of work and we would much rather put in the work on the actual robot.

Eliminating the 6-week restriction:
1. saves money
2. saves time
3. reduces stress

It would be interesting to see a survey of Chief Delphi on this topic.

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

I've been basically away from FIRST the past two seasons (I moved to Austria) but I feel strongly about this topic.

We need to get rid of the 6 week deadline. I think this was there when there was a time we all had to ship our robots to the competition. Now, it only serves the purpose of a media point "The kids built this in 6 weeks" (which we all know really isn't true when you include improvements over the season).

To add what was more elegantly put by Adam...another thing that would be missed without bag time would be "fix-it windows". I know we would spend several hours the night before just planning these times so we can get everything we needed done in the time window. This was time we could have spent working on the robot (and caused more "burnout").

I don't agree with Eric's argument because the teams that want to continue to improve the entire season are already doing this...it's just in an inefficient way (two robots...although we would probably still build two robots because our practice bots get beat to heck...)...

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

If someone from FIRST reads this I propose that a survey question be added about the six week build season to all teams. If there is an overwhelming majority on one side or the other from the end of the year survey then I propose that FIRST implements this change into the FRC program. I personally agree that it would lessen mentor/student burnout for the build season. One other major thing that has popped into my mind is a question for the teams that build a practice robot. How has building a practice robot correlates with student grades. Do they trend up or down after the build season. This would be the only major problem of eliminating the 6 week build season.

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

No no no a thousand times no.

Anybody who says 6 days a week for a 6 week build season translates to 4 days a week for a 9 week build season is lying. Not simply because of Parkinson's Law, but because of 'elite' teams' constant need for that extra edge, and 'lesser' teams' need to try to keep up.

Here's my reality: For six weeks - 36 nights - my wife has to feed, bathe, and put our two sons to bed by herself. For 36 nights, I don't get to read bedtime stories and tuck in my two boys. I am not willing to make that 54 nights.

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

Then don't... Who is telling you that you have to? Self impose your own deadlines. That's the beauty of it...it's in your control.

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

I guess we're doing Ri3D next year then. :)

Seriously. Tell your students and mentors and administrators and sponsors that, purely by your own choice, your team is only going to actively work 36 days out of the possible 54, and let me know what 469's response is. If they have any interest in returning to Einstein, I think I know the answer.

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

I'm sorry...but I don't get your point (or joke)...

BTW... "3. What works for you may not work for me, and vice versa."

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

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the six week season should stay, at least for a while. Once the district system is the norm in FIRST, I could see an argument to go to a continuous build period. There are several reasons for this (burnout, I completely agree with Taylor on this), but one big one I haven't seen talked about much looms above them all.

Remember minibots? How much variety there was at the beginning of the season, for better or for worse? How a few teams spent thousands of dollars and incredible amount of times iterating to perfect the direct drive minibot? How after a few weeks of regionals, clones started popping up left and right, because teams and the rules made this possible, and everyone asked for them to never, ever be done again, partially because so many teams hit the ceiling of performance with identical designs?

I don't want to see the 120 pound robots become like this. I don't want a system where it's practical for teams to copy what others engineer. The 6 week period makes this impractical to do. With unlimited robot access, I could see teams doing complete rebuilds for championships, bringing even more burnout into play, taxing sponsors and giving a double advantage to teams with good manufacturing support, making FRC robots monotone, and resulting in some spectacular failures that wouldn't have happened by teams who try a more ambitious rebuild than they can handle

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

Are folks advocating an extended build season (e.g. 9 weeks) or the elimination of a stop-build deadline altogether?

If the latter, what would you recommend to minimize the advantage a team competing late in the season has over someone who, perhaps necessarily, competes in week 1? Would you attempt to minimize the advantage at all?

We meet 3 times a week during build; twice during the work week and on Saturdays. Later in the season, we meet more frequently as required. I'm pretty well ready to die after 6 weeks now; I can see how making the time allowed longer could help, but I also see where it wouldn't make much difference and the pain would only be prolonged.

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

I don't see the point. Teams competing in different weeks aren't competing against each other, unless there's some weird time warp that allows that in the Pacific Northwest :).

The qualification system is still based on how you do in the event you attend. OPR (which improves every week) is not a qualifier for the world championship.

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

I'm against extending the build season, I can guarantee it would lead to more late build sessions for my teams. I am already stretched thin for 6 weeks and my college hates the fact I miss so many days of class (I still keep my grades up). If it were changed to an 8 or 9 week build season I simply would not be able to be a mentor in my current capacity.

More build time = more days missed of class/work

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

I have to disagree with extending build season or getting rid of the 6 weeks stop time. I feel that it is impressive to build these machines within the 6 weeks. But the big issue is what about the teams that can only do a week 1 event such as GSR. There build season is only 8 weeks and another team that can only go to week 4 has a more time to work on their robot. It is not a level playing field based on the simple fact when your competition is.

Also with the six weeks deadline this allows our team to develop documents that is used during competition as well as providing a great experience for the students to learn not just how to build a robot but also how to document our build season and robot. The technical documents they create will be better tools for them in both their professional and college careers.

I understand mentors get burnt out but what is the reason for this burn out? Cause i know when it is close to the end of week 6 i feel amazing on what has taken place of not just building a robot but changing students lives forever.

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

My opinion...get rid of it altogether...

What advantage does a team competing in week 5 have over a team competing in week 1? All the teams competing in week 1 compete with other teams competing in week 1...and then 2, 3, etc...

Are you saying that a team in week 5 will wait until the week 1 districts/regionals and then copy the best designs?

Wow...I feel like EricH today...I think this is the most I've ever posted in one day...

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

I pulled this quote of mine from a 2009 thread on this topic.
This is just an observation I had from Kick-off 2000, but the quote is classic Woodie Flowers:
Back in the olden days (2000) the only kick-off was in New Hampshire, they used to let people line up at a microphone and ask questions after the game was revealed.
After Dean and Woodie had fielded several questions, an annoyed mentor stepped to the microphone and said something like....."Why don't you give us more time? Why don't you give us 10 weeks instead of 6 weeks?"
Woodie stepped to the microphone and said with a smile....."Because we like you"!
Dean and Woodie understood even back then that extending build season would only make things worse and simply extend our agony. :)

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

In a district system where district Championship attendance is predicated upon points earned through competition, though, isn't it plausible that a team competing in week 1 and week 6 is at a disadvantage to a team competing in week 5 and week 6?

The total time spent on the robot may be the same, but the functional state of the robot may be quite different between the former and latter at their first event. In other words, while team A has 7 weeks before they have to compete for the first time, team B has 11 weeks. Our robot would certainly perform better after 11 weeks of work than it does after 7.

I guess, if you presume that everyone is equally handicapped at 7 weeks, it makes no difference. I think our current experience shows us that certain teams do MUCH more in 6 or 7 weeks than others. So, in the end, the teams are appreciably better today would be appreciably better without a stop-build day, but everyone gets better overall. I suppose that makes sense.

Okay, I concede. But I still might die if I have to do for another six weeks.

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

But wouldn't that be true also of the robots you would be competing against at that event?

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

It's more the latter.

I'm not sure there would be an advantage to competing later in the season. It seems like the level of competition later in the season would increase much higher than an early competition (we see similar now)... that it may or may not be a benefit to compete later. It may be in a teams best interest to register for an early regional and get a robot completed quickly, so they can get a win against a slightly lower level of competition. Then continue to develop their machine as time goes on for additional competitions later in the season.

We have a similar design/build schedule. We are not working every day all 6 weeks. We work Tuesday / Thursday 4:15-7:30pm and Satuday 8am-4pm for the majority of the build season. When we need to work more later in the season, we do...or even after.

So yes, I could easily justify to our sponsor (although we don't need too) that we would "only" be working 36 out of 54 available days.

-Adam

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

I agree that access to your competition robot after the six week build season would "raise the floor" as many have said. By how much is debatable.

I also agree that extending the build process into the competition season would have little to no impact on mentor (or student, parent, coach, ...) burnout. It is true that the work expands to fill the time available, at least for most of us I think that would be true.

I really enjoy "continual improvement" and I believe that there is great value to the students in that experience.

The present system of events spread over six or seven weeks with the ability of teams to attend as many as they can afford creates the opportunity for some to benefit from their extra efforts to acquire the resources to evolve their machines.

I do not see much, if any difference, between completely eliminating the bagging requirements versus allowing some limited time through the competition season for working on the competition robot. EDIT: And as stated in another post, there is little difference between no bagging and having a 30 lb allowance.

