Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Let's imagine that we never had a build deadline, and it was identified that low resource teams were having a hard time getting mentors and students to commit for the full 9-12 weeks. As a fix, somebody in our alternate universe proposes that we reduce the build season to 6 weeks. I think that proposal would be poorly received by the community, because it limits the high performers instead of lifting up the low performers.

Problem: >50% of FRC teams build robots that essentially can't play the game.
Solution: Give teams more time.

Regarding weeks 7-12 in our current setup:
1) Top teams use that time - they have the money and commit the time to utilize it.
2) Some teams can't use that time effectively because they lack funding to make a practice robot.
3) Some teams can't use that time effectively because their people won't or can't commit that much extra time.

If we get rid of the bag deadline, that helps group #2, but it doesn't help group #3. Is that a good reason not to help group #2?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

You would need to characterize group #2 better before a useful answer can be arrived at. Group #2a currently doesn't work past week 6 because they lack funding, but could take advantage of more time if they had it. Group #2b has never thought about asking people to work longer because they don't have the funding to do so under today's rules, but if they did ask they'd find themselves alongside Group #3.

So you'd be helping some of Group #2, and you'd be contributing to frustration and/or burnout of the rest. It's a tradeoff, not an obvious win.

And don't forget Group #4, who can't work longer on their robot because they must pack and ship their robot since they're traveling to a distant competition.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Erik,

Please define "minor changes"

I'm not sure you understand the scope of work some teams are accomplishing within the current rules set.

References:

• 2011 Minibots
• 1678's 2015 Can Grabbers
• 1114's 2015 Harpoons
• 973's 2015 robot between their 1st and 2nd regional
• 1678's entire 2013 robot (minus drivetrain)

1678's 2013 robot is my favorite example. The hanger, shooter and pick up system were entirely different between stop-build and CMP (we actually took the pick-up system as carry-on on the plane to Saint Louis!)

I understand where you are coming from. However, this "building robots from scratch" you are talking about, which puts low-resource teams at a disadvantage, already happens. We just pay more to do it because this large plastic bag gets in our way every year ;)

-Mike

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I still like the 6 week build season with being able to have our second robot being built and practicing. Imagine what St. Louis would be like with not as experienced drivers as we have when able to practice with our second robot.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Personally I really like 6 week format, it feels very fitting to an engineering project in the real life. Including the radical changes with short windows and/or weight limits. Also it gives a good amount of time in the fall for training.

Now if they were to change it they should just move kickoff to first weekend in October. Then start competitions in mid January So instead of 6 weeks you have 10 full weeks (ignoring holidays). Teams would have lots of time to practice, not have to worry about shipping/painting/cutting times as much and wouldn't have to meet as long during build season. Also could spread out districts, district champs and champs.

Now while I doubt that would happen any time soon, there would still be teams that show up with robots that didn't work or were just boxes on wheels.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I'm glad you build a lot of robots every year. Even if the season was twice as long as it is now, my team (and many, many others, probably well over 1/2 of FIRST) wouldn't have the funds to do so. I still don't see, however, how this plays into the length of the build season or whether we should have a stop build day. Even with a stop build day, what's stopping you from going year-round and building 20 robots each year? If getting MORE the the required number of robots done in 6 weeks is possible, why is that 6 week limitation a problem?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

For me, the build season is a major selling point like Al mentioned. When you tell the general public that a bunch of high school kids built this fantastic robot in 6 weeks - they are always astonished. I typically correlate this to a real world competitive bid for a project demo - if you don't have a working demo at the deadline, you're out!

The main thing I worry about with regard to the 6 week build season limit is newer teams that compete for one or two season and then fold. The first year I mentored we failed spectacularly (caused by our lack of knowledge of "what works in FRC" training resources). While it was a great "learning experience" for the kids, most of them did not return the following year.

I recall seeing some statistics recently about returning percentage of rookies being quite poor (someone better at searching - help me out here). My experience is that FRC can be quite a steep learning curve and that with more time, newer teams would be more successful and want to keep participating.


My suggestion is to keep veteran teams on the 6 week schedule and allow rookies an extra 1-2 weeks before bagging. My reasoning is that they would get to see other robot reveals, catch up if they are behind, tweak their design slightly based on reveals of top teams or get in some driving practice to ultimately make more competitive robots. Since many regions have pre-ship scrimmages rookies would be able to see their robot in action and then make some tweaks over a longer period (typically there are only 3 days between scrimmage and bag). This would hopefully improve their experience and make them want to return. I realize that in some cases, this could be abused to give these teams an advantage.

