Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Is it time to eliminate the “six week” build season? Think about the tremendous savings of time and money if there was no six-week deadline. A number of folks will say that six weeks is long enough and if you expand the build season you’re going to have more mentor burn out.

Actually, the majority of the leading teams build two robots and continue to develop, improve, and practice throughout the entire FIRST season. That coupled with the withholding allowance and the practice and pit time at the various regional and district competitions allows teams to legally make major changes.

You could eliminate the building of a second robot, which most of the leading teams do. You could continue to practice, debug, and improve the one robot that you take to the competitions. And you can eliminate the “bag and tag” nonsense.

If you want to keep the six week build season, then make it an actual six week limit. Make it illegal to continue to work and practice after the ship/bag date. Otherwise eliminate it completely.

Comments?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I need some break in the spring to work on my senior design project, so I want there to still be a limit.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

It's probably about time we had this discussion again. For reference, here are a couple previous discussions on similar topics.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=116658
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=126848
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=116789


P.S. Awesome to see Bill posting again.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Simple, choose to stop working.

Just like you can choose to not work on a practice robot now.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I think you would find that teams would just look at whatever the best robots are in the first few weeks (254s and 1114s of the world) and start building a whole new robot for later events and championships.

However everything involving money and time spent would be a lot nicer.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I'd be 100% in favor of eliminating "bag day" and shifting to a "kickoff-to-competition" schedule. We'd do less work, be less stressed, and consume less resources while probably providing a better educational experience.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I would love to hear the perspectives of FTC and VRC teams on this line of thought. They have an even larger competition window and much more affordable robots, making strategies like this even more feasible.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

This is very common in VRC. By the time we get to VEX Worlds in April, design convergence has usually set in, with 2-3 designs that have been extensively cloned/copied. Some teams really like this, others really don't.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

It did seem a little quiet around here lately. :)

I've made my stance clear for a long time, the six week build season negatively impacts lower resource teams to a greater degree then large resource teams to the detriment of the entire program.

If we remove the build season limitation across the board we will see a dramatic increase of the quality of the product that we put on the field in front of the public.

Teams have more time to

• Share ideas and teach during the season
• make their robots professional looking (paint, etc)
• iterate, tune, and tweak
• Practice, Practice, Practice

The only argument I see against the limit is burn out, but a large amount of teams are already essentially building right up to and through Champs (or IRI). So if a team wants to stop after the 45 days they are able to and won't be at any further disadvantaged then they are now.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I'm in favor of getting rid of it. I got some evil stares from mentors when I said FIRST would eventually get rid of it about 2 years ago at a meeting but I stand by that statement. It will eventually go away.

I suspect we'd see less convergence than everyone thinks but I could be wrong.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Getting rid of the six week season will make keeping rookies (and new mentors) on the team a bit harder.

It would probably also make the act of packing for the first trip to competition twice as stressful as it already is, since there will be much less packing until the last minute. Also, the withholding allowance format encourages adaptability and consistency in dimensions as a requirement in the design process.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Weird.

We're very transparent on our team that we essentially work year round, and that build season extends through the last day of champs. Doesn't seem to cause anyone to lose faith halfway through.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I think more mentors are lost when they realize the time commitment is more than they expected. I think my team is better at being up front on how much time it takes to mentor. We no longer describe the commitment as only the build season but include the full length of competition.


P.S. Hey Bill is back!

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

We will see a slight rise in design convergence but not a whole lot more then we already do. Rebuilding an entire FRC robot is a lot of work with or without the bag restraints. Removing the bag restraints isn't going to instantly motivate teams to put in that kind of effort. We see teams rebuild in season every year (we did it, 973 did it, etc).

FRC is a different animal than VRC.

• Less time between first competition and championship
• harder to rebuild/build a robot in that time frame
• more expensive to copy a design
• much, much harder to get it right when you do copy a design
• few teams will just wait for 7 weeks to see what the top week 1 team does

We already saw design convergence with the systems that are easy to modify in many years. It didn't ruin anything.

• 2011 - Minibots
• 2015 - Can Grabbers
• 2012- Bridge Balancing devices (stingers)

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

One major advantage of the current build format is that it only allows 1 robot to be associated with a team. There are a few scenarios in which I can see this being taken advantage of.

1) Team A built a good robot, but didn't manage to qualify for championships. Team B qualified (maybe as a 3rd robot or RAS), but doesn't have a very good robot. Again, Team B could potentially compete with a robot that they had no part in building.

2) Team C didn't build that great of a robot this year. They are friends with Team D that built a really good robot. Team C is competing in a week that Team D is not competing in. Team C in theory could compete with Team D's robot to give them a better chance at winning the event.

3) Team E has a lot of resources. They could build 2 different robots for use with different strategies. They can bring them both to competition, and just reinspect their chosen robot each time they want to play a different position in the game.

4) Cheesecaking could get out of hand (more than it already has) with teams literally bringing a full alliance worth of robots to swap with their partners.

Are there rules that could circumvent these scenarios? Probably, but these are definitely things that would need to be addressed before we drop bag day.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Both robots would have to be under 120 pounds. Both robots combined could only have 1 control system. So this is pretty much prevented already.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

As an international team, we would need a stop build day regardless.

Generally, we need to crate and ship the robot at least a week before a regional. And if we're going to championships, or another overseas regional, there is no time to ship it back, work, and ship it out again.

Granted, in Australia we have a regional now. This however dosen't help a lot of other teams.

At the Australian regional, we were also very lucky to have some US teams come over. I think if you eliminated bag and tag, then teams that may be interested in going to regionals luck ours, would be discouraged for losing that 2 or more weeks or robot time in transit. I'd be intereseted to hear what the Hawaian teams think of this.

I think eliminating stop build day would give a massive boost in competetivness to many teams, but there would be a group that are left behind.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I think it's in FIRST's best interests to eliminate bag day if they have any vested interest in improving both the on-field product (better competition) and off-field product (better and more numerous opportunities for education). I would assume they care about at least one of these things.

On top of that, FIRST has championed expanding the reach of the program to under-served areas. In fact, Don reiterated that point in the video released today. As it stands, a nontrivial number of teams are needlessly consuming thousands of dollars in redundant resources every year to field a practice robot. That money could be filtered back in to supporting additional existing or potential rookie teams without the current team suffering at all competitively.

"But Wil, they could just not build a practice robot now and filter that money back into the FIRST community."