I do wonder what unintended (and unwanted) consequences would ensue from lifting the "bag and tag" requirement? Would it impact the participation at early competition events? Other than dispel the myth that all of this great work is done in six weeks, I am hard pressed to to see a negative impact.

I am firmly in the camp of eliminate the bagging requirement. The only stop work date should be ship date for the Championship event.

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

Forget the build cycle, the practice bots, etc.

The level of dedication required to sustain a successful technical career and a successful team as a mentor will continue to rise, eventually beyond a tipping point, for a team that wants to make it into Eliminations or better at Championships. The technical job market, where nerds compete to have meaningful impact on the projects at work for which they're passionate, is far more competitive than even IRI. A wife & house on top of that is hard enough, but add kids into the mix and it'd get tougher still.

Mentors are the keystone to the level of competitiveness in FRC -- and any student on a highly competitive team is better for it in the long run. Some geographic areas lack one type of mentor or another (for example, my area is light on the mechanical side but is overflowing with software & business). One solution is to get more mentors involved -- but how, on a sustainable basis? Another is to partner teams up who are heavy on one, yet light on another, but that's another topic for another thread (and something we're trying for 2014).

The posts quoted after me in this thread showcase an interesting few points, and I waited to respond to Adam until a few more people came in. My original statement wasn't to start an argument, but really to start a discussion on how 341 and other very successful teams are able to motivate their team to excellence for 4 months of out of the year. Is there a core of mentors who can come in when needed? Is there 'that 1 guy who loves the robot more than life'? Are the kids told 'the mentors are here, and so you shall be as well"? We've tried a variety of things on my team, with mixed results. I'd love to hear what works for a given team's circumstances.

I think that the specific discussion regarding removal of the 6-week cap is far bigger than ChiefDelphi. There are many voices which aren't represented on these forums. The 9-person team I talked to last night (1 technical mentor) doesn't have anyone who even reads CD, for example.

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

Oh my heavens, we need to keep the 6-week deadline and if anything, get ride of the 30 lbs of fabbed parts rule. If I remember right, there was a time, you couldn't bring any fabricated parts to a competition, now teams can slap on a whole new shooter or intake at a competition.

Mentor burnout is a serious issue and I know for me personally, extending the build times will overwork our volunteers and myself. When we are overworked, we won't be volunteering at competitions, volunteering for community outreach events, etc. This is bad for FIRST!

Keep the 6 weeks and modify the fabricated components weight limit... (maybe 15 lbs?)

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

No it's not a disadvantage, because everyone competiting in week 1 events have all had 7 weeks at that point. Everyone in the week 5 events have had 11 weeks, etc. In other words, your robot may have gotten better from week 1 to week 5, but so has everyone else's robot so the comptition around you is better. Once again, you're not competing against a set standard, you're competing against the other teams at that competition who have all had the same amount of time.

I'm actually going to advocate that the 6 week limit is a DISADVANTAGE to teams that compete late, especially in the district system.

Take team A who decides to attend events on weeks 4 and 6. With the current system, team A will have trouble going up against the 30+ teams at that event that have already competed in one event and have already had one event worth of refinement, practice, and fix-it windows. Team A is at a big disadvantage with the 6 week window. This is one of the reasons why we never schedule our first event after week 2.

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

For what it's worth, I edited my earlier post a bit. I didn't think my position through entirely.

I think we could look to FTC a bit to see how a season with no end plays out. I can't speak for any other than the three teams we field and the few we've shared a build space with, but we end up cramming as much in near the end as we do for FRC. We're far less intense about our work in the early part of the season than we are in FRC, though; we don't make effective use of the additional time.

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

I am completely in favor of eliminating the six week (or any number of weeks) deadline. The build deadline certainly did not prevent our team from working hard in March and April. But it did cause us to work more slowly and cost us more money. I see no benefit to the build deadline.

Eliminating the 30 lb allowance would lower the quality of robots o n the field substantially, and that matters. Kids who get a chance to actually get their robot working properly have a better experience. The changes we make to a robot during the season provide some of the best engineering experiences.

I think robotics teams need to figure out how to exist with a nucleus of team members who show up nearly all the time but still receive contributions from mentors and students who are there, say, twice a week. It should be okay for mentors to stick with a level of time commitment that works with their lives.

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

There is also a huge value in having to make a difficult deadline. The six week time period is very short and every team knows it. Teams then have to evaluate their ideas and determine which ones are the most important and attainable before the deadline. Moreover, it forces them to operate under stress - all the while trying to maintain gracious professionalism.

Frankly, learning the teamwork and leadership required to build a robot under those conditions is more valuable than the technical skills acquired.

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

I'll second the FTC comparison. BadgerBOTS as an organization supports four FTC teams, in the past season I interacted with three of them (we all work out of the same space), and I am head coach on one of them. All of those teams met pretty casually around the start of the season, and then started cramming it in towards the end.

As far as the six week build goes, I'm definitely for keeping it. I imagine that i fyou made it nine weeks, most teams would end up working the same hours per week that they do currently, for three more weeks.

Plus, I think it's useful for showing students what you can achieve when you really push hard and work for it. Every season starts with the students (and mentors too!) saying "Oh man, how the heck are we going to make this happen in six weeks?!?! It's crazy!" But by the end, you have a working robot that nobody thought would be possible, but there it is. I think you lose some of that excitement and sense of accomplishment if you don't have that deadline.

As Woodie Flowers put it once (I'm paraphrasing): "It's a problem too large, with a budget too small, a staff too big, and a deadline too short."

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

It's very personal and team dependent. Will it level the playing field somewhat? I believe so. Those "elite" teams will improve say 5-10% with the extended build season while teams that have a rolling chassis by week 6 will improve considerably more. Will it reduce mentor stress? I can say in our team's case it probably would not. I suppose if we didn't have to build a practice bot (no stop build) it might reduce it some (not much). The student grades dropping is another good point. There are many sides to the argument. I'm torn between the "if it aint broke don't fix it" and the fact that the level of competition would rise if they lifted the restriction. I feel like it should be one or the other; either we bag/ship it and there's a much more stringent/small withholding allowance, or just leave it open. With 30lbs of withholding this year, it may as well have been an unlimited build season.

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

So I see this is a back and forth between if the 6 week deadline is really needed.

What I am more curious about and want to know is

Why do mentors get burned out?
What are some stories about a fellow mentors or yourself and burnt you out?
When they get burnt out do they come back after a year or done with it for good?

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

Are we looking for an answer more sophisticated than addiction? :p

Seriously I have done nothing more intense, rewarding, and fun.

EDIT: I get it, that "burnout" implies it is no longer fun. I haven't personally experienced that yet. There have been nights where it's 3 a.m. and I am just exhausted, but I've never stepped past the no-longer-fun line. I think if that ever happens I'd have to stop.

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

Wasn't it 469 that used to have a reputation (c. 2005?) for making big changes at their first event? If so, were those changes independent of what happened in week 1?

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

Everyone who knows me knows that I am all for getting rid of the 6 week build season.

My team meets 7 days a week during build season and 7 days a week during competition season too(except for the Wednesday after bag and when I'm away at competition).

The best teams are building for 16 weeks either way and spending a lot of time and money doing it.

My main problem with the 6 week build season is we have so little time to help struggling teams. We do two rookie workshops, a bumper build and hold a scrimmage which is really just more time to work on robots. All of these events plus teams coming to our shop on various days still isn't enough time to get some teams competitive. If we had up until right before competition we could have several more practice events to get robots ready for actual competition. The few teams with copy bots in our area already do this, why should we exclude those teams without the resources (yes I know they can go out and work to get the resources, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it easier for them).

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

I usually burn out because somewhere along the way robotics transitions from fun to a job. Since I'm already working a (more than) full time job, I get intellectually tired and stressed out the farther build season progresses. Also my sleeping patterns are disturbed during build season most significantly because my brain is constantly engaged wrestling with the problem(s) of the day more often robotics related than work. My burn out correlates directly with my commitment to the team. If I was less committed I'd be less engaged and less stressed out.

My burn out is generally temporary. A few weeks off and I'm eager to watch webcasts and do a little light weight robotics R&D but I'm unable to sustain any real heavy lifting for months. Come build season time I'm ready to go again.

The real source of my burn out is myself. I don't do enough in the lead up to build season to protect myself. These are the concrete actions that I know I need to take but don't seem to find the time (mostly because they are intellectually less appealing than playing with robots):
1. Recruit more mentors to the team
2. Train more team members (students and mentors alike)
3. Organize better so that we can more effectively use all our team members
4. Build a better community support structure so that we are all helping each other throughout the season rather than letting the load fall on a select few.