Similarly, 2nd year teams that performed poorly in their rookie year could apply for an extra week and FIRST could allow this on a case by case basis.

I am assuming a bad experience is the primary reason teams do not return, though it can also be loss of funding/sponsor/teacher/etc. I also realize the logistics of this proposal could be significant. I am confident CD can help shape this into a better idea.

In my experience the best measure for student success has been the ratio of students to mentors. The more time students get to spend with mentors the more they learn and the more they get out of the program. With a longer build season for rookie teams I think there would be more time for students and mentors to work together. Most new mentors I have met seem to ease into FRC and only come once a week.

Since this discussion comes up every year, I think FIRST should poll teams about build season changes as part of the year end survey (or perhaps a pre-season survey).

-matto-

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Only group #2 (or group #2a if you prefer) is spending more time than they did before. You can call it "increasing burnout" for that group, but I call it making a choice to gain a benefit in exchange for time. Any team that doesn't want to spend additional time can exercise some free will and choose not to spend the additional time.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

You can, and as I pointed out previously the team I mentor soon will be, in a position to go year round in some fashion. However you can't build a robot before the official start of kickoff without knowing the challenge and after that you only have 6 weeks unless you buy enough parts to make at least a second robot.

The issue is we need to build a 2nd robot, and sometimes per team (we have 2) to be competitive and have time to train the drivers on that year's robot even with 20 years of experience in how to build FRC robots. That's at least 2-4 control systems cost and the load of both this work on the mentors and the contributions on the local community. To some level that scales with the number of participants and to some level it does not.

Also it's one of motivation. Once the season ends you've quick burned the time. Mistakes are being made you can't undo and you burn your resources out. Plus when you go to your respective work leaders and tell them it's merely 6 weeks you are not being honest. It's not really 6 weeks. If you go year round you have a side job you probably pay to work. If you go less than year round it's very likely more than 6 weeks. So how would you expect those mentor employers to react to your mere 6 week engagement turning into 10, 12, 16 weeks when they expected it to end?

I know that if I start doing this year round - I am trading the sprint for the long term vision otherwise my coworkers will rightly ask which is my real job.

I know that when we started FRC11 (which was FRC8 the first year) that we all thought that a poor showing would work against our ability to find the funding to continue. A poor showing worked directly against our personal motivations to pour our personal funds in to secure the resources we couldn't get funded by sponsors. It also enabled any detractors to argue we were less than capable making the problem much worse. It is not 20 years ago but these human problems are still the same human problems and that is still the same 6 week build season.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

This right here is your biggest assumption - that you need to build two robots to be competitive. As I said, my team never has, and except for two years hasn't even designed improvements after stop build, yet we've been to elims a bunch, finalists a bunch, and winners twice. Yeah, we weren't close to Einstein, but you don't have to be up that high to be competitive or successful with your team.

You are choosing to put that added work on yourselves because you feel the benefit outweighs the cost - but it's not something that is required to be competitive.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

There are already teams that avoid week 1 events. Some do it because they don't like being "guinea pigs" for a new game. Others do it because they want more time. 1712 falls in the latter category.

While in a regional format, you can put a bad event behind you and pick up a clean slate in your next event with an improved robot. In the district format, if you have a really bad event, you've essentially condemned yourself to missing DCMP and CMP. 1712 learned that the hard way in 2013. We simply weren't ready for our week 1 event, and missed the eliminations as a result. Despite great improvements at our 2nd event, we missed DCMP because we had put ourselves in a massive points hole. We still competed in week 1 in 2014 because we hate back-to-back events even more than we fear week 1, we skipped out on the very local (and very awesome) week 1 event in 2015 and are doing so again in 2016. It makes much more sense for us to have the extra time to work on our withholding allowance and test our programming on our development chassis (as well as get some lessons learned from watching earlier events). Even if we're competing against teams who are now going into their second event, guaranteeing we have something functional prevents us from prematurely ending our season.

If bag day was removed, I anticipate this aspect would become far more pronounced. Especially in the district format.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

To add to this. I know 610 didn't have a practice bot in 2013 but that didn't stop them from becoming world champions and being one of the top robots of that year. Were they the absolute best? I think most would agree they weren't but they were definitely good enough to be competitive and good enough to have a chance at going all the way as they did.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Respectfully I disagree.