Teams are run independently of what FIRST may want teams to focus on. Teams may find fielding a highly competitive program to be a better use of their time than helping to field an additional team that would risk both teams being less competitive than the original team. Eliminating bag day can help nudge teams to help out other teams.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

While you are right, there are a lot of teams where if one or two particular people stop working with the team, then the team takes a serious hit. It's definitely not good for the team to be operating like that, but it is a reality. The decision to let so many people IS still up to you, but it isn't always a simple one.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

+1!...my opinion and not necessarily a reflection of how all the rest of my fellow advisors feel:D

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I for one like the stop date. While the students will keep on working it will be at a lower level. No more nights or weekends. The main problem is that the main mentors need the break. By this point families want their members that they loaned to the team back. College work needs to be caught up. Yards and houses that have been ignored need worked on. Prepping for classes and other jobs needs to be done. Winding down and catching up on sleep is a health problem that needs to be addressed. I also miss being home enough to cook some meals.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Yea, I'd say do away with it. If you plan your time right you won't have to cram in so many hours at the beginning. Mentors may not need to come as many days a week over a longer period.

Practice bots are subverted and shipping costs matter less because you can afford to wait longer. On that line of thought, I wonder how this would affect vendors like Rev, AndyMark, Vex, etc. (if at all).

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I have difficulty understanding this point of view. Do you not understand that

A) teams are already meeting after stop build day at a volume similar to build season

B) teams are not obligated to meet at the same volume after build season as they were before build season, and they would be under no other obligation to do that if bag day is eliminated

Or is there another breakdown somewhere?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

You're definitely right but I, like many others it seems, think that it's for the greater good. You could still do the practice robot strategy that many teams already use, it just wouldn't be necessary for the other teams to also do it.

To prevent excessive cheesecaking, there could be a rule that you can't donate non-cots parts to another team (possibly with a "unless specifically allowed by the lead inspector" exemption for specific circumstances)

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Hmmm, On the one hand ...

If I'm FIRST and I want to inspire students, and pack a real-world-style engineering/science/technology challenge into a period that enhances a student's education, without losing sight of everything else important in students' lives ... I might decide that 44 days is plenty long enough for the students to enjoy & receive the benefits of the Strategy-to-Delivery, before-a-deadline, part of the experience.

Hopefully, as the teams mature, their students and their mentors will learn to set realistic goals for what they set out to accomplish each season during that 44-day period.

Hopefully, during those 44 days, those teams that are able, will fan out to cooperate with neighboring teams that struggle to be ready for the competition events.

On the other hand ...

If you call the program a "competition", and if you turn the competitions into showcases, and if you create a program that celebrates excellence, it would be a little myopic to not expect constant overt and subconscious pressure from teams, and from almost everyone else, to put excellent robots onto the fields.

My 2 cents ...

Focus on expanding participation in the program, not on expanding the time & resources the program consumes. The program's vision can be accomplished more easily if competition-creep is resisted.

If people want to go nuts (in a good way) squeezing as many accomplishments as they possibly can into the 44 days they get to invest in prepping for the competitions, the program doesn't need to try to hobble them, but that possible/optional aspect of the program shouldn't be the engine that pulls the train.

Be excellent for 44 days, then let the chips fall where they may.

Blake

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

How many teams do this? 5%? 10%? 20%?

There are a lot of teams that quit building on bag day, and they show up to the competition with 6 weeks worth of designed and built robot. It appears that most of them are not on CD during the off season, to comment on threads like this.

I like the 6 week cutoff. This year, our team is going to build two robots and keep going from January to April. Not my decision, but I'll go along and see how it works. We are not meeting as many hours each day, as well.

I understand that FIRST can't really control the whole practice robot thing, so it is really difficult to enforce stop build day.

I kind of like a firm deadline. I even depend on it, for most of my own projects. I can't seem to get anything done unless it needs to be done by such and such a day. Maybe I just use bag day as a crutch...or maybe the limited build time was part of the original idea of FRC...

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I like the stop build day.
I found it odd that some feel it's an advantage for less resource teams to get rid of it. I feel the opposite is true.
More resources will allow the "better" teams to take advantage of what they see and do a quick turnaround before the next subsequent event.

Getting rid of the 6 week build season helps some teams but not the Hawaii and international ones. I dont mind it in VEX because we are doing all of our events locally where we can drive to events, similar to teams in FRC that drive to their events.

I realize that we are in the minority, so I totally get why teams would want to get rid of it. We are very fortunate and have been lucky the past 6 years in being succesful at regionals despite making almost no changes or none at all to our robot that is bagged at the end of the season. In fact, it never comes back home until after championships.
We have also never had the time to ever build a 2nd robot, because we spend most of the time traveling all the time! :)
For us, it makes no difference doing a week 1 or a week 6 event, our drivers need to be ready because other than the last week of build season to hopefully practice and get drive time, that's it until they do an event, subsequent events, and at Championships.

I always chuckle a little when teams say an event is a work in progress and will be back better at the next one. These events cost $$$$, and for us who have to travel there, a whole lot more $$$$$$$. I try to stress to our team that at each and every event, we need to be prepared the same as the last one we do.

This in my opinion is what makes build season special.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

To be honest, the fiction of a six week build season helps keep me on the team, even though most years I'm the most gung-ho mentor (and often member in any capacity) to continue working until the season is over. While we certainly do not stop all robot work at bag and tag, we usually do take about a week off (or at least mostly off), apart from driver practice with the "other robot". After a week or two of driver practice and a week or two of watching videos, we'll work on adjustments. Key build team members usually work on designing and building adjustments, while other members work on getting the pits ready, organizing scouting, and other functions such as give-aways. We're usually back up to about 80% of the "build season" operations tempo by the time we go to Bayou.
I really believe that we would come out behind if we had a "full-on" development season right up to our competition, due to the numbers who would not commit anything. YMMV.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

The 6 weeks is perfect without it the average team would probably stay the same and the Elite teams would probably have even better bots.

Although I would not mind practice robots becoming illegal just because its not feasible for most teams and creates an even more unfair playing field.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I would say that over half of the teams quit on bag day, easily. They may even quit before. A lot of teams only work weekends. Some show up to competition with a box of parts or even an old robot. A few teams don't show up at all. Teams do a lot of things differently, and a big one is how much they meet. It doesn't really change the fact that bag day is an artificial wall that some either circumvent with money, time, or both, and some don't circumvent it at all.

Over half the roster at most events sit out during eliminations. Why not end the event there since most teams aren't doing much after qualification matches are over?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Awesome that we get to discuss this again.

The unintended consequences will be rampant, but in the end, there will still be three basic categories of FRC teams at competition:

1. top level teams, who work year round and take advantage of every opportunity and loophole available to win more;
2. low resource, low knowledge teams, who will come to competition with poor quality robots, and
3. teams who are willing to work ridiculously hard, but cant yet be called "elite" (if they ever get that far)

In other words, the rich would stay rich, the poor would stay poor, and a bunch of us would just keep chuggin'. So we might as well keep it the way it is.

