Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

I did not assert he was lying. I merely provided some interesting reading on the topic of statistics and using them to convey a point.

If you'd like my opinion I'd currently be quite unlikely to share it given your habit of accusing me of things that I didn't say.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

I would assume FIRST sends it out to these contacts hoping they forward it it to the rest of the team as necessary, rather than try and send it to every single person in STIMS/TIMS.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

Ours forwarded it to all students and mentors as per the instructions.

Greetings Teams:
Please don’t forget to send this link to everyone from your team who participated in a Week 5 event: https://www.surveymonkey.com...
Your feedback is very important to us! Please be sure to tell us about your experience by Wednesday, April 2nd.


EDIT: I do agree the couple days after competition is hectic so emails may not be forwarded until it is too late to respond. There probably is a disparity I just don't know the best way to handle this other than the method they currently use.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

What I see in this blog post is a 40% reduction of very good ratings and a 400% increase of very poor ratings.

I don't think this is something to brag about.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

Emphasis mine. No where in the blog post did I see anything even close to resembling bragging. In fact, he even states that the results this year are not as good as Ultimate Ascents popularity.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

First, you can figure out the "Fair" responses, as that's the only missing response from the graph. Week 1 has 12% poor, 66% good, so fair was about 22%.

Second, while I don't think anyone's trying to lie with the graphs and survey results, I think they should be taken with a sizable portion of sodium chloride. This is a summary result of a somewhat vague question of an online survey that apparently wasn't well advertised and was not administered particularly scientifically.

As others have pointed out, "What's the quality of the 2014 game?" is a vastly different question from the quality of execution of the game. Also, I'm not sure "lots of people after you liked the game" is an appropriate response to the 10% of week 1 teams that were disappointed with the game.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

I find it kind of strange that week four's survey was sent to me on the Friday of week four. We had no issues week four other than not doing so well. But week five's survey never came, and we had all kinds of problems with week five...

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

I'm pretty confused as to how people are reading between the lines as well. Frank clearly says it's not up to par, and that FIRST is trying to resolve issues as quickly as possible.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

Another interesting note, that I missed at first read, and perhaps others did also. Frank says there have been 3600 survey respondents, while there were only 2300 throughout all of last year. So certainly an improvement. And, 3600 is by no means a small number, though it only comes out to 2 or 3 per team.

Another thing to consider is that survey responses may be biased to the negative side, since people may be more likely to go fill one out if they have complaints than if they are satisfied.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

I've actually liked the game a lot. Yes, it has its points of frustration, for sure... and it's not Ultimate Ascent... but it is very good.

I think it's hard for many of us as engineers and perfectionists to say "yeah, the game is actually quite good" when there are still flaws in it.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

2-3 per team would be a really good sample actually. The fact is that it's unlikely clumped to a handful (handful here being somewhere between 100 and 1000) teams rather than randomly distributed among teams. Furthermore, teams that competed more often will be over represented (125 competed week 2, 4,5 and will compete 6 and 7).

This is also correct, negative things are also more likely to stand out in our minds. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/yo...pagewanted=all




Please note, this post merely asserts that there is likely not an even distribution of votes it does not claim that this is good or bad. It also merely provides source material for interested parties on negativity and recollection.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

Frank,
Thanks for sharing the survey feedback. Unfortunately, I was not able to participate in the survey after our two events. These opinions are my own, not my full team.

The game design was a significant paradigm shift with limited game pieces and no "end game." Encouraging more teamwork is definitely an admirable goal. However, making game more sports-like is not the best approach.

Sports have many subjective rules that both teams and refs understand after years of play and abundant visual references. Having no reference point for subjective fouls or possession calls was frustrating.

Additionally, two thirds of my team's contribution to our alliance was focused primarily on the drive base of the robot - setting picks or defending. This is common for sports but translates poorly to the "sport" of FRC. I personally prefer contributing to our alliance through the scoring section. All teams pour a great deal of effort into scoring functions. I feel some teams were not given the opportunity or had very limited chances to use what they built.

We did enjoy the challenge of building a machine for Aerial Assist. Overall our team and students gained valuable experience in our second year. We achieved many "firsts" and look forward to next season.

David Allred
Mentor 4451 ROBOTZ Garage

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

What I love about the first graph:
week1->week2 showed definitive improvement. The negatives went down from ~12% to ~7%, and the positives jumped up from ~66% to ~78%.

What I don't love about the first graph:
There is no appreciable change from week 2 onwards.

I do like some things about the second graph, but I don't believe the sample sizes are large enough to conclude anything definitively.

I will add my name to the list of people who don't understand why others view this as bragging. If I missed a sentence that sounded prideful, please quote it for me, because I have read it twice without seeing anything like that.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

This might not be what you're intending, but this reads an awful lot like "screw what other people think, my opinion is the correct one."

That's not a particularly productive view to have.

I, for one, like this game quite a bit. There are issues, yes, but the fundamental design is the best FIRST has had in a long while. FRC has gone too long with three robots playing in parallel rather than three robots playing as a team.

Re: FRC Blog - How We’re Doing and FIRST Babies
 

I am an Alternate Contact, and only received the survey email after our week 5 event, not after our week 2. MrBasse mentioned receiving it after week 4 but not 5. It may be that they only send it to multiple-event teams once, and hopefully randomize which event.