It may be that your team's circumstances enable you to get this absolutely right and your drivers trained in 6 weeks. However plenty of other teams have this issue beside Team 11 & 193 (who has stuck with one robot as they desire). So I'd love to see a poll of how many teams build a 2nd robot because they feel they need to and as an option because they want to.

It's hardly just an engineering issue. There's weather. There's logistics. There's the 2 pizza problem (remember we are student led and there are a lot of students). The fact we hold the FLL championship for NJ, an FTC competition and an FRC district event. Again when you compare teams you need to really think about what loads are on those resources.

Sure we could make some choices to make the problem smaller - the point is making these choices comes at a price not just for our teams.

Also do not discount luck in the competition itself. Sometimes the difference between success and disaster is just luck. For example Tom posted below that your region matters. That's just luck you happened to have competitors between you and your achievement that weren't better able to stop you or get lucky themselves.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

The amount of work needed to be competitive varies by region. It would be hard to be a perennial contender at SVR without the use of a second robot unless you got VERY lucky in your early design choices.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

You are assuming that your team's record qualifies as "competitive".

I suppose we (and many others) may have different definitions of "competitive".

-Mike

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I agree with this alot.

I like the stop build day. If we were to get rid of it, I feel like it would create an even bigger disparity between the elite and rookies. The elite would have several robots by the end of the season, and there would be a lot of cloning... Also think of all the fun times that we would miss. 1114's harpoons would not be such a cool big deal! They would be pre-build to a specific robot that would play like junk in quals so they would be picked. Part of what i think makes FRC so great is the pressure. The pressure to get your design. It simulates a real world job where you must finish a project by a certain time. Getting rid of stop build day would I believe lower the fun and lower the number of unique designs, and working with what you have.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Removing stop build day won't make the elites better.

The elite teams already are skipping stop build day via practice bots. Elite teams already are doing complete robot rebuilds

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

John might have a definition of "competitive" that is relevant to most teams.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I've seen a few responses mentioning design convergence if we were to eliminate robot bagging. While I'm not necessarily against this, I do see a way to put a bit of a damper on it. We are already required to submit a Bill of Materials, though it's not looked at too closely. If you wanted to limit in-season changes, implement a "feature-freeze" using the BOM.

Teams would submit a BOM online after 6 weeks listing the normal stuff, plus a short list of their robot's subsystems and 'Planned Additions'. These would need to be specific (say "Floor pickup for Game Piece A" and not "Change robot to be better"). Basically, you can make additions, but only if you came up with the general concept of it on your own. This doesn't really prevent copying subsystem designs so much as copying strategies.

This would not prevent can-grabbers from 2015 or minibots from 2011, because everybody would have put those things on their Planned Changes list. It was obvious from the design of the game that those mechanisms would be important. I see this as more of a game design flaw rather than something the rules need to address. Even if we had strict bag rules and no practice robots allowed, teams would just make them at competition.

This would not prevent redesigning existing subsystems (copied or otherwise). Teams routinely redesign intakes, shooters, and such, replacing their original designs under the existing withholding allowance rules. This wouldn't change.

This would prevent a team from copying something like 118's bridge hanger from 2012 (had it been legal). If you don't declare at 6 weeks that you might build a device for hanging from bridges, then you can't add it later. Similarly, probably a lot fewer teams would have had stingers.

This would also prevent a team from copying something like 71's unique drive system from 2002. A team would have to have planned to build a high traction 'walking' drive. If they simply planned to 'drive' they'd be able to change wheel types/sizes, gear ratios, and other tweaks. Switching from tank to H-drive would also need to be declared ahead of time. Teams would be limited to functionality improvements for their existing subsystems, not functionality additions.

Minor Bonus Effects: Encourages stopping design in favor of drive practice/polish, discourages overworking after 6 weeks, and encourages teams to take a better look at the rules.

My Personal Opinion: No bag, no limits. My BOM system would be harder on the bottom group of teams than the top because of the experience difference. Many teams didn't think about can-burglars at all last year because running out of cans was so far off their radar. It'd be frustrating to see all these designs you aren't allowed to build. That's not inspiring or fun.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Not even just elite teams. Spectrum is by no means elite but we did a full rebuild this past season and we copied ideas we saw from other teams. (Thanks 118, and others). It was a very hard decision to scrap 7 weeks of work for a new idea but we know our robot wasn't competitive. It took a very long time to get the new "cloned" robot working half way descently. This was definitely a rushed job and better clones could be made with more time but largely it would require you to be be building your clone through most of competition season. You would not have any time to actually test it at a real event. Almost any clone is going to be worse then the orgional (for an entire FRC robot) because you don't have all the experience gained from the prototyping and design phase.