My opinion.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I come from a team like this, so perhaps my input might be beneficial to this thread. Team 4301 consists of approximately 5 full-time students, about 10 more who go to meetings at least twice a week, and the physics teacher who has so generously given up his afternoons and weekends to allow the team to function. Our school district policy technically does not allow us to meet for more than an hour a day except on weekends, but we have been able to push it to 1:30 to 2 hours for short bursts when we really need it. We do not CAD or program at the meetings, as these activities can be done independently at home/in class and would not be an efficient use of our limited shop time.

As one could imagine, the real issue we face as a team right now isn't so much funding or manufacturing resources as it is the availability of student labor hours to build the robots. Every year, with approximately 7 people showing up per weekday meeting and 5 on Saturdays, we're lucky to have even the most simple of robots fully bagged by Build Stop. For example, our 2014 robot, despite its complete lack of complexity, was completed in the last few minutes of a 1 hour build meeting on bag and tag day. That's the struggle we deal with every year. Now, the robot itself wasn't actually bad, but one of our biggest impedances stemming from the late completion was that we had zero practice time before our first quals match. As a result, the robot – which relied on precise positioning to catch the ball – only ever caught one ball over the course of the entire tournament because I had no experience driving the machine.

Contrast this to our 2015 year, where the robot was arguably equally as complex as the previous one: KOP + Mecanum drive, one actuated moving mechanism powered by a single motor. This time, however, we got the thing completed an entire day before build stop. The difference? Well, we made it into the eliminations bracket for the first time in our team history, and as an alliance captain nonetheless. This all, based on our team's post-analysis of the season, stemmed from that single day of driving practice.

So what is my team's position on keeping the 6 week build season? We are entirely in favor of getting rid of it. Even if we decided to enforce an artificial 6 week deadline on build completion, the driving practice alone would enable us to make drastic improvements to our robot performance at tournaments. Beside this, the extra time would allow us to be able to more comfortably design more mechanically complex robots with the confidence that we could actually complete them before the tournament. This makes us able to not only be more competitive at the competitions, but it also allows us to be more attractive to potential sponsors by being able to show them a more polished and functional machine than before. Finally, it would allow all of this to occur on a more relaxed schedule. Everyday meetings would no longer be necessary, and we could actually have one or two days a week as cool down time to reduce the burnout on both the mentor(s) and the full-time student members.

tl;dr: low-resource "kickoff to bag" teams would benefit greatly from the removal of the build stop date, even if the only benefit was that they could have a little bit of practice time they could not have had before.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I'm going to apologize immediately because this turned into something sort of all over the place, but still mostly related to this discussion.

Teams and the people involved with them are (with a few exceptions) not obligated to do much anything at all. For the most part this entire endeavor or building robots and competing with them, of mentoring and educating students, is completely voluntary. FIRST doesn't tell us we need to meet every day of the week any more than they tell us how many wheels we can have on our robot. We choose to do it, for all sorts of reasons.

There's been much made of the difference between "average" teams and successful teams, but a good deal of it boils down to time, culture, and by extension, community. Success isn't just about wanting to succeed as a team-- I'd argue that nobody wants to fail, it's feeling the burning desire, the passion that drives you to spend more time than someone else might consider possible doing something you love. I know when I was in high school, what got me out of bed from January to April wasn't the 8 hours of formal schooling I had ahead of me, but the hours I know I would be spending from 3 to 9 on robotics, whether we were meeting or not. Now, I've tempered a little in college, but now I bus an hour and a half each way to help three FTC teams and an FRC team twice a week outside of build season and probably way too much during build season, while still balancing all the normal demands of getting a degree and having a personal life. I know I'm not alone in loving this program, and I would gladly spend more time working with my students if it were physically possible, but rationally, I know that if I had a longer build season with my students, it's very unlikely it would be a positive thing for me.

I should also probably say how stop build actually affects me and my team: it cuts our number of shop hours (especially on Saturdays) down to about 3/4 to 1/2 of what it is during build season. It reduces the days I bus down from 4-5 to 2. The people in the shop are almost exclusively people who actually have work to do, or who are highly passionate about what's going on. They'd be in the shop whether there was a stop build day or not. This is also pretty much how it was on my high school team, and I'd imagine it's something like what FIRST expects the effect to be.

In our society there are a number of laws to help save people from themselves, and in FRC that's how I view the stop build day. On one level, I hate it, and wish it would go away forever so I can divert the resources we've been using to work around those limits to more valuable things, but on the other hand, I love it because it means I can start ramping down my robotics induced insanity and take a step back to reevaluate where I'm at in all the other (equally important, but more often ignored) aspects of my life.

So yes, FIRST doesn't tell me I need to add on a 40 hour work week with my team, but I do it anyways because I love it, during build season. But on a less visceral level, I can sometimes appreciate "the man" coming in and telling me it's time to dial it back for a little bit. And while at the time I fight it, at the same time I know it's probably what's best for me and a number of other people.

A small note on the difference between FTC/VEX and FRC-- and don't get me wrong, I love FTC, and though I'm only now participating in VEX U, I'm sure I would have loved being a part of a VEX team in grade school too-- they are, without a doubt, less intense programs on average. Yes, there are teams that are more intense than the average FRC team, but FRC, especially at the middle to high level, is, well, the hardest fun you'll ever have. There's so much more pressure to succeed and do well at competition, both internally and externally. It's that sporting atmosphere, the drive for victory, that, like in "real" sports, fires people up. FTC has some of that, but the events are smaller, the teams are smaller, and the stakes are smaller, and so the fire is less intense. In FRC, even lower resource, smaller teams have people who are intensely interested in the competition as a whole. I'm not sure the same can be said in FTC.

tl;dr: I hate stop build because it's an obstacle when working with my team, but I love it because it saves me from myself

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

The main valid argument I've seen for the "stop build day" is that it would discourage teams from going to Week 1 regionals. However, I argue that teams would go anyway due to locality and the fact that everybody has only had the 6 weeks anyway- it would change very little. However for teams that don't have the funds to build two robots and/or go to only one local regional, the benefits would be immense. Personally I would vastly prefer the extra time to drive, test, and improve things, as we usually go to week 3 and 5 regionals.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Seems to me that the work expands to fill the available time. If you knew you had another 3 or 4 weeks to work on the robot, would you spend that time practicing with the same simple robot you usually build in 6 weeks? or would you build a "better" robot with the additional time, and still not get to practice with it?

We've had the same experience with practice on our FRC team, as well as other robotics projects. Setting a self imposed 5 week build deadline lets us spend a week getting to know our new robot, and we've done well at competitions using this approach.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I don't see the burnout problem like others do. Meet less often over a longer period and you solve that. You could also shorten meetings or cut out some week days and use weekends or vise versa.

If you were a team that could sustain that whole period at full chatter then you save the practice bot while simultaneously getting more time overall.