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

Jesse,

I agree with your statement here. Yes, comitting time was much easier 10 years ago (when I was a lowly engineer) than now. I've made plenty of decisions or non decisions that may or may not have adversly affected my career. These are all conscious decisions to continue with this program instead of making advancement in other areas (although there are plenty of other factors that went into the decisions). Once my kids were born, it became even harder, to commit additional time. One of the reasons we work the schedule we do, is because there is no way to commit any additional time.

This season was terrible for burn-out. Trying to get a climber developed and build put such a strain on all aspects of our robot that many of us were ready to walk away after this season. But, after seeing it all come together and having a great experience at MSC / Championships...I don't think (hope) we will lose any mentors.

To keep the team working for the entire 4 months of the year, we have a couple "really" dedicated mentors that are around all the time to help get stuff done. They really are the backbone of our entire operation. The rest of us provide the knowledge base for what we are going to do and how to do it, but they are the ones that really get it done. There's no way I could invest any additional time than I already do...but, I still think it would be easier to spread that time out over the entire season, than trying to cram it into 6 weeks.

Our core group of mentors is not getting any younger. So to help counter act this, we are looking into opening up our mentor base to former students that we feel would be able to develop into mentors. In addition to any former FIRST students that hire into the GM proving grounds that would be interested in helping out.

I agree... CD is a very small minority of the total teams in FIRST. Nothing is going to decided here, but it is a fun discussion! :cool:

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

For our team, the "stop build" day was last Saturday. We basically work 100% until we are eliminated. Having to build and maintain a practice robot costs us 2x and increases our workload by a significant amount. At each competition there is a massive push and stress to update the bagged robot to the current state. How nice would it be to show up to the competition and be ready to go?

There are teams that stop building at 6-weeks and their mentors get a break. I get it and respect it. However, without a stop build day your season can still be 6 weeks long... just go to a week 1 event and your done (maybe FIRST could even move it up a week). Right now, if you go to a week 5 event you will be competing against teams that have worked for 11 weeks... the stop build day accomplished nothing.

For our team, removing the 6-week stop build day would not "extend" the build season at all... rather it would reduce cost and mentor burnout.

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

Granted 2005 was before my time with 469... Do we make changes? Yes. Are they sometimes big? Yes. Do they sometimes resemble other good designs (like 1114's arm in 2007 because ours sucked)? Very occasionally. But most of the time the changes were because we weren't really done at our first event... In fact the running joke/motto on the team was "We'll just finish it on Thursday at our first event..."

In 2008 we wanted to "shoot the ball" but thought it would be deemed illegal. After we won Detroit and saw 27's awesome robot and how much fun and cool it was, we spent the next day ripping our arm off our practice bot to make a kicker...because it was sooooo cool to score that way. The students wanted to put in the time. The mentors did too. So we did.

I think that was the last season of "big changes" other than minibot deployer in 2011...again...233 found such a cool way to launch those suckers...

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

Mentoring a team during build season can be a full-time job. Add that on top of a "real" full-time job and something's going to have to give. Six weeks is about the limit for neglecting family and for postponing downtime.

I am convinced that a firm "stop build" date is a very good thing.

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

For me, any burnout is due primarily to the compression of work into a 6 week time frame. The time frame we are given results in us working 6/7 days a week, late into the night often and even with some rotation of mentors on various days of the week we still suffer some "burnout". Of course my team doesn't stop working at the end of 6 weeks as we continue to build, iterate, program and practice with our second robot...but we do so with a less intense work rate. My team is already working throughout the season and spreading out the work hours and days would, for me, be less stressful. And no, we wouldn't just fill in the available time (we already demonstrate the ability to say we aren't going to work on certain days during the 6 week period).

If the FTC open build model were adopted for FRC I can see teams saving money on a second robot, taking more days off so we actually get to spend a more days each week with our family throughout the season. The extended access to the competition robot could also make things easier on some of our sponsors who are sometimes asked to rush outside work for us as well to fit most of our work into the 6 week period.

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

Team 359 over recent years have "Mentor Burnout" "Travel Burnout" "Lack of family time Burnout" and "Financial Burnout."
Winning the CCA and many Regional Championship Banners have helped ease the burnout pain.

But as Adam has stated here, our mentors arent getting any younger, and we are also faced with the transitioning of mentorship to former students.

Our program puts just as much time in VEX and it really adds to the burnout issues.

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

The Chief Delphi bias strikes once again. Please keep in mind that CD is not representative of the FRC population as a whole, and most teams who post actively on CD are above average.

Most of the elite teams meet constantly, and well past the stop work date. They have aggressive schedules, practice robots, practice fields, and lofty goals.
Will eliminating the stop work date improve their result? Probably to a marginal degree.
Will eliminating the stop work date reduce their mentor stress? To an extent, especially on competition weeks.

Most of the FRC population does not meet constantly, and scales back their efforts significantly past the stop work date. Their schedules are still demanding, but less so than the FRC elite. They don't have practice robots, and have to do significant testing and driver training at their first (and frequently only) event.
Will eliminating the stop work date improve their result? In large part yes. Bottom teir teams will still struggle (it doesn't take six weeks to build a box on wheels with bumpers, more time is not going to fix the teams who cannot do that). Middle teir teams will likely show up much closer to ready, but many will still not have ever put their robot on a real field to get proper autonomous testing and driver training.
Will eliminating the stop work date reduce their mentor stress? Not likley. Even without meeting every day, these mentors are often pushed to (or well past) their limits. Extending that build period will not help matters, even if their robot does better.

Obviously these are generalizations, but it's how I feel these types of changes would impact generalized versions of teams. I'm in the same boat as Madison (including that competing early in the season is a disadvantage to many teams who have yet to pass the threshold of being competitive). 1712 meets 3 times a week, with some additional meetings late in the season. More time would help, but few of us have that time or energy to spare. We're all exhausted when the build season ends, as it is.

I don't know if a longer build would raise the "floor" per se, but it would likely help with raising the 25%-75% percentile of teams. However, you may well see the number of teams drop, as mentor burnout increases.

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

Pretty burned-out mentor here. I had too much non-FIRST stuff going on this year, and found that robotics was a bit of a chore. I'm always nonplussed about build season, but this year felt really bad. Between work, a start-up, and a girlfriend, I was massively overstretched. Our main mentor is fortunate enough to be retired, but as a working stiff I'm finding less and less time for FIRST.

The 6-week season absolutely must be kept, and I'd be happy if they eliminated the withholding allowance too. Top-end teams will build practice bots, but top-end teams will always find a way to be better whether the season is long or not. I had to skip out on the mid-february-until-first-competition build season this year, and I felt awful about it. I shouldn't feel like I'm abandoning my team by not showing up after build season.

Here's the problem:
-Extending the build season would certainly raise the floor of performance, but it would also raise the ceiling. Teams that perform near the bottom now would perform near the bottom with an official 9-week build season. Their robot might be better at the game, but everyone else's robot would be better at it too. Human psychology and satisfaction isn't interested in absolute performance, it's interested in relative performance. And coming dead last feels just as bad whether your robot can score (9 weeks) or not (6 weeks).
-Put another way, the build season is a bit of an arms race: if everyone spends 3 more weeks, then that's 3 more weeks of neglected homework, children, and jobs for essentially zero gain. The extra 3 weeks will probably not gain you any ground on any other teams, because they'll also be working for an extra 3 weeks.
-Teams can't really say "well we're just going to work for 6 weeks", because that guarantees that they'll get beaten by the teams that are willing to sacrifice their non-FIRST lives more.
-If FIRST were to make the build season officially longer, they'd probably make the games proportionally more difficult, so you'd still have teams unable to perform any of the tasks. It's not like we'd have 9 weeks to achieve the same bar we have now: the bar would be higher.


Here's a proposal to enforce a short build season: have the drive station software stop working between the end of build season until thursday of the competitions that that team is registered for, along with the reinstatement of "raw materials only" being brought to competitions. Boom: no more practice robots, no more february->march build season, no more 4-months of daily meetings to be competitive.

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

If we kept the rule concerning ending work on a certain date (the old ship date; now a bag & tag date for most events), then 6 weeks is appropriate. If this were 7 or 8 weeks, we would continue to work as intensely, but for additional time. We build a nice, designed robot, but frankly, it is never really "done". ...On the other hand, 6 months would reduce the pressure...

Maintaining the current intensity for 1 or 2 more weeks would not be an improvement from a burn-out standpoint; just worse. It would also seem to necessitate a delay in the competition season, which is probably impractical, given that this runs to the end of April now.

On the other hand, if the robot remained accessible for modification throughout the competition season (no bag & tag), it might reduce burn out a little (although I have some reservations). Mostly, this would eliminate the need for competitive teams to build a second robot (which helps).