I think 2014 is a good place to look to see if the majority of teams would really clone another robot. It was pretty clear early on that 254 had a very special design once you saw the robot. A lot of teams could have probably used withholding and COTS parts to build something that cloned their robot, but to my knowledge none of the elite teams did that because they believed tweaking and getting better with their own robot had a better likely hood of success. The equation wouldn't change all that much if you got rid of stop build.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I’d argue there's a definition of "competitive" that we can all agree with; it’s a drive to always do things better, gain more experience, and meet new personal bests. I don’t care how many banners a team has: if they have that drive, they are a terrifying and inspirational competitor who will eventually earn any measure of success they want.

It's worth noting that extra time on the robot can make a team more competitive in that respect, whatever their on-field goals are. It's an opportunity to put extra passion to work and learn more as a result. Practice bots aren’t necessary for teams to succeed on the field, but they can push a team’s experience and performance to levels they couldn't reach otherwise. That may sound cheesy, but it's true and awesome.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

That's an admirable suggestion, but I'll bet you a lunch that 90% of the folks using the word "competitive" in this thread, mean "builds a robot that has a strong chance of doing well during tournaments".

I doubt many use it to mean what you just described, or to mean simply "able to compete". Able to compete is probably the more correct definition (if a dictionary was consulted, or if we focused on the etymology of the term).

If I won my bet, the definition of "doing well" would still be a big source of fuzziness, but it is definitely tilted in the direction of participating in the eliminations.

In my experience, "competitive" is a notion that means so many different things to so many different people that I have learned to avoid it. Using it creates waaaay too many opportunities for talking past one another. Parts of this thread are good examples of that.

Blake

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

It's been a pretty long time since I considered all these things - my last "on team" FRC experience was 2010. At that point, after a decade in the game, I was pretty much toast, but not totally because of "the game" and "the robot" but more because of the totality of game, robot, outreach, school integration, work with area teams as an SM, etc, etc.

So, with that in mind, I'll provide you with no answers, but rather I'll pose additional questions ...
- What's the best use of time for an FRC team when mentors are with students?
-Is more time on "the game" and "the robot" a good thing in terms of culture change or does it "only" provide better competition robots?
-What metrics should be used to measure this stuff?
-does having unenforceable rules (even if everyone is honest and gracious) make any sense?

I'm honestly not sure, even after all this time, exactly where I stand on the overall issue - I'm just adding questions to the pile. I think, if I were back on a team, I'd lean toward JVN's kickoff-to-competition and spread out the meetings, "teach" more, get home before my whole family was asleep ... and probably shut the "robot switch off" at some point and use more "in season" time for outreach, community service, etc.

The one thing I am sure of is I don't want good folks to burn out ... however, I can't say I know the exact cause of burnout in FRC or if it's even the same thing for all who need a break.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

For me, competitive means playing saturday afternoon. Playing Saturday means your team is excited and energized. It means you have something positive to bring back to your school and tell them about how far you got. And we've seen enough upsets to know that anything can happen, so long as you're playing saturday afternoon.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Based on last year... Einstein or nothing, then? :)

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

QFT.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I love the title of this thread because the myth really is this exact statement above. The 6 week deadline is arbitrary. As has been beaten to death in this thread already, our team changes almost nothing about our work style/pace after bag day. The deadline is the competition! Its why every team continues to make changes and improve their robots throughout an event, because the real deadline is when autonomous starts on your next match. When that match is over you get a new deadline of another match, maybe a few minutes from then, maybe a couple weeks from then, you get my point.

My biggest sticking point lies in the almighty dollar. FIRST is run on free money. Money that flows in from sponsors, governments, stipends, endowments and communities. FIRST doesn't generate cash, this is obvious- so its why spending money intelligently and efficiently is really important to me. The way the build season works now inherently is more expensive than any other method. It pushes teams to pay for ultra fast shipping, buy duplicates of many expensive components (both mechanical and electrical) and really lean on fabrication sponsors to deliver duplicate parts and assemblies. This is because the rules are opened enough outside the bag that you can gain fundamental advantages by spending money.