Everyone will be able to save on shipping costs and better utilize machining sponsors because your lead times won't be as short. Snow days and government shutdowns become less of a problem too.

I also think that design convergence might not be too bad since, depending on how drastic a change, it could be unreasonably expensive for most even given the time.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I'm surprised more people haven't brought this point up already. I always viewed stop build day as beneficial because of the experience it gives to the students--namely, the experience of a hard deadline that everyone would prefer to be just a little bit further away.

As CEO of an engineering consulting company, I see these at work all the time, and every time I do I'm grateful for the experience I had on my high school FRC team that prepared me for it. It's valuable for these kids to learn that no one is going to wait on you in the real world, and that whenever you see a deadline on a calendar you should treat it as immovable and plan accordingly. I know my clients appreciate this approach, and I can't think of a single situation in life where this mindset would steer anyone wrong. If stop build day teaches this effectively, then it's invaluable(especially when so many high schools these days have a "no zeroes" policy, but that's a rant for another day...).

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

The problem is that it's not really a deadline anymore because teams are working around it. And if we opened up build season then the deadline would be by your competitions basically.

Not saying I agree with opening up build season, just stating those points.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I am reminded of these great ideas for compromise a few years ago. Getting a little practice, tinker and programming time before competition would have a large improvement in competitiveness of competitions.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Good point. Personally I have never seen this as a huge problem because most people on our team(students, teachers and mentors alike) are about ready for a break by stop build day, so we enforce it as a hard deadline.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

A proposal: All robots MUST bag at the 6 week mark. Teams are expected to enforce a tools-down policy--this includes practice robots and software development.

After 1 week, robots may be unbagged for up to 15 hours a week, in time increments of no less than 1.5 hours and no greater than 3 hours (noted on bag-and-tag form), with the exception of recognized demonstrations which may run for up to 5 hours per unbag per day but count against the total allowed for the week (and appropriate documentation should be provided to inspectors--photo, signature of key FIRST person who was present on the lockup form--keep it mild here, just to show that there was actually something going on as far as demos and it wasn't just a workday). All work is allowed.

The intent is to strike a balance between robot work and the rest of "life"--take a week to catch up, then you get some time to work on the robot.

Or, here's a novel approach: Put the robot in a crate and ship it... :p


That being said, I like the hard stop.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Here's an idea, how about instead of eliminating bag day for all teams, FIRST says that any teams that are willing can opt-out of bag day provided they do the following:
Donate some amount of money, say $2000, directly to FIRST
Spend some amount of time during the build season, say 100 hours, volunteering with other FRC teams

Teams that don't build practice robots wouldn't opt out, so nothing changes for them. Many of the teams that currently do build practice robots would opt-out of bag day instead of building another robot, netting FIRST thousands of dollars and getting thousands of extra hours of support to teams that need it.



I'm being facetious of course, but honestly, it is possible that I would like this better than what we have now. All of that money and effort that high-caliber teams put into building a practice robot could easily be channeled into things that are more beneficial for the teams themselves as well as for the entire community.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I bolded one statement for emphasis. I'm not really sure that I agree with this. I think the teams who were first to come out with dominant versions of the mechanisms you described above would disagree. By the end of 2011, nearly every competitive team in St. Louis had a <1.5 second minibot. Our team has never been more burned out than we were this year because of the constant iteration caused by the Canburglar wars. Frankly, the can wars from last season are a major reason I'm not even remotely excited about the upcoming season (and frankly, I barely even participated in Canburglar iteration, compared to the rest of our team). Burnout is a real thing.

Now, regardless of what I just wrote above, the big question is will eliminating "bag day" reduce or increase participant burnout. I think it's obvious that it would allow for more polished robots. As for burnout, I'm really not sure which direction it would go. I do know a lot of teams need to be saved from themselves.

Yup. The design convergence was bad on minibots and can grabbers because they were small and could be done at a relatively low cost. (I say relatively. For some teams the money spent on these arms races would be more than many teams spend on their entire robot.) However, doing a full redesign similar to what 33 did in 2009, or 254 in 2015, is something that very few teams can pull off; both due to a lack funds and a lack experience.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

When stop build day goes away, we will trade a very squishy deadline for one that is absolute. Should you fall short of stop build day goals, you have at least a week (and often many more) to decide and implement your withholding strategy. Should you not finish your robot by the event, you have no fallback since your Sunday robot can't earn you any points.

Honestly, in both approaches students get great exposure to hard deadlines that no amount of pleading can move. I think removing stop build day potentially makes the teaching deadlines more memorable (or at least more painful) since you don't have the safety net of the withholding allowance.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." -- Douglas Adams

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

...and because the scoring mechanic underlying both minibot racing and can grabbing was a winner-take-all, asymptotic race to the bottom.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Just to nitpick this. some students on my team delay their participation in week 6 so they are rested and ready to dive in with the practice bot after bag day. Its also a good time for peer review of code, to clean up while week 6 is still fresh in your mind.

I personally don't like the concept of bag day but I do think it provides closure for my team and permits them get needed rest. There are those like me, who are too excited and immediately want to play with the practice bot.

However we did get very burned out this year, we asked ourselves almost everyday if we would be more upset if we did not give our best. We gave up on the can war to keep our sanity.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I think this is the key point, my statement about not ruining things was meant to be more about the watch ability of robots and diversity. Those game mechanics were unquestionably broken.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I just want to point out (again, as is annual tradition) that those who go "tools down" on "stop build day" are already making a choice. Don't pretend that you're not.

The only barriers to continuing to iterate on your robot legally are (a) the expense and extra work of building a practice robot (a few thousand dollars and many person-hours, which is significant), (b) fitting your post-bag modifications into your withholding allowance (which IMO has not been a problematic constraint in recent years), and (c) the feasibility of transporting your modifications to your next event (which is an issue, albeit a big one, for a small number of teams like my international and Hawaiian friends).

What tenable arguments could there possibly be for keeping the stop build day?

Fairness? Totally out the window. In fact, there are artificial obstacles to continuing to work that make it harder for a low-budget, low-hour team to keep up.

Preventing duplication of successful designs? (a) Copying happens to some extent already, but (b) it will never happen to the same extent as in Vex and FTC because it is much more difficult and nuanced to copy and perfect something in FRC. Moreover, I think that games that converge to a single optimal solution are fundamentally not very good games.

Saving us from ourselves? I sympathize with this and know all-too-well about burnout, but still don't think it's a convincing argument. Again, you are already making a choice and are more than welcome to continue to do so if build season rules are relaxed. For every "in the real world there are hard deadlines" point, there is a "in the real world, nobody keeps you from working yourself to death" counterpoint. I work at one of the most competitive companies in the world, and see at least as much value in the latter lesson as in the former.