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

I do like this aspect of the 6-week build. It's not easy to get a high quality machine built in 6-weeks. When it happens, it is very rewarding!

With the currently imposed 6-week deadline, we WANT to get the robot completed in this time frame. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't.

I'm sure it helps to keep the students motivated as well.

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

I vote to keep the 6 week deadline. I would even vote to eliminate the withholding allowance. The arms race will get worse as teams start copying the good designs they see in earlier competitions (take a look at VEX). It will turn into a never-ending brutal build season if you want to try to compete with the best.
(just my opinion)

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

I would hate anything longer than the 6 weeks of open bag.

Yes, the season continues after you bag, but for us it's a much slower pace. We're usually refining code on the robot, fixing any major issues, then planning for the bag window. For us that means we go from a 7 day a week before bag to a 2-3 day per week after bag.

Having the robot out-of-bag would mean that the 7 day grind would keep going, because 'large scale' improvements like adding a climber would still be on the table.

I'd vote to keep the current system just for my sanity.

Also, as a parent with kids, there's simply no way I could devote more time than I already do. I would have to take a long hard look at whether or not I would continue to mentor if a longer build season was implemented.

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

Yep. We used much of our 30lbs allowance at each of our events (4 events * 30 lbs allowed at each = one entirely new robot). Add in unbagging hours for District events and we basically had a build season that went from January until May.

"Stop build day" really doesn't exist. Since we "stopped build", we re-designed and re-built our shooter, our intake, our shoulder joint, our loading mechanism, and our 10 pt hanger (literally every function of our robot other than the drive base).

And let me tell you: a 4 month build season kicked our butts. Easter weekend was the first weekend since kickoff that we didn't work on the robot. I think my wife forgot who I am. Many of our mentors are burnt out, and I don't think it's a coincidence that several of us had very bad winters/springs when it comes to illness (the students don't seem to mind, but they are young and energetic and can rotate in and out more than the mentors who are in the critical path).

Most of the pain was self-inflicted. We chose to pursue a very ambitious design, had some manufacturing delays that backed things up, and ultimately set a lofty standard for our robot performance and refused to rest until we met it. If at some point the deadline is extended or eliminated, teams will need to rethink how they look at build season. 6 weeks of "full speed ahead" is really all you can take.

In the end, our robot was pretty good, and we went 7-1 and seeded 5th in Newton. We would not have been able to do that without withholding allowances and unbagging time. In hindsight, if we didn't have to worry about building a practice robot, or building upgrade mechanisms separate from the rest of the competition machine, or spending the first few hours at competition frantically installing our upgrades, our season would have been somewhat less stressful. But honestly, it still would have been on the verge of unsustainable.

Since there really is no such thing as a "6 week build season" for a team like ours, there is really only one way to solve the burnout problem: self-discipline. Teams need to set their own limits and pace themselves. Karthik's talk isn't just about how to make a winning robot; it's about how to keep your sanity.

If we come to the realization that self-discipline is the only thing that will prevent burnout (whether a 6, 8, or N week build season), then I don't see why we need a stop build deadline and the additional stresses it can cause.

The only other option that makes sense is completely eliminating withholding allowances, and going back to the days where half the robots on any given field can't accomplish the game challenge.

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

Thank you mentioning VEX... with a longer build season, the amount of improvement leads to a bunch of similar scoring robots, which may be good for the average match score, but I find it a bit uninspiring. At Vex Worlds, a lot of the top bots had a very similar scoring mechanism that I'm sure were inspired by others. The minibot from 2011 is another example. I really enjoy seeing a lot of variety robots and solutions to the game challenge. This year was probably the most variety in robots. If teams were allowed to continue to improve their design, I have a feeling we see a lot more floor intakes, Full Court Shooters, and all would be using the same type of wheels... Boring...

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

I don't have a job, and I get burned out at 6 weeks. Our students do too, so do the teachers. We treat the 6 week build as a 6 week build, when it's over we are done with robots until the competition. Yet we managed to seed first and win the Arizona regional this year, so we might be considered an "elite" team in AZ (which is a relatively small pond).

I've also been involved in another robotics competition in Arizona, the National Underwater Robotics Challenge. This event kicks off on Halloween, and the event is held in June. There is plenty of time to do lots of work for it, whenever you want. Yet most teams show up at the competition with a non-working robot. I think this is the result of procrastination, caused by the way too long build season.

If anyone at FIRST is paying attention to this, please put me in the "keep the 6 week build and get rid of the 30 lbs allowance" camp.

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

Both of these are already choices you and your team are making. If you have the money and time to build a practice robot, 30 lbs and unbagging time are all you need to keep on grinding. Eliminating stop build day would not rob you of the ability to make the same choices. Instead, it gives other teams (without the resources to make practice robot) the ability to do what you currently do.

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

I'd vote to keep the 6 week build season and a much smaller withholding allowance. Mostly because that's how we function on our team. It would have been great to have a few more days to tune software to improve our consistency, but that's our fault for building up until 11:53 PM on stop build day.

In 2010, 2011, and 2013 we competed at champs with the robot exactly as bagged on stop build day. In 2012 we added a load sensor to help with ball variation but otherwise made no functional changes.. While on one hand I'd love to keep upgrading to improve our robot, on the other hand it's somehow enjoyable to make a plan early in build season and see how it all plays out (especially since it's gone fairly well for us over that span.)

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

my personal view is this would help newer teams and not have a signficant impact on many of the teams. It would save $$ and a lot of work and reduce stress.

Why - we build a prototype and then a competition robot. we work hard to keep the two very similar. once we bag the comp robot, then we make changes to the prototype. then we have to make a second spare part for the comp robot. then we have to be sure the new parts will fit and it will all work the same. then we spend a lot of time on thursday morning putting on the new parts, or re-fabricating pieces.

If we had access to the comp robot, we could just work on it. and on thursday, instead of finishing our robot, most of our team could focus on helping the teams that are still struggling.

Even a 1 day "out of the bag" optin each week could make more teams available to help others on the first day of the regionals.

Teams still have a choice. Even with the current rules, some teams meet 7 days a week for 6 weeks. Some meet 3 times a week. Three are some really good teams that do not meet everyday (or even 6 days a week) now.

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

The problem with self-discipline as a solution is that self-discipline essentially means: "choose between having a non-FIRST life or being competitive". If our team chooses self-discipline and goes back to our families and friends between februrary and march, it means we'd be middle of the pack at best at the competitions, because half the field or more will have been working during that time.

If FIRST mandates (and enforces) a shorter build season, then it means that you don't need to choose: you can work your butt off for 6 weeks, then relax, safe in the knowledge that the competition is also relaxing.

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

but it isn't.

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

So an example of how I got "burned out" this build season.

My family scheduled a vacation on the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of the Stop build week....(not sure how I messed up the dates :o ).

Anyways...the Satuday before, I NEEDED to have all my work done before I left the shop, because otherwise the robot would have been bagged without a functional shooter.

Myself, some other mentors, and some of our most dedicated students worked from 8am Saturday, until 5am Sunday. Just to make sure we had a mechanically sound shooter, ready for the electrical team to wire.

Now, our robot was no where near completed when it went into the bag. We were probably 60% wired (cRIO, Victors wired, a few motors wired) and 70% mechanically complete (drivetrain and shooter complete, no climber, other misc stuff not completed) ....and 0% tested. Our fault, obviously for many, many reasons.

So now our robot is sitting in a bag for 3 weeks not completed, while we continued to work on our practice bot trying to get the climber working. The stop build didn't stop us from working, it just stopped us from working on our competition bot.

When we were allowed to un-bag the week of Waterford, we worked for 3 days (2-3hrs/day...or whatever it was) to get the robot capable of shooting and hanging for 10pts. We had to fight through mechanical, wiring, and software issues that were different than the practice bot.

By the time we showed up at Waterford, it felt like we had been working for a year straight to get this machine functional....and it was really only 70% functional at that point. No pre-programmed positions. Could only FCS at the 2pt goal. Auto was a mess. No climber. Very little driver practice.

This are all 100% self induced issues with biting off more than we could handle... but, if we had access to the robot for the 3 weeks prior, we probably would have been able to get it all working in that amount of time, with the same effort that we already put in.

We then continued to work the same schedule moving towards Troy, MSC, and Champs.

How inspirational was our robot at Waterford compared to the one that we showed at in St. Louis?? Because we receive a lot more comments and questions about the one at St. Louis, than the one at Waterford.

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

At what point/amount of unbag time would you stop making a practice bot?