To me this is just crazy. Why are we spending money on this stuff when we are an organization funded by others? Maybe I'm in a minority, but this to me is one of the most compelling reasons to consider a change. I'd much rather spend some more money on tools for our lab, stipend mentors, cover travel costs, etc!

-Brando

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Interesting...we don't spend money on this stuff. And we're one of the bigger fish in our small pond.

I guess you can find fault with the game, or you can find fault with how you play the game?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

In fairness there's a lot of reasons why you need more than the spend of money alone and the need for fast shipping to determine if there's a fault in a team rather the competition.

Hence the need to ask questions about making a practice robot in my other topic.

For example:
1. Is your team really 2 teams in the same school who share spaces and some basic parts?
2. Do you run FLL, FTC and FRC competitions from your school?
3. Is each of your teams larger than 75 people?
4. Is your team student led?
5. Does your team compete in MAR (we can see you are in AZ)?
6. What technologies has your team decided to use (do you CNC, powder coat, CAD/CAM)?

Not that our teams should not seek out every opportunity to succeed but pretty clearly concerns exist beyond our teams and we are not new to this. Between FRC11 and FRC193 we tend to have very different build styles. The FRC11 team is the older students in their last 2 years and they tend to use the CNC and mass manufacturing skills more. The FRC193 team are in their 1st 2 years of high school and tends towards classic build where hand tools are often adequate. There are upsides and downs to these approaches and also how optimized your team is with either.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I really dislike comparing individual team's methodologies and styles because there are so many factors to drive teams to do what they do, im not going to even attempt to list them. What works for you, may not work for another team.

Would you disagree that being able to spend money on these types of things is a fundamental advantage a team can have? Of course spending power will always be an advantage for some teams, but there is a inflection point to me where being able to spend into a 2nd robot or a redesign gains a team a serious advantage. If there wasn't, would the teams that do it, do it?

-Brando

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Our team takes a few days off and then keeps right on working after bag day with our practice robot. The 6 week deadline truly is just a suggestion if you have the resources to build 2 robots. I understand that the 6 weeks deadline is 'part of the challenge' but isn't the challenge already challenging enough? There are still tons of teams that field robots that barely function at all. How is that inspiring?

Even if a team only met to work & practice for a single weekend prior to their actual regional event, just think how much more productive Thursdays would be for everyone. I know it would allow us to actually use Thursdays for practice instead of integrating our modifications that we made to the practice robot.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

5254 had an incredibly successful season last year for a second year team, despite not having a practice robot. 2 Regional Finalists and quarterfinals in Carson is nothing to scoff at.

But do you know what the difference between the medals 5254 won and the banners they COULD have won? The ability to access the robot between competitions.

5254 lost in Finger Lakes finals due to 2 dropped cans. One of the features they were unable to implement between regionals (that they implemented for championships) is a can stabilizer.

5254 is a small, low resource team that is fundraising like crazy right now so that we can have a practice robot for the 2016 season. Because we don't want to lose like that again.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

This effect is multiplied between a teams first event and second event.

One of the magical aspects of Districts is one fee gets you two events. Teams are inspired to improve between events as they see their creations succeed and/or fail in the heat of the event.

The current system severely limits how much teams can exercise this new-found inspiration, mostly because of a plastic bag.

Well put Ryan.

-Mike

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I would love to see some analysis like Jim Zondag did in another thread but that shows separate OPR growth curves for district and non-district teams.

I would speculate that district teams would increase their OPR more over time when compared to regional teams attending multiple events, possibly related to their unbag window in between events.

If I have time, I'll try and crunch some numbers this afternoon.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

If you are able to wait a week to get something and still get adequate practice in then that's fine. If you could get them in a week sooner, under the same conditions, you gain a week of practice or whatever you want to do. You could stop working a week sooner and have more down time before the next competition. Thus eliminating stop build day gives you that sort of option, which you don't have to use.

We would use the time to make a drive base with some weight thrown on to act as a defense bot to practice against. Way way cheaper and easier option than making a copy of our main that still serves a huge purpose.

I guess if you wanted to be a defense team you could build a fully functional scoring bot to practice against. :p

EDIT: If things are better in moderation than why binge on FRC for six weeks? Why not spread out your time?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Seems like your implying that inspiring excellence in students is a fault in how one plays the game?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Adam,

MrForbes can certainly answer for himself, but if I can be allowed a guess ... I think he might be saying that "less" can be "more" (much more) .