Preventing escalation of the competitive arms race? This is already present to some extent, but every single year there are tons of examples of teams that succeed despite a disciplined approach to build hours. Look at 67 in any year - they are the prototypical example that proves that a team doesn't need to spend 80 hours per week in their lab to build a world-class robot. I actually think that removing the stop build day would remove barriers to competition rather than add to them.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Since I have obviously never been in a situation where my team has developed something everyone wants to copy, maybe it can be explained by someone with that experience. Why do you think the potential for increased design convergence is a bad thing? As far as I can see, design convergence has a net positive for both teams off the field and the on-field product.

The only defense I have seen is anecdotal evidence to where design convergence already exists in the current environment only where conditions can easily present itself (a lightweight, simple and potentially even fully COTS solution to an over-weighted game mechanic).

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

In VRC it becomes very difficult for teams to design something unique and innovative yet still remain competitive because of the design convergence. Although it's fun seeing a design so good teams attempt to duplicate (sometime almost screw for screw) the downside is having them on the other side of the field and your team loses the match. The single worst part is knowing you'll probably do worse arriving at a competition with something innovative versus just following the convergence crowd.

FTC is a different story because materials are less constrained giving teams more scope to build innovative robots that can't easily be copied without someone doing all the engineering again. You can actually make something different and win. Design concepts do converge somewhat by the FTC world championship but implementation is always different and this often determines match outcomes.

Time limits? Our team participates in both VRC and FTC with the later usually constrained to about 8 weeks of actual build work followed by perhaps 4 weeks of fine tuning. Wouldn't want the season any longer to be honest. VRC being a full 12 month season actually gets boring and we usually have a little fun in the first few months then just sit back and observe trying hard to figure out something innovative that will be a match for the convergence crowd.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

"world-class" robot with world-class engineers.:]

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Removing stop build day would be tremendously helpful to my team and others like us. We're a mid-level team, maybe the 50th to 60th best team in Michigan. Building a practise robot is both a significant financial burden and a significant temporal burden. A few $k can go a long way (an extra event, new tools/equipment, extra stock/components/motors). As for time, building a practise robot takes enough time to hurt the quality of our robot at our first competition. Over the course of the competition season, the practise bot makes up the ground, but not having to build one at all would immediately make our robots better.

I'm honestly not sure which teams making this change would hurt. I suppose it would narrow the gap between the teams who have to struggle to make/use a practise robot vs. those that do it pretty easily. But those teams aren't the type to shy away from competition.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I have to start off with a nod to Dave Lavery. Go check out his "six weeks" speech from Championships. I think that speaks volumes about our motivation.
While there are likely equal reasons for both views, I personally have some other reasons to keep the six week build.
One of the greatest things that grabs casual observers and potential sponsors is the statement that every robot on the field was built in six weeks or at competition. The additional development time is never discussed because, for those people, it is irrelevant. The memory trigger is watching any robot on the field with the thought that it was the result of a team approach to a six week build and design.
While students are constantly under a time constraint for projects in their academic life, very few schools actually teach techniques on how to best accomplish great results in a limited amount of time. The six wek build does that with mentor help.
I have been around long enough to know that the best built robot is not going to win just because the team has a lot of resources or time. Likewise the best design is not going to win every time because there are other factors like driver fatigue, mechanical breakdowns, and miscommunications.
Yes, we are one of those teams that builds a practice robot. Yes, we continue to improve designs after the build. No, we are not a team that has a lot of resources. Yes, we are a team of very driven students who feel a need to make improvements, assist other teams and play a part in improving the overall competition. One of the things that has not entered into this discussion is the value of the additional learning experience in planning the robot modification that can only take place a competition. We always talk about how we are training our students for a life in industry. Well, no industry sits back and does not make improvements to it's product. Many of them need to plan on improvements in the field. (Hubble to name just one.)
So for my money, I am all for keeping the six week build. I don't think we could attract as many sponsors and supporters without it. I don't think we can provide a quality, real world, experience without it. I don't think the competition will improve without it. (I suspect it actually may suffer.)
On a personal note, I often surprise my coworkers with the solutions and direction on projects we are given. I attribute that with my work on the team. If you think six weeks is not enough time, you need to work in live TV. By the time you have realized you screwed up, your work is on it's way to Mars.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I had heard of this proposal before, and hadn't thought about it much beyond a knee-jerk reaction of something along the lines: "Oh, hell no! Don't take my bag day away!" So when this thread popped up, and I saw some folks I respect a lot arguing the other way, I figured that it'd be better for me to actually think about it, talk to some students on 1712, and come out with an opinion I felt I could defend. I can say confidently that my answer (and the answer of a lot of students on 1712) is still: "don't remove bag day." The main reasons for that (burnout and time limits) have already been covered in this thread, but I'd like to throw a personal example into the ring. Feel free to nitpick or criticize, I promise you that I won't be offended.

Bag day absolutely helps keep FRC viable for me. When I joined the team, I mainly characterized myself as a musician and performer, and they are still major factors in my life. For the 2 years I've been in FRC, I've always pushed the envelope as regards time management: it's difficult for me to maintain the grades that I require of myself, be a strong part of 1712, and keep music in my life. During build season, other parts of my life get pushed to the side and I focus on robotics. Asking for students to sacrifice other aspects of their life for 6 weeks is fair, given the massive benefits that FRC brings. It is not, however, reasonable to expect that students give much more than that, because we're getting to the point where it will prevent students from joining, or even continuing with the team. (I certainly do less after bag day. I still work, and work a lot, but no longer to the exclusion of other parts of my life.)

I am now more interested in CMU/MIT than Juilliard/Oberlin; in Randy Pausch than Placido Domingo; in data storage and analysis than in opera. I don't think it's overly narcissistic of me to consider that a success for FRC; it seems very much like what FIRST was founded to do. If bag day were removed and our build season schedule extended, however, then it may not have been possible. The "responsible" decision for me would have been to not join my FRC team, not be exposed to engineering as a possibility, and stay with music and performance as paths for my life. That would have been a shame. Ignoring the time demands of students with other interests detracts from FRC's appeal to students who aren't already interested in STEM.

That said, the compromises from previous threads look like really good ideas.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I agree wholeheartedly with this, and think it's the most compelling and important argument against the 6-week build season. Yes, the top teams (and a growing number of middle tier teams) build two robots... expending more resources, etc.... but they'll always expend a lot of effort and will probably compete marginally better without the "6-week" system. The difference is that the teams that don't have the resources to make a second robot can suddenly have a far more developed product at their first event if they still put in at least as much effort.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I think the major "resource" that teams need to improve their robots, either in 6 weeks or in a longer time, is effort. Getting the motivation to put in this extra effort is the tricky part. Having the time available is not the issue--we've heard from a few self proclaimed low-resource teams that consistently produce great robots in 6 weeks, because they effectively use all the time available.