1 Day/week?
6 hours/week (not just competition weeks, but all weeks?)
8
12?

I think there could be a neat compromise made where you could find a threshold that would essentially find a balance. Just a thought. I know of a handful of teams in Michigan that stopped building a practice bot a couple of years ago thanks to the 6 hrs, and 30 lb. allowance.

This would also balance a bit the desparity of teams that due multiple events vs. those that only do 1 later event.

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

99% would if there was no withholding allowance. Get rid of withholding or at least lower it to 10-15 lbs. Save us from ourselves!!

I think some are also misinterpreting what is meant by Mentor burn-out... It is not that we are unhappy or not having fun, it is just they we have responsibilities outside of FIRST and often make sacrifices that either hurt the team or our families. Making that choice is not always fun.

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

I hear your point, but the problem is that sustainability is ALREADY a self discipline issue:

1) Teams have the same choice now, even with a stop build day. Ask 67 or 254 how many man-hours they put into perfecting their climber on the practice bot after they bagged the robot.

2) Our most successful robots ever were our simplest (mechanically anyhow). Many other teams fall into this category (1503's 2011 machine, 610's World Champion robot, etc.). Just like how cramming for a test into the wee hours of the morning has diminishing returns, there is something to be said for aiming for a simple-but-effective, master-of-one-trade robot and being able to be well rested when you work on it. If you want to build the swiss army knife of robots, well, you are asking for it.

3) The artificial constraint of not being able to touch your robot from Day X to Day Y (which seems even more arbitrary once you are in a district system and get 6 hours of access per event) actually impedes your ability to balance FIRST and life, since all direct work on the robot can only fall on certain days/hours.

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

That's because the current ruleset permits them to. If the rules were "6 weeks, no withholding, only raw materials brought to competition, and driver station doesn't work between end-of-build and start-of-competition", then nobody would be building because nobody would be allowed to. You could work on your human player skills or talk about strategy, but that is (depending on the game) working at the fringes, rather than improving your shooter from 2 cycles to 5 cycles.

I've been in FIRST for 10 years now, and I've noticed a gradual increase (steep, in recent years) of how much building goes on between end-of-build and competitions starting. Under the current ruleset, if you want to be competitive, you also have to be doing that building (because the competition is). If you want to maintain friendships, jobs, or families, then you are essentially put in a situation of choosing to be competitive vs choosing to maintain those other extremely important things.

Put another way, you could put it this way:
-10% of teams will work to the absolute maximum of what the rules permit them to and enjoy it. Currently, that means a practice bot, 30lbs of robot withheld per competition.
-40% of the teams want to at least be competitive and have a shot at winning the competition. Therefore, they'll kill themselves trying to keep up to the top 10%. They'd work less, but in order to be competitive they have to be working about as much as the workerbee top 10%.
-The other 50% of teams probably pack it up at week 6. Some of them may be have really good robots, but many of them won't.

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

Amen. Burnout doesn't mean it isn't fun. I freaking love--LOVE--FIRST. But it is exhausting--and moreso the older I get; and it forces me to choose between FIRST and lots of other things that I love.

The obligations of adulthood means that "time off" usually means "time to do other types of work", and FIRST already gets in the way of other types of work. If you want to stay competitive, you meet like crazy, you push yourself, you do everything you can -- because you know everybody else is, too.

Oh, and some of us have spouses, children, pets we have an obligation to keep happy (because we own them, and that's what good pet owners do)...

I love FIRST, but I don't love only FIRST, and I don't want to do only FIRST. I also don't want to look at a group of students who say, "Mr. Freivald, we want to do whatever we can to be as good as the best teams" and say, "no, we're not going to do as much as those other teams do, because Mr. Freivald doesn't want to become suddenly single and give away half his stuff again".

Why do mentors get burned out? Because mentors have more than one passion, more than one obligation, and finite amounts of time and energy.

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

Personally, I think that 6 hours every week would be a nice compromise.

I would even take 4 hours every week, instead of the 6 hours of unbagging before the event (District Model).

Our team spent/wasted a lot of time on a PracticeBot, that was never used to its full potential.

Love the idea IKE.

-Clinton-

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

Yes!

I am not advocating teams/mentor spend more time on FIRST. I am advocating FIRST makes the time spent more valueable by allowing teams/mentors access to their competition robots.

Probably the most important thing that happened to us this season was getting eliminated in the quarter finals at Waterford. This gave us 3-4 hours of time to work on getting the climber strung and hooks installed. This time with the competition robot, without the pressure of having an up coming match was critical in discovering the issues that were holding us back from climbing. Without this time, I doubt we ever climb in the season.

If we would have advanced, we would have had to wait until Troy to install the parts on the competition robot. We would have then discovered we needed to change the hooks (again!) to get up to level 3. Depending on how far we got with the practice bot (it ended up falling off the tower btw Waterford and Troy, and had to be re-built). We may or may not have continued with the climber development. Knowing that the competition bot was close to climbing was what kept us moving forward.

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

Ask the question: "Why do we restrict access to the Robots".
The answer is not because to restrict burnout or any other reason stated here. This is a side effect and not the original intent.
The real answer today is "because we always have". This is not a very good reason. Almost no one who works at FIRST other than Dean and Woodie were here when the decision to institute this policy was made. It persists as an artifact of the past and little more. It really makes very little sense in the modern context of FRC as a season long sport and not a single event.
Look around at any other machine sport on earth and you will very rarely find any kind of restriction like this, if ever. I know of nothing else like it. If your build machines, you need time to learn to use them, time to fix them, Time to test them, and time to improve them. Contintuous improvement and iterative development are two of the core aspects of good engineering process. FRC deliberately squashes these effort for reasons I have never understood.

If you told a race car team that they could not have access to their car for weeks before the big race, they would laugh in your face. Most other machine sports are just as intense as FRC, some are more so, but none of them attempt at putting any extra artificial constraints on access to the machines. When race day comes, you go to the track; that is your only time constraint. FRC does not need to be different.

I actually find in practice that the machine access rules make the sport of FRC much harder for the weaker teams, and give a huge advantage to the well resourced teams. These rules are a major driver of cost, effort, and time investment. they makes the void between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' wider than it would be if we have free access to the robots.
This is not just opnion: the performance data from many seasons of FRC history support the statement that "Teams get better when they use their robots" (Duh!). The way it is today, the well resourced teams have many, many times more time with their robots than everyone else. My team will effectively spend several YEARS of FRC match time driving our practice robot every week during the competition season. We will never have a world in which most teams can build multiple machines per year. The only solution which approaches a more equitable solution is to remove the access restrictions for everyone. As long as this disparity exists, there will be a large amount of stratification in the league.

As for mentor burnout: I personally would spend less time, have lower stress, be able to better empower my students, spend less money, and have more fun if there were no machine access restrictions. The "myth of the 6 weeks" is simply not true, and it has never been true in my experience. Being successful in FRC takes longer than this. We should all stop lying to ourselves.

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

I love Isaac's compromise.

I think we would stop building a practice robot at the 4-6 hours per week threshold. I think 6 hours per week would be about right.

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

We try to do more than that in just driver practice. It doesn't always work out that way but we try.

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

The problem with these kinds of arguments, of course, is that people do not get to dictate to other people what constitutes "burnout" for them.

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

Even Formula 1, the most intense and engineering-oriented motorsport of all, has instituted a mandatory "summer break" to prevent burnout of its employees.

http://www.gpupdate.net/en/f1-news/2...iver-holidays/

Food for thought...

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

Sure, but this FI holiday is more of an agreed upon 2 week break by the participants during the peak of summer so that those with families have some hope of sneaking in a summer vacation. F1 Teams can pick when they do this break based on their own state of preparedness. FRC restriction is kind of the other way around.

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

I also would be in favor of such a compromise. To a point (there has to be a reasonable limit, or some of us get a pass to a place where every room is padded).

I would suggest the following: Each team may unbag their robot up to 3 times per week, for a grand total of 10 hours (remember the FIX-IT Windows from a few years back, guys? and how you had to use some ridiculous amount of time in one or two shots before they changed it?).

To add complexity (and therefore decrease chances of this part being used...), your withholding allowance decreases proportionally to the amount of time you spend unbagged. If, for example, a team uses none of that time, they can show up with 40 lbs of withholding. BUT, if a team uses ALL of that time, they can show up with 10 lbs (that means, for every hour you spend out of the bag, you lose 3 lbs of withholding, in this example). Teams who crate their robots and ship get 40 lbs for that regional event, 20lbs for Championships. First item on the inspection list is to check the time on the lockup form and the amount of withholding.