To my way of thinking, I want to jump on his bandwagon and suck every bit of wisdom that I can out of his team's approach, before I even think about copying the rushed shipments, and two-three robots approach(s).

The JVN vs Copioli contests, MrForbes' comments, and other related evidence, tell me that the search space for ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce) contains a heck of a lot more dimensions than just the calendar-days that a build-season lasts.

That evidence also strongly suggests that those other dimensions might be much more important than adjusting how long the current build season lasts.

Blake

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I will point out that the $ cost of building a 2nd and 3rd robot is not substantial. Our robot build budget has not changed substantially as we add robots. Our increased budget has gone into other capital equipment purchases, stocking a set of new classes, and increased team members.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Probably not...but I might be implying that inspiring excellence in students does not require spending lots of money.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Here's another argument to the end of bag and tag: The monumental waste of resources.

FIRST put a lot of focus on recycling in the last year across all of their programs. You could argue however, that to be a top team, you had to use so many extra resources.

• Think of all the raw materials that get wasted on building a second robot.
• Think of the thousands of giant bag and tag plastic bags that get used once or twice and then thrown out.
• Think of the miles of wire, the tons of metal, the blood, sweat and tears wasted across FRC because you are separated from your robot after build by a few mils of plastic by an arbitrary rule.

A removal of bag and tag would help middle tier and low tier teams the most and save so much money, time, and material resources across the program.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Blake,

You are completely right, there is an overwhelming evidence that adjusting the days on the calendar is not the only dimension for "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)".

My question is:

Will removing stop-build be one of the many "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)", or is it one of the "ways-to-NOT-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)"?

I am proposing this:

Removing stop-build is simply one of many "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)"

I believe discussing other "ways-to-improve-build-seasons (and the students and the robots that build-seasons produce)" is tangential to this thread.

-Mike

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

"300 points and we could have done... less?"

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

A) because I believe lengthening the build season is so unlikely (for an overwhelming majority of the teams) to affect the root causes and symptoms that people are hoping to affect, and
B) because I focus on FIRST's as a program that uses competitions, but doesn't exist to *be* competitions; I think we should park lengthening-the-build-season in the examined-but-rejected-because-of-very-low-ROI pile.

We/FIRST have better/bigger fish to fry. YMMV

Blake

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Mike, Myself, Jim, others (as far as I can tell) aren't advocating in lengthening the schedule at all, just skipping bagging.

Any team that doesn't want to use more doesn't have to.

Elite teams are already working in this time anyway.

By keeping the status Quo FIRST is essentially endorsing a full open season for high resource teams, and a 6 week build for low resource teams.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

How did you go about determining this was a lower return at a higher investment? Is it not a plausible scenario where it is a greater return on a lower investment?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Well, I propose moving in the other direction and working to shut down the egregious post-44-days modifications (not easy to do, but worth the effort, I think) (fixes are one thing, wholesale rebuilds are another).

It's certainly not a forgone conclusion that what I'm calling competition-creep is the right direction to move the FIRST programs. While many folks seem to think that is the right direction, I'm advocating going in the other direction.

Intelligent people can reach different conclusions. These are my opinions.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

The long answer is long.

The short answer is the prima facie evidence supplied by the highly-visible "build a robot in a weekend" fun stunts, and by the posts written by folks like MrForbes.

I don't see a strong (certainly not strong enough) correlation between the length of the build season and a team's ability to successfully participate in the tournament part of inspiring students. Other factors appear to dominate, and I would much rather see the organization and the community of participants focus on those other factors, instead of on build-season-length or on creating/enhancing a second build season by eliminating bagging (if I understand the intent of eliminating bagging).

Blake

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Per my first post in this topic:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...9&postcount=57

The inability of FIRST to grasp the evidence of the imbalance of their time/cost/quality pyramid (the top is scope) has driven me personally to decide that the 6 week build season means - literally nothing to me.

So I am preparing to make it so I have the ability to mentor any student in FRC that wants to do it and can make it there, in a mobile way eliminating the location access roadblocks, for CNC and programming. To put it bluntly: I can certainly run a makerspace with these tools even if FIRST disappeared. I can do it year round and I can therefore budget the costs (time, money, resources, etc).

I've already spent far to long, going on 20 years, watching people dance around this limit. If this was a job and similar passion had nothing to do with it: I would have quit because the cost to me is being utilized poorly. Actually in retrospect I have left 3 jobs for this sort of activity which would have held back my career had I stayed.