Teams that have their act together can build a great robot in 6 weeks, or 12 weeks. Teams that don't have their act together will probably build the same so-so robot in 12 weeks that they now build in 6 weeks.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

The reason I personally am not a fan of the 6 week build season is that it gives one the idea that we stop. Been doing this long enough to know that FIRST teams rarely stop at 6 weeks. I am a people leader at my job (it's part of my duty) and if someone on my team with the crazy hours we work took 6 weeks of their time to do this every possible non-work/non-sleep hour and then more and more time outside of that I would ask them to think over the impact this quasi-deadline is having on them.

However there is a learning issue at work here and after a good long time I am making efforts to decouple it. I can't teach a really motivated programmer or CNC machinist (that's right I am treating these young adults as young professionals with a skill) a large amount of what I could teach them in a mere 6 weeks. MORT (FRC11) does MORT-U between September and just before Thanksgiving 2 nights a week. Even that is not enough. It's not merely a MORT thing, or a MAR thing or even an FRC thing. They have the same issue at NextFAB and that has little to do with FIRST at all. Also that commitment of 6 weeks every night is really hard for me at a personal level considering the scale of my responsibilities (I work in Manhattan and Mount Olive is 2.5 hours each way).

So I am slowly gathering machine tools light enough to be mobile and FRC parts to make it possible to decouple from MORT the programming and CNC efforts. Then, even in the summer when we have limited access, we always have a shop and access to robots. Still on the fence on where we will work but everything is mobile and 115VAC so where ever it is we will make do. Plus this decouples from the charitable corporation and the school so if I decide to help out some other venture with the tools I am free to do so.

If the learning opportunities are not interrupted by demotivating factors I really think the 6 week build season is ample if you have enough people to share the load which does often directly work against new teams. I have rarely seen a new team that came into FIRST with all of the required skills to compete with the veterans, mind you, many learn impressively fast but the playing field is hardly level. It has taken me 20 years to decide to commit what amounts to $15k to building tooling that doesn't actually serve my business purposes (I can do my job and run my businesses with a cheap printer, laptop and Internet). Now I just need to make it finally happen and see how many students commit their time to this opportunity.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Personally, I'm rather swayed by the international team argument - if we remove bag day, it automatically puts those teams at a disadvantage, as they have to be hands off the competition robot while it ships. Having had teams from Hawaii or China at my events before, I don't want to see them decide to just to local events so they have that extra week or two to work on the robot. We'd miss having them and the different experiences they bring to the event!

Also, having the 6 week deadline directly amirrors how things go for me at work as a software engineer. You spend a lot of time working on a release, with a known target date. You meet that date and package up your "dot-zero" release. Then you turn around and start working on the "dot-one" release, fixing everything you didn't have time to fix within your schedule, or addressing bugs that were found late in the process. There's a lead time between finishing the release and going live, and as a result your under time pressure to finish the "dot-one" release so you go live with that instead of the "dot-zero". Then it goes live and your customers find all sorts of stuff you missed. So you go back and start working on fixing those in a "dot-two" release, again under a time crunch because you don't want to tick off your customers for too long.

In FRC, your bagged robot is version 1.0. You keep working on improvements, and practice day at the event you change it to 1.1. Then you see how it does on the field, design other improvements, and address those for version 1.2 at your next event. Take away stop-build, and your short changing that cycle, in my opinion.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

So technically I help lead several hundred software developers. A project with a timeline so short it negatively impacts the people doing the work and produces broken product that no one thinks meets any of the expectations is a project not scoped correctly.

I think the 6 week timeline can be met with significant pressure on the people driving it. I also think what comes out from all of the FRC teams is pretty darn impressive and definitely most people can see it being competition worthy.

So I would propose:

1. We should have a deadline that is a longer by just a few weeks.
A. So that the commitment is not every night and weather has less impact which can be dangerous.
B. The teams that get close have a little more time to get to the destination.

2. There should be more study of what makes new teams successful with an eye towards improving that experience.

I know work tends to grow to fill the time you give it. So realistically there will be people who will waste just as much time with more time. However one can always point out the expansion of the technical problem by people who lack the foresight to see the outcome before hand. I am pointing out the actual level of commitment for this challenge is higher than is required from my teams at a professional level and if at a professional level I worked my employees like this I would loose some of them to jobs that pay just as well, produce just as many results and do it by working smarter.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

There is a mistaken impression that 45 days is the traditional build season length, therefore 45 days is the optimal balance of avoiding burnout and producing good results.

We could go shorter OR longer, and people would adapt to make it work. Your team's definition of a sustainable, "sane enough" pace is going to change depending on the length of the build sprint.

We could have any length of build season from 3 days up to a multi-year season. We've seen what RI3D build sprints look like. A team could try to sustain that type of around-the-clock, break-neck pace through 100% of every day of the entire 45 day build season. But they don't.

The longer the time period you look at, the lower the maximum level of average sustained output a human will be able to provide. If people are close to their max over 45 days, that means their level of average sustained output would have to be less over a longer period of time.

Try to imagine the other extreme. If FIRST released the 2020 game after this year's Championship, then this year's 8th graders could start working on their senior year FRC game before they even get to high school. If the system was like that, would everybody automatically start working on it (plus 2019, 2018, 2017 games) for 4+ years running as if it was a long version of the 45 day build sprint? That would cause everyone to get get fired / get divorced / drop out / suffer various health problems / have a mental health breakdown and so on. But really that wouldn't happen. People would adjust their behavior.

1) A longer build season would change some behaviors of FRC teams.
2) If a team tries to sustain a schedule that actually isn't sustainable for them over any length of time, it isn't the rest of the teams' fault for forcing them to do that.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I would be in favour of a slightly longer build season. 8 weeks maybe?

A few posts back someone said that a team that doesn't have its act together will produce the same so-so robot in 12 weeks as it would have in 6 weeks. That sounds like a derogatory comment, but it's probably true, and I would take the viewpoint of "well in that case, why not?" If not for a better quality robot then for better mental sanity for all the students and mentors and parents involved. A longer build season would be a little bit less stress and that might actually mean the difference between giving up at the 11th hour and just slapping it together, or having the ability to say "ok, let's take a break, rest, and look at it again tomorrow".

I have worked on software projects that "required" a lot of overtime due to overly aggressive schedules, and everyone who has been in this position knows that the work you produce at 11pm on a Sunday night is not the same quality as the work you produce during the regular weekday.