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

There are actually lots of goofy rules in Motorsports. For instance NASCAR will let you work on the car. They just won't let you test it:
http://aol.sportingnews.com/nascar/s...-series-venues
At least until this year. That is a big reason why you see so many teams sneaking into high speed wind tunnels at night is because they cannot test on represntative tracks. So, instead of a practice bot, NASCAR teams build "practice facilities".... or at least rents them.
Big Budget teams even bought their own tunnels (think tunnel in a mountian instead of wind tunnel...)
************************************************** *
The long and short of it is teams that want to find a way will, but I am proposing a compromise between the two camps that I think might help some find the balance that others are concerned about.

Currently there is only a small percentage that build a practice bot and fully utilize it. Most teams here in Michigan do use the "out of bag time" or at least 4/6 hours before their district events. Some have even stopped building their practice bots now that they have a reasonable amount of practice time during un-bag. As unbag time increases, this will give more opportunity to those that do not build a practice bot. It might also curb the concerns of those that would "quit if there was no lock-up" period. I have been told this by many people that I have a great deal of respect for. My guess is it is right around 6 hours/week useable in 2 hour blocks minimum.

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

I don't see how this helps. You build a practice robot, spend all your time tweaking and perfecting on that, then unbag just fast enough to mount the mechanism to the actual robot and do a quick integration test. Then you move on to the next mechanism...

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

If you don't have a total time limit, or a time limit per unbag, I can think of one very obvious loophole to any unbag rule with a limit on # of times: I bag up the robot once. Then, a few days later, I unbag the robot, and leave it unbagged until a couple of days before competition.

The basic idea is to allow a significant amount of time with the actual robot, theoretically enough to vastly diminish the return from having a practice robot. I suggest a hybrid between # of times you can unbag (which will limit the amount of what you're suggesting) and the total time (which will limit the amount of robots left out of the bag for quite a while before rebagging). I randomly picked a maximum of 3 times for a maximum of 10 hours total, partly to fit with the later text (I originally was going to go for 2 unbags, 6 hours total time).

You may want to take a look at some of the discussions of the Fix-It Windows--I think 2005 was the worst, something about 2 times for 10 hours,and that was just to build spare, replacement, and upgrade parts!--for the compromise suggestion given was effectively a Fix-It window of time, or an MI/MAR unbag period, however you want to see it.

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

For me, this just begs the question, what is your team doing differently from 99% of the other teams that you can consistently create elite-level robots in 45 days with that kind of build schedule? Is it the amount of mentors with experience, project management, CAD, attitude, students, etc...? Can you elicit some principles that would be concrete takeaways for other teams following this thread.

My team has struggled the last four years producing a working robot by the end of the build season. The team is ready to try a different approach and we really want to look at successful teams to find out what changes we can make to make the build/competition season a much more positive experience. Not just from a successful robot standpoint, but from our students learning that engineering is a wonderful career. Right now we seem to be in a negative lessons learned mode, rather than positive lessons learned moving us forward.

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

This is an interesting discussion. Here's my perspective on the matter.

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
Pretend that the entire FRC season is only 12 hours long. The first 6 hours is used by all the teams. However, the option is available to any team to spend some extra time and money to continue to work for the other 6 hours. Teams that choose to spend this extra time and money to get the other 6 hours will generally have a more competitive robot then those who do not -- This is the current situation in FRC.

Now let’s pretend that the entire FRC season is still only 12 hours long. BUT now all the teams can use all 12 hours without having to spend the extra time and money.

- The teams who already spent the extra time and money to get the extra 6 hours will continue to use all 12 hours but will save the time and money they used to use to spend getting them.

- Some of the teams who only used the first 6 hours will continue to only use 6 hours. They were not willing to put in the time and effort to use the other 6 hours before and they are still not. Even so, now they can work every other hour rather then 6 hours straight. This saves them some stress while they maintain the same level of competition that they used to.

- Some of the teams who only used the first 6 hours will choose to work more than 6 hours now that they do not have to put in the extra time and money to get them. These teams might work 8/12 hours, they might work 10/12 and some might even work 12/12. These teams will be more competitive as a result.
]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

The point is that teams already decide how much time and effort they want to put into their robots. The end of the 6 week build season is not a stopping point but rather the point where extra time, effort, and money is needed to continue working. By eliminating this point teams are allowed to continue working on their robots at their discretion based on how much effort they have decided they want to put into the program but without any barriers to doing so.

Regards, Bryan

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

Honestly, I can't really explain it outside of mentor experience. We have an incredible Chief Engineer (Jim Meyer - 13 years in FIRST), who I would argue is the best in all of FIRST.

Many teams have asked how we do it....and we've tried to adapt the principles of many other great teams (148, 1114, etc...).

It's definitely not CAD experience. We do 95% of all our work in 2D AutoCAD.

I doubt it's project management, we rarely finish on time.
Since I've joined the team:

-2005: Competition robot did not drive on carpet until first competition.
-2006: Robot was a disaster. Did not have Jim full time this year.
-2007: Robot was finished 2 weeks early. Good robot. Could have done more, but was weary after 2006.
-2008: Complete design change on the arm prior to first competition.
-2009: Complete re-design during un-bag time before first competition.
-2010: Robot was done early. Added ball-magnet before first competition. Added climber throughout competition season.
-2011: Robot was finished early. Mini-bot development and deployment was finished week of first competition. Terrible code issued at first competition.
-2012: Best machine we have ever built. Robot was done early. No major issues throughout competition season.
-2013: Robot not finished when bagged. Major work to get functional before first competition. Climber developed and added throughout competition season.

So my guess would be mentor experience, attitude, and students. We expect that we will be able to create a World Class competition robot. We instill that expectation in our students. We devote as much time as possible (as mentioned before), given work and family requirements.

The other thing we have is almost instant access to parts and materials. We are very fortunate to have a build facility that we can make virtually any part that we would design for our robot. That allows us the opportunity to make design changes quickly.

I'm not sure I would recommend our design process or project management style to anyone else. It works for us....and we're willing to share it, but I don't think it is the "best" process bt any measure.

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

Here's an off-the-wall thought:

When a company decides to delay a product launch, they decide that increased sales of a better product out weighs sales lost by the delayed launch.

What if teams earned qualifying points based on how long the robot was locked up. Lets say 1 week in the bag is the same as 1 win in the qualifying rounds. Now teams have to decide if losing the extra qualifying score is outweighed by a better robot.

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

Personally, I know I'm burned out as it is. 6 weeks of build, followed by being LRI at two regionals, volunteering at champs, and now getting ready to be LRI at States is a lot of time and effort, and other areas of my life suffer as a result. Is it worth it? Yes, obviously yes or I wouldn't do it (that said, I'm doing what I can to make sure we have enough LRI's to cover all the events next year so I'm responsible for only 1).

So, what if we get rid of Bag and Tag? Well, then the season would last 4.5 months. On top of all of the normal team meetings (you're deluding yourself if you think teams would meet fewer hours per week!), I would have the time I spend getting ready for each competition (volunteers, especially key volunteers, spend a surprising amount of time getting things ready just so they run smoothly for you and your team!) coming into play during the last half of the season. That's a lot of work, and a lot of time.

I believe one of the things holding MN back from going to districts is the time commitment. Coming off a 6-week build season, I know I can't commit to spending the next 6 weeks doing district competitions (With Jeff Pahl moving to Wisconsin, we only have two LRI's currently in the state, so I would have to work half the events), and the same goes for most of our volunteers. That would only get worse if we did away with the Stop Build day.

Further, I think the limited time allowed on the robot is actually one of the best things about FIRST. With unlimited time, anyone can build a competitive robot. Doing so in a short timeframe is the challenge. If anything, I would like to see us do away with/modify the withholding allowance. Limit it to true spare parts, and require that the entire robot be bagged - you can't keep working on 1/4 of your robot after Stop Build day. There's a team I know of that brought in a new shooter for every event this year. The drive base stayed the same, but essentially it was like they competed with a different robot at each event (and rumor has it they might bring in yet another shooter for States!).

As many people more important than me have said, this is a robotics competition that isn't about the robot. And yet asking for more time to build seems to go against that concept.

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

It's already a 16 week build season, even if people want to pretend that it's only 6.

If you want to be great (or even really good) it's almost impossible to work only 6 weeks and then stop. We took maybe 5 days off total between kickoff and championships. Our technical mentors all put in over 50 hours/week every single week from kickoff to championships. It's hardly something to be proud of and we can't possibly sustain another year like this again, but that's what it took for us to get the 2013 robot to where it ended up.

If we didn't have to build two robots and only had to perfect one robot we would put in less time on the whole.