Keep in mind - I will still:
FRC - Mentor & Volunteer: CSA/FTAA/Small parts
FTC - Judge
FLL - Judge at NJ State level

However 20 years of FIRST, since I was basically 20 years old, have taught me if people won't move - do what's right.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

You're advocating removing the ability to improve robots between events? Would that change make the FIRST experience reflective of an actual engineering process? I'm just an ignorant student, but I was under the impression that engineers don't usually just throw their first prototype out the door, without testing in real-world conditions, and then later decide not to make improvements when they are able to.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

FIRST's build season does resemble a competitive proposal sprint, and other real-world business activities.

Using the business analogy, those that would wait until the 44th day to finish and then throw their first prototype out the door wouldn't be businesses for very long. Who said you had to use the entire build season producing one prototype that you throw out the door?

Iterate during the 44 days. During those 44 days use simulations, and other methods to predict and test performance. Use those 44 days be an engineer, or a whatever. That is more than enough time to take care of that part of the inspiration process.

OK - Now for the post-build-season part of the discussion.

At the competitions, I recommend spending as much of your time as you can, focusing outward, rather than inward. There is an excellent pay-off.

Yes, businesses, computer scientists, cooks, engineers, farmers, etc. all improve their products when they have a chance. With that in mind, if FIRST was focused on being a competition, instead of on *using* a competition, I would be making a strong case for placing maximum emphasis on the competing (the scramble to claim a banner). But it's not and I'm not. Other people have different opinions.

In my way of looking at things, there is nothing at all (well, very little *) wrong with telling teams that they will be given a challenge, that they will be given 44 days to create a solution to that challenge, and that when they go to the competitions they will be able to see how their solutions measure up against what the other teams bring.

Is it necessary to make it possible for teams involved in FRC to do everything they possibly can (outside of or inside of the 44-day window) to win a banner??? The answer is, "no." The universe does not require it. Instead it's a choice FIRST can take, or not.

Is it useful to allow for teams involved in FRC to do some iterating after 44-day window? The answer is, "maybe." There are strong arguments in favor of it, but there are also strong arguments that anything more than the the bare minimum puts the program on a slippery slope that can lead to plenty of unnecessary problems that can poison the well. Again, that's a choice FIRST can take, or not.

FIRST can say when you should put your pencil down. FIRST can say that once the pencils go down, the solutions get graded. FIRST can say that further iteration occurs in between then and the next season. FIRST doesn't have to operate that way; and they sort-of do, sort-of don't, operate that way at the moment, but they could operate that way if they cared to.

If I understand things correctly (I might not), some people I respect began the program wanting teams to spend 44 days producing their solutions, and to then test those solutions during a few high-excitement competitions. Reading between the lines, I think that those founders wanted the teams to invest time outside those 44 days in fruitful pursuits other than full-tilt (or even half-tilt) revamping, completing, etc. of their solutions. I like that model. I think it is wise.

Does that clear up my point of view for you? Mine isn't the only viable point-of-view, but I like it, and I think it's a very useful one.

Blake
* If a team shows up at a competition unable to play, sure help them put something useful onto the field (and make a note about helping them before the competition next year). That is an entirely different kettle of fish than using the withholding allowance to lug in wholesale replacement mechanisms or extensive modifications.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

That does not mean that business today, that helped wreck a global economy, is a smart model to copy. I would like to inspire to do more than break your butt to win then often under deliver which is all too common in business today. I'd like to inspire to improve. (see below)

At the core - I ask merely for honesty. I suspect the greatest fear is if you tell perspective schools what this really is like: they will run from it because this is no simple quick commitment or fast win. This is basically 2 years before you become an 'overnight success'. That is the reality and clearly we prefer to put lipstick on it.

Added - Think about this. Today the computer on your desk is more than powerful enough to send a man to the moon. More than powerful enough to figure out the parameters of nuclear power. You have Internet so fast that only a nation state could dream of it 30 years ago. Yet our business have delivered Twitter, Facebook and first person shooters. Even today I find myself counseling students that: with a cheap Internet connection, a cheap computer from Walmart and a cheap All-In-One printer they have something that would takes years of work to gather 20 years ago. Yet people still can not find work with the barrier that low. Yes there is a problem with what we call the high bar.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

+1 for this. this is my favorite so far. Seems like a fair compromise. It would make more teams more competitive and therefore more inspirational.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I once read a postulation about procrastination, that it happens due to the psychology behind perceived energy it takes for a person to think through and do something. As someone becomes more adept at something, procrastination is much less likely since the perceived energy is much less lower. Examples are chopping veggies or getting a technical person to write a paragraph for a FRC award. That concept - energy to think through something - is something I face daily as a software engineer. Some days I only do 8 hours (compared to my wife's 10+) but I am mentally exhausted after those 8 if I've been working on brand new concepts.