Having a slightly longer build season would also be a little more forgiving for those teams that don't "have their act together". The team I was on last year had a good pedigree but was hobbled because of (a) some design churn and (b) one of their manufacturing sponsors promised to make some parts and were two weeks late getting them. That resulted in everything "sliding to the right". It happens to the best of us. I like that there IS a stop build day, though, because you do need to deal with this in the real world.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I think it is worth mentioning that many software development shops are moving to continuous integration and software release cadence is being shortened. I live in the DevOps world (mostly on the Ops side but I speak the language of both camps) and it's an interesting analogy to what we (my team) go through with building two robots in FRC.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Agreed. The team I lead is a DevOps team in an environment shifting towards our model:

The trick is that merely releasing frequently is pointless if the quality control feedback is not there. One needs to recognize that a 2 week scrum in an agile workflow is a soft deadline. One is supposed to evolve scheduling that matches the feedback from the working results. It's not unusual that major corporations merely setup 2 week scrums and make hard unyielding deadlines like it's a health check and then they realize that 'done' is not 'done'.

To make CI/CD work you have to work like a manufacturer. You have to adapt at each checkpoint changing direction to yield the best result with the resources you have. It's not just continuous deployment and integration it is also continuous improvement. I can't not express how many times that 'continuous improvement' part is totally lost on the people who think tossing Jenkins in will fix all their issues.

With just 6 weeks there is really a limit to what can really be delivered. It's a soft deadline that building 2 robots does change but at the cost of 2 robots. It's like forking a software development project because you know you are going to come up short.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I did an informal poll at last year's IRI, walking around the pits asking teams if they had a practice robot.

I don't still have my notes. If I remember correctly, 3 teams there had not built a practice robot. Two were in district areas and felt that they no longer needed to with the unbag time. One was from a regional area.

The remainder of teams at this event had a practice robot.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

If we had a 6 week build season, and at around week 5 it was then extended to an 8 week build season, then I think the extra time would help many teams. But if we know that we have 8 weeks, we'll try to do more, and still not get it done in time.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Yes! It's a lot like picking out a wrench and saying "I'm ready to build a robot now!" when in reality you need multiple wrenches, other tools, training, and a team who has bought into the idea of building the robot in the same way! I feel your pain, trust me.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

This is an obvious concern that people will not exercise good foresight. The less you really know about the competition and the hardware the more likely this will happen.

In DevOps we fix this with a checkpoint. Show your work and tell us how you will reach the end in 2 more weeks. It serves the same purpose without replicating the robot which is cost ineffective. Perhaps teams could be required to show their work to their peers in the area. I mean we ask for documentation which, in theory, should show the plan.

The way FIRST works now is very waterfall. We give you 6 weeks. Then judge how complete you are at the hard stop at the first competition you show up to. However some teams manage to slip a little more time in by taking it out of the time they have between the 2: stop build and competition. I am pretty sure we can all tell if you have no drive train at all by the end of 6 weeks you are in trouble.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

A lot of people are saying that eliminating build season will benefit low resource teams. I think the exact opposite would happen.

Right now, even if you do build a practice robot, it's a clone of your bagged robot that you use for driver practice and to test modifications. By eliminating stop build day, you don't stop teams from building a second robot, but you make that second robot a completely new iteration on the first.

High level teams have already proven that they have the time and money for this but the majority of the FRC community does not.

What this means is that instead of getting some advantage out of building a second robot, which some high level teams (610 if I'm not mistaken) have foregone, it now becomes almost impossible to compete at a high level without building a second robot.

My former team has built two robots since 2011 and my current team will start building a second robot this year. However, even with building two robots, the end of build season brings the intensity of our schedule way down.

Do, while I sympathize with the teams who don't have time to practice in the six week window, know that by eliminating the six week build season, low resource teams would have an even harder time keeping up and to be competitive, a build season intensity schedule would be required all the way through champs.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

We are going to build three robots (1 comp and 2 practice) for 2016.

Why?

The competition season is longer than the build season.

We will do more development and iteration during the competition season than the build season.

We want two robots to iterate faster during the competition season.

I think its clear that the gap is wide between us and low resource teams because we have the money to buy 3x of robot parts, and get to play with two robots post-stop build, and low resource teams get to play with zero robots post-stop build.

You make the call if the gap shrinks when low-resource teams get to play with their one and only robot while we're playing with our two or three robots.

We meet 4 days a week.

-Mike

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

So you've never found a bug in your production code? Never had a customer ask for a change to a feature you just released? Never asked any of your employees to work late or spend a little time on the weekend to get something out the door on the scheduled date? Honestly, that sounds like fantasy to me. There are always bugs. There's always stuff your customers are going to want done differently. And there's always stuff that won't go quite as planned, requiring either extra time or dropped features to hit your deadline (which, sometimes, is imposed on you by forces outside your control).

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Required? Absolutely not. There's nothing that says every team HAS to compete at the same level. As Mike so clearly states, right now the best teams do keep up the intensity, and most likely ramp up as more information becomes available on other teams and new strategies, during the competition season. As you said, your team brings the intensity down after the build season. Those are choices that every team makes and every team can continue to make if there is no bag day. The difference would be how effective your time can be during the competition season. If you don't meet at all now, you could continue to not meet and play with the same robot you start the comp season with. If you do meet and currently build two robots, you could potentially drop it down to one robot and still perform the same functions. If you meet and build three robots now maybe you can get away with two and maintain efficiency. Nothing is ever going to completely level the playing field and I don't necessarily think we should try. But this will help teams who want to be competitive and have the drive but not the resources compete at a higher level.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Comparing the build season to agile development is a seriously flawed comparison. Stop build day is not the last day of a single sprint - it's the last day of the entire release, which was composed of many sprints (for my team 6, one sprint per week, which is a little shorter than most agile shops).

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

In about the last 10 months I've worked about 1,000 hours of time over a 8 hour work day specifically because someone scoped a project with too little time to make the core delivery. Bugs or not.

That's not a little over time. That's basically 70 hours a week. All because someone didn't actually think about the scope, or did not understand the scope, of the core deliverable.

There's a great big difference between mostly there and off by a mile. In some cases you build a massive piece of computing infrastructure at break neck and break your necks doing it. In others you build a robot that has to accomplish 2 tasks: compete and educate. A lot of people compete but we should be honest: how many can claim that with a little more time they wouldn't have been able to educate better?

Correct it's a hard stop that, because of the way it's done, is not a real hard stop.
You can literally buy yourself more time by buying parts for more robots.
My point was it should be a soft stop: we should checkpoint at the 6 week mark such that we close the loophole.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

And how does that compare to the 6 week build season? In my experience, it is entirely possible to build a successful robot in 6 weeks. It's also possible to blow your own schedule and not meet the deadline. Figuring out how to deal with that, the importance of checkpoints and adjustments along the way is a crucial part of engineering.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

For most teams, I think removing the stop build day is a positive thing. It will make teams able to be more competitive and remove the need to build expensive practice robots.