If you think the six weeks is saving you from yourselves I don't think it is. You've made the decision (either financial or personal to your team) not to build a practice bot. Presumably if we went to an "open" competition you could continue to make the same decision and bag the robot after six weeks, lock it in a mentor's garage, etc.

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

Thanks for sharing.
Other than you and Dave, I have never met your other engineers such as Jim who I'd like to meet one day on how you folks build great robots year after year.
I wanted to comment on the bolded paragraph above.
You bring up a good point, which almost never is talked about on CD.
Great elite teams can adjust and make changes quickly IMO.

I think for a small rural school like ours, we have quite a bit of machinery that ranks with the best of them. With 9 mills/lathes, enough space for 4 teams to comfortably build their robots, newly acquired waterjet, etc. we have way more equipment than experts and personnel to run them.
We are way too slow in our design and build process where we try to make up for it by spending a large no. of hours/day during build season.
Amplify that with the cost of travel and spending countless hours raising funds, takes time away from prototyping and other offseason projects.
If our team could ever get more people to help, then perhaps we can take more design chances during crunch time and not burn anybody out.

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

The 6 week cap definitely puts a great deal of pressure on teams, since it is such a short amount of time to build a great, efficient working robot. But, I think it is helpful in some ways. It teaches members that there are certain deadlines, whether they are short or long, that must be met. And, this is quite true in real life. Essentially, I think it teaches us to make a well organized, balanced schedule to plan out how to go about building a good robot. Really, in a way, it sorts out the teams that are really dedicated to doing well during competition. Typically, the best teams are the ones with the best planning. Ultimately, it prepares us to deal with the sometimes ludicrous deadlines that are sent our way in college, and after college.

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

Forgive me as this is my first post - and seeing how we bungled out first season, this may be bumpy.

As a rookie team, I see the benefits of a determined build season. We started our team with a relatively large group of mentors (12). Each and every mentor was worth their weight in gold. However, since this was a venture that was new to the mentors and the companies that they work for, we quickly realized that we were taxing our local sponsors and their talent (our mentors). If we had pushed beyond a 6 week build season, I am not sure if our sponsors would have allowed more time.

Becker is a small community and sports are not just activities, but act as entertainment for the locals. Most of my 24 robotics athletes are also competing in winter and Spring sports (When we have a spring). However, we were not able to utilize the time between our NorthStar Regional and FRC Championships because my team was either finishing their winter sports of Basketball, Wrestling, Hockey or getting primed for Tennis, LaCrosse, Baseball, etc. All 6 of my senior boys are also involved in our Tennis Team which has made it to state that last 4 years. They will most likely do so this year.

We did very well for our first year by building a Robot very different from most (Many from Galileo may remember seeing our C.I.S. 4607 Banners hanging from our shot blocker). We concentrated on defense and climbing for ten. This did well for us as we were awarded the Rookie All-Star and also won the regional in large part to the Iron Lions (967) and the Fighting Calculators (2175).

For us rookie teams not knowing what to expect, a determined 6 week build season is great. I am not sure if I could have held my team together much longer...

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

The 6-week bag deadline is unfair in the degree that it more detrimentally affects different kinds of teams.

Ours is a small private school team that has few students overall and even those with the most dedication to the program have trouble putting in a lot of time per week. We also have conflicts with other extra curricular activities, some of which are mandatory.

We often have a vacation week in the middle of the six week window, with almost no build time taking place, from many students out of town.

We have a finals week with only one session at best.

With a small team size and this much total time conflict it becomes almost impossible to complete our build. These time bites simply represent too big of a % of the total 6-week time window to ever get caught up.

We are always finishing our build in the pits, and never having any practice or troubleshooting/optimizing time before our first match. We rarely make any practice matches. We barely get to the practice field.

If we had 9 weeks or more, losing a week or two would not be such a total total progress killer. Even when we build a practice bot, we barely finish it a day or two before competition, and this makes that effort almost just an expensive and frustrating exercise in futility.

We also typically find that our design concepts are really excellent, but having our builds barely get finished by the end of Thursday at competition, and having no practice and tuning time, means we are struggling to barely reach a competition ready level while being in the middle of competing, which does really not allow for the best results with any design, no mater how good it may be.

We typically see how easily we could have done so much better but for lack of a week or so of more time for practicing and optimizing.
We always resolve to work more efficiently, and finish earlier next year, but it just never seems to happen.

Team members get frustrated seeing this pattern repeat for 2-3 years. It takes a lot of the fun out of the program for them too.

A big part of engineering design involves testing, iterative refinement and improvement, and I believe that small teams like ours are consistently being cheated from experiencing this aspect of engineering learning, from having such a compressed 6-week build window constraint laid on us.

For bigger teams with larger groups of mentors, I can see the 6-week build being pore realistic and more fair, but for the smaller teams with few mentors it is extremely difficult to handle.

-Dick Ledford

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

I have not decided how I feel about completely abandoning the 6 week build concept and I do certainly agree with many of the points that Jared made earlier. But I also have some concerns that would make me hesitate.

Most of my concern surrounds the loss of creativity and the heavy-handed benchmarking that will occur.
At the FTC level there is a great deal of "benchmarking" that happens due the the competition structure and the ease of rebuilding. There are still many imaginative teams, but there are also teams which heavily copy from successful designs.

Sure this happens in FRC, but there are limits to how much benchmarking you can implement. If FRC opens up completely, teams that have high speed manufacturing talents and the manpower can wait until the "smart teams" figure out the game and do a complete redesign based on the most successful robot systems.
I watched this happen in 2008, when Team 121 came out with an awesome design and reveal video at the end of week 3. It was a great machine. Countless struggling teams immediately dropped their design plans and adopted the "Tusk and Roller" pickup system. Sure those teams probably had a better year on the field, but those kids lost the opportunity to go on a journey of discovery.
In 2008 our ball pick-up design was not going well and there was tremendous pressure from a large faction of our kids to just give up on our design and adopt what Team 121 was doing. We certainly had the time and the talent. But even though I loved that design, I refused to allow it. I made them stick with their plans, improve their design, and go on that journey of discovery. It was a HARD year, and it was certainly not the best machine in FIRST that year, but it did win the Philly Regional, and more importantly those kids learned something that year about believing in yourself and having confidence in your ideas.
If we change to a completely open system there will still be plenty of creative teams, but being successful will no longer mandate imagination, simply having manufacturing muscle and manpower will be enough. My fear is that it won't be all that different than school life, where many talented kids wait for the "smarter kids" to figure things out and then simply collect the fruits of their labor.

I know this happens now in FRC to a certain extent, but it will bring this practice to a whole new level. As I said, I have not decided how I feel about this proposal, but it is one of my concerns.

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

3 short points.

1. the biggest obstacle to building a practice robot can be electrical, many teams cannot afford the extra h/w. but this seems like the norm, just to be even a little competitive.

2. the years 1912 did the best, the week long Mardi Gras school holiday fell during build. that tells me an 8 week session would help a lot.

3. PLEASE REMOVE the 30 lb withholding. that made our some mentors think they could just keep on going and usually for our team, that just made a bad robot worse. and we have built a lot of bad robots.

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

The 6 week build season may be a reality for some, many or even a majority of teams; I don't know. For the eleven season that I have been involved in FIRST FRC, the 6 week build season has clearly been a myth for some number of teams. And in the past few years, the two teams which I have mentored are included.

I agree that allowing access to the competition machine during the competition season will provide the opportunity for more folks to choose to extend the intensity of the build season without spending the additional finances required to effectively build a practice robot. I don't know how many folks would make that choice, but it is a personal choice and I do not feel compelled to decide for anybody but myself.

I am 85% confident that our team would make use of the time and be more competitive sooner as a result.

My position is that the current system makes a mockery of the idea that all of this great design, fabrication, iteration, optimization and improvement occurs in six weeks. It is laughable and I find it completely intellectually dishonest.

If FIRST wants to continue to perpetuate the myth, I will continue to follow the rules and strive to increase the number of sponsors, mentors and additional processes and resources required to continually improve our team's on-field product, because that is my area of focus on the team and because the students have much more fun, are much more engaged and appear much more inspired by a much more competitive machine.

I like that we have the opportunity to improve as the season progresses and I think there is tremendous value in exposing students to the process of continual improvement. I would not want to see the system altered to eliminate this aspect of the process.

What I would appreciate is the ability to more cost effectively and productively take advantage of the full 13 or so weeks between Kick Off and the Championships ship date.

Like I posted previously, the only stop build date should be the date Fed Ex picks up the crate to take the machine to Championships.

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

Perhaps we need longer than six weeks, but I don't know how I feel about the removal of a universal stop build date.

Any game with a chokehold strategy or something close would become excessively dull after the one team that figures it out competes in their first competition.