I think that burnout is much less of an issue as the veteran status of teams becomes more prevalent. As we get better at competition and better at training 'the next generation', the energy we spend coming up with new concepts is far less than it used to be. As designs for things like gearboxes and drive trains converge, we focus the creative energy on the game challenges rather than finagling the fundamentals. So I think FRC's culture is more aligned with removal of the stop-bag day than it ever has been before.

However, I think we'd need a formal poll sent to all teams.

On the plus side, there wouldn't be so much conflict over who to spend Valentine's Day with. I'm sure that applies to other situations that are inevitable for individuals in the first 3 months of the year.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

FIRST did ask for the survey data I took. We tried to interview someone knowledgeable about the team for the top 25 OPRs in each division that year. I don't know if I told teams I would publicly share their data or not, so I would rather not publish the table, but we asked a handful of questions. One was: "Do you have some sort of Practice Robot?" The four divisions came in between 75% and 88% of teams from those top 25 (some divisions we only got to 20 of the 25 teams). We then asked teams to assign an estimated "percentage" that the practice was similar to the competition robot. This varied from 10% (usually a modified version of the previous year and only used for driving practice) to 100% (only 1 team claimed that). The average came in around 60% (averaging a number given to a subjective value is.... well another number...) with the usual Einstein suspects coming in between 90-99% IE very very similar. This was a fun discussion to have, and a couple teams were oddly specific (I got a 97%, a 98%, and a 95.2% from three teams I have a lot of respect for).

This survey fostered the idea as I was surprised that a couple of really good teams actually stopped build practice bots because they typically had access to 3 districts (and 3 x 6 hrs. un-bag) plus a district championship to gain experience. I am not sure that they were top 1% teams, but they were within that top 4%. 6 hrs. of unbag split into 3 x 2 hr. sessions is a decent amount of access for practice, test, and tune. I know a lot of really great teams spend way more than that, but it truly is a nice chunk of time for a team. If teams had similar chunks each week, they could do some pretty impressive stuff.

**********************************************
I really pushed for this as I think FIRST misses out on the inspiration of product development/improvement. Watching the documentary on Slingshot, and all the iterations they went through, I was reminded of how little refinement we get to do.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Curious - I would have considered "Woody," our prototype robot in 2014 to be around 60% similar to "Buzz" even though they were built of different materials, because Buzz was built in aluminum to the dimensions worked out in lumber on Woody, and all of the functional points were implemented similarly. Our 2015 practice robot was north of 95%, only decorative and completely inconsequential differences like abandoned mounting holes. Anyway, was 60% the mean value? What were the median (50th percentile) and mode (commonest answers)? I suspect that this did not look at all like a normal distribution, even among teams with similar OPRs. It would be lovely if you could post a histogram.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I remember answering your survey questions about this- and we are one of those teams you are describing who stopped building full scale practice robots. The past few years we've been playing 4 times before DCMP, and then getting DCMP before heading to CMP. It was actually becoming more work to maintain the practice bot as we swapped 'end effectors' and subsystems back and forth.

We will usually have several 'test bucks' for software or specific mechanism design, but a vast majority of our practice is done on the competition robot before ship, during unbag windows and through practice matches at competitions. We really emphasize being ready to go out of the bag so we can cycle the practice field many times and tune and tweak.

Would I prefer to have a practice bot? Yes definitely. However, it does take a considerable amount of effort for our team as we do all of our own fabrication. It's been working for us thus far, and we're continuing to refine our process!

-Brando

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Median varied between 0.7 and 0.9 depending on the division. Mode was 0.95 for all divisions. 95% usually meant functionally equivalent with all major systems and close enough to do code development, but possibly different enough that some tuning may be required.

Yes 125 answered back in 2012 with a Practice bot that was 40% representative. I don't have my field notes to know what that meant for that team for that year*, but usually that was similar drive train, or something to hook the shooter up to while tuning.

I also had helpers doing some of the interviews, so it may not have been me doing that particular interview.