However, teams who have to travel long distances to compete are at a disadvantage with the removal of stop build. If I have to ship my robot out a week in advance of an event, I lose that week of time to build and iterate. If you're a team that plans on attending a week 2 and 4 regional, for example, you lose out on week 1 and week 3 that your opponents have to iterate.


I would prefer one of the compromises illustrated earlier in the thread here, but given the choice between having a stop build day and not having a stop build day, I'd prefer not having it.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I wanted to point these out as this theme continues in this thread. How many of us are holding FIRST's competition structure responsible for our own lack of time management/self restraint during build season?

So asks one very, very guilty party, herself. I didn't quote those to single anyone out - I am rarely one to find an adequate life balance when I have a goal in mind. Competition structure amplifies this. How many people want to show up to the table completely outclassed? I am reading that we are concerned with our individual 'me' times, but what I think we're really saying are these points:

- To stay competitive, we'd have to completely revamp the comfortable and expected structure & schedule we've had in place for our team, especially where our own personal limitations/boundaries have been set. This may mean someone else may have to help pick up the slack when leading the team or the build.

- To do what's best for our teams with this new deadline, we'd have to determine if our current competition strategy changes in any way based on the resource levels of our team and the competitions available to us, and decide what would work best for us/in our region (e.g., "Early or late regional?", "Regional location"?). We already do this to a point, but our first year of this new competition structure would be a big question.

- It is a relative unknown how my team will react to having the extra time. I do know what needs to be accomplished in six weeks. I don't necessarily know what we can create in 8, 10, 12 weeks, or how to schedule that, limit that, budget that. It's an unknown, well, because we haven't done it before.

I have mixed feelings, and it brings up a lot of questions for me.

Why is design convergence bad? What are the students learning that they would not learn otherwise?
Why is the deadline of my first competition date (which is known before build season) any different than the existing, somewhat-by-choice deadline of stop build day?
How does day 1 of competitions change without teams seeing a different robot on CD and then working like crazy to change/needing to refine their bagged robot?
How would my team change their overall meeting schedule for a late regional? An early one?

All of these could be a thread on their own. What I have realized from the fact-based points brought up in this thread, and did not previously consider, is that FIRST would have to seriously think through how this would affect teams that must ship to their events due to location, and if that disadvantage is severe.

Most other assumptions here are in fact speculations made without any real data, so I'm weighing those as personal viewpoint without factual analysis.

I don't know if lower-resource teams will have a tougher time, or find it easier to have a more competitive robot. Even if not as competitive as the top tier.
I don't know the percentage of teams that already build a second robot or at least a partial build. I was surprised by Collin's post.
I don't know if higher-resource teams will spread out the work, or continue to work at a six week schedule with bonus for driver training.
I don't know how the challenge of the game will change any of this. Minibot year vs. endless recycling vs. FIRST Frenzy with many tasks.
I don't know if more teams will experience burnout, or if it may relieve burnout with the added burden of finding someone else to help.

I have been on teams on both extreme ends of the spectrum - from extremely successful seasons to one-and-done regionals where we came in last or nearly last with a completely non-functioning robot. I'm still pondering how this schedule would have changed those teams, but the above questions are still kicking around in my brain. I think my next step is an old-fashioned pros and cons list. :)

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

This topic seems to come up every year, and on average the general consensus here seems to trend towards eliminating Stop Build Day. I have two main counters to this trend.

Mentor/Team Burn-Out and Level-Loading Higher and Lower Resource Teams: I grouped these together because they are connected when it comes to the lower resource teams. Though some have brought it up, it seems to me from reading this thread that some here have lost sight that Chief Delphi is not a proper sampling of FIRST Robotics Competition Teams as a whole. Most lower resource teams that I have talked with drastically reduce how long they meet in the weeks between stop build day and competition. So when deciding if mentor (and/or student) burn-out would happen, remember that you should be thinking of the teams that struggle to have enough mentors (and/or students) during build season due to the current time commitments already being a massive deterrent. As a result I don’t think the elimination of stop-build day will level-load these teams with their higher-resource counterparts, if anything it might just move them further down the bracket in terms of competitiveness.

Teaching Real-World Engineering: This to me is the larger, if not largest, reason to keep stop build day. Whenever I am explaining FIRST to someone who is deciding if they are going to provide me something* based on what the program is I ALWAYS use that it teaches “Real-World Engineering” as a selling point. Then go on to explain that the students have a strict timeline, budget, and build constraints like they will once (if?) they get an engineering job post-grad. In addition to being a selling point, it is also a good teaching point. Once these students enter the work force they will not have a deadline that they get to decide (teams decide which events they do, if we eliminate stop build day, this will become a bigger deal than it already is), nor will they have extended time to study and analyze the competition then completely rework their work to take advantage of the lessons they learned from their competition.**

*the something could be team based such as funding or mentors; student based such as a scholarship or university admissions offer; event based such as volunteers; or personal based such as a job offer.

**This already happens to an extent, but I envision would get worse if stop build day was eliminated.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Sure anyone should be able able to assemble the KOP and have a driving robot and very likely an end effector in 6 weeks.

Will assembling that KOP teach you about programming? Not so much.
Will assembling that KOP teach you about CNC? Not so much.
Will assembling that KOP teach you electronics? Not even a FIRST goal for the most part (hence we provide the control system).

My point: what is your goal to merely build a robot to show up on the field?

My goal is not just to build a robot, it's to educate and mentor students in the skills that built that robot. So will I be successful? Sure I will reduce my scope till we succeed at the price of my goals which are larger than the time provided.

I can do this even faster. I can just build the robot myself with 2 or 3 trained engineers and let the students watch and learn how it is done. Accumulating none of the tactile education they could have gotten. Heck I've built military robots I can just show up and hand them the controls teaching them with the right amout of money you can buy someone else's hard work. Military probably prefer this anyway: drone pilots that when they retire no longer have drones.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

This is important to me, because I find improving a marginally effective robot to be the most inspiring part of FRC competition. Stopping at a robot that almost works or sort of works is sad. The stop build date leaves a lot of teams stuck at that point in the process.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

techhelpbb: You already have the rest of the year to learn all that fun stuff.

I'm surprised how many people seem to think that you can improve teams' time management skills by simply giving them more time. It doesn't work that way.

It only takes 3 days to build a robot.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I support this but I worry that such a rubric would be royal pain to scope.
This would require some serious thought to do and I doubt it would be as straight forward as a vote with no context.

I guess the first step is to agree there's a good reason to consider it and that it will result in action from FIRST who governs all this.

Actually we really do not have the whole year:

It is very likely you can loose the summer if the school is where the tools are and the tools are not mobile.

If the students participate in other activities it is hard without a structure provided