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

Why? How would this be any different than any other year?

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

Well, it would still be rather dull either way. I just think it would be a bit more dull to see the same robots over and over again after some team reveals their chokehold strategy at a week 2 event.

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

I don't believe that there will ever be a chokehold strategy that could be copied and implemented by anyone other than elite teams, who are not very likely to scrap their robots midseason.

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

Here is one huge factor that people are overlooking. First is killing the worlds supply in several items. Hex bearings anyone? Talons is another great example. Also who wants to do the math on overnight shipping first teams spend? IMO they should announce next years game at the finals of champs. This would make first cheaper and improve the quality of robots.


P.S. thanks 254 for the hex bearing. Even though we bought 20 of them we were still 1 short of what we needed.

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

Regardless of what could happen in the future, I know for a fact that teams that already work to be elite work the entirety from kickoff through their last in season event, and other teams work at varying amounts down to just the build season and time at their events, and I don't think it will change. I don't think the ceiling would grow as much as the floor will rise, which is a great thing for FIRST.

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

Not to hijack the thread, but both of those items are created specifically for FRC. Hex bearings don't exist outside of those produced for FRC. While Talons have great applications outside of FRC, Talons were created to cater specifically to the FRC market. So excluding game pieces, FRC isn't really killing the worlds supply of items. As far as things produced for FRC, I'm sure suppliers are working to hard to remedy such supply problems in the future.

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

Over the years the shortages change with the game. Some years its game peices other years its batteries another year it's motors. This year it was hex bearings and they are not exclusive to first robotics

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

I think what Shaun is trying to say is that oftentimes these FRC specific items(which is technically the "world's supply") get completely sold out, leaving the teams that rushed to get these items at an advantage over teams that waited a bit. The point is, with longer build season, this allows suppliers to produce more items so that teams don't have to instantly buy so many of them so early in the season.
EDIT: Shaun clarified with what I said above

However, I very much agree with what Alan Ostrow said, about how if there's an open build season, you will see much less disparity between designs. The minibot is an example, and, while I didn't personally see many Ri3D clones, I have heard that certain events had many of them. While I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, what prevents a team, competing only week 6(this example is avoiding the future implementation of district systems and is an extreme) from making no serious design progress in their robot, only to wait until week 1 of competition to see what design wins, and from there on, completely copy that design? I think that with so much time to iterate, we'd eventually see so many clones...How many teams would have had 1114/67/217 style climbs if they had a full open bag time?

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

VEX Mentor here. What Nuggetsy suggests won't happen. RECF does this, reveals the next game at the Worlds Championship in April. Top teams spend the next months (May, June, July) building and designing. The New Zealand teams get into the swing across their winter (June, July and August) posting ideas, reveals, match results. North America and UK students go back to School in Sept, so build starts up in Sept/Oct. Early events like the Delaware VEX competition (19 October 2013, at the DAFB, (shameless plug)) have teams arrive that have spent the summer building.

Some get crushed and do total rebuilds in the next 4 weeks to meet again in late November and December events. (Thanksgiving? Super, a 4 day build period without school!!) Crushed again they look at the Jan / Feb season events. A last try to get to Worlds!. (Holiday break? I don't think so, too much to do. ) Meanwhile our friends on a pair of small islands in the South Pacific have entered Summer, no school, and a ton of time to build.

With a last competition date of the first week in March, teams and mentors are under pressure to get those last few berths. January, February, March: Build, hours spent by mentors, parts orders, etc. go up.

Let me interrupt this to give a huge shout out to IFI / VEX Robotics and their 1/2 price shipping during FRC build season. A huge bonus for VRC teams!

Finally March comes, teams have worlds berths, a chance to relax. Not quite, need to put a ribbon on that Excellence presentation, need to make repairs to robots, maybe build a front end posted, and lets replace that drive train too. Travel plans, wrangle roberteers, parents, robots, parts, etc.

You have arrived!!! VEX WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP!!! Compete, work on the robot, compete, more work, Excellence Presentation, compete and then:

Announcement of the next years game!!!! :rolleyes: There, that was a lot easier than being an FRC mentor!

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

It would be impossible (or very close to impossible) to perform a hang like 1114 and 67 without designing your robot to do it from the start. Doesn't matter how much time you'd have to copy it, you'd still have to build an entirely new robot.

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

Even if a team coppied a design, the real question would be did they learn something? Reverse engineering is not always that simple.

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

It's possible to do this now even with the with-holding allowance. You don't need to take your robot home in order to do it. In 2011, my old team (2079) built an elevator that didn't run smoothly and we had trouble calibrating it. We took the 35 pound with-holding allowance (I think it was 35) and built a completely new 4-bar linkage manipulator lightly based off of the design from 148 that we were heavily inspired by (our linkage used box tubing, but the dynamics of the system were similar). I still question myself as to whether this was the right thing to do, but we learned a lot along the way, and it made our competitive season more successful.

Long story short, even if you can't take your robot home, it's still possible to make drastic iterations that can be influenced by successes of other teams.

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

1114 showed their working climb at a week 2 competition. Assuming you are qualified for CMP, that gives you 5 weeks before you have to crate and ship your robot to St. Louis. Only a week less than the "official" build season, and you already have concept and design proven. The 30 point climber is obviously a very complex example, but this would apply to every novel/successful design feature shown early in the season.

As noted, this already happens at varying scales - look at 2010 "ball-magnets", 2011 minibots, 2012 stinger/balancing aids, etc. 2168, 1218, and 103 all rebuilt their 2013 robots to a significant degree after their first event.

I could see this having the same effect as the wildcard rules. Why compete weeks 1/2/3 if you have no shot at a wildcard? Why compete week 1/2/3 if you have a unique and successful robot with features that others will then duplicate, negating your competitive edge? How many 469 clones would there have been in 2010?

341 rolled out of the gate in 2012 with a dominant robot that was made out of extruded aluminum. It was genius in game analysis and strategy, not mechanical design: most mid-tier teams with good controls mentors would have been able to build a reasonable facsimile without too much struggle. Would that be a good thing for FRC? I see the merit in going through iteration, redesign, etc, as crucial engineering fundamentals, but at some point wouldn't we see significant design convergence? Didn't 341 earn the right to plow through the competition?

Watching 341 last year motivated our team to take a much deeper look at the way we approach game analysis and robot design. Along with increase in-house manufacturing capability, we were able to build a relatively simple robot in 2013 that was highly effective, and very much inspired by the way 341 addressed the 2012 game. I don't think we learn those same lessons in 2013 if we're able to play knock-off in 2012.

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

For me what burns me out is having to work during the week days. I have to fight traffic to get to my team and can spend up to an hour on the road. During a weekend, I get to my team's place in about 15 minutes.

I think given my circumstances, I would favor eliminating the 6 week build. I would much rather concentrate my time commitments to the weekend.

Also, our team is still struggling to get our practice bot and competition bot to behave the same. For the competition, robot, we sure could have used 20 minute on an official field or equivalent. For example, in LV we could not climb on one of the corners of the pyramid because a larger weld on a corner. We only practiced developed our climber on our pyramid which had smaller welds. Had we realized this sooner we would have made designee changes to fix this.

I figure a lot of teams would improve if they got to take their robots to a official field or equivalent and spend a couple hours honing their bot. Squeezing time in to do this on week 6 is not practical for many teams I know. Being able to do this on a week 7 or 8 would be huge.

Since I don't think this will change, we are going to keep on adding student and mentors to complete more tasks in parallel.

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

Ike was on to something when he asked about what it would take for teams to forego building a practice bot (which seems to be behind a lot of burnout).

I would like to see an expanded version of what we already have with the district system (FiM & MAR). I like the 6 week build season, but I would also like to see greater robot access during the competition season. The district model makes it possible to do both, while reducing stress on mentors, etc.

I would like to see a 10-12 hour "practice window" in the week preceeding each of the teams' scheduled competitions (up from 6 for FiM), and a 6-8 hour "fix it" window in the week following the competition. Non-district teams attending only one event could opt to use their "fix it" window prior to their event. I would keep the withholding allowance.

The out-of-bag time would be in lieu of the Thursday "practice day" at the competition. As an FiM team, I know that having the robot out of the bag in our own shop is always more useful than another day at the venue, and reducing the days off work to attend an event is a huge anti-burnout blessing.

PS: I think 6 weeks is a reasonal amount of time to brainstorm, prototype, build, test, drive, and tweak a competitive. Independent of the mentor burnout issue, I think it is good for teams enter the competition season with a machine that is their own "solution" to the "problem" the GDC gave them - a solution that they developed without the benefit of seeing how others play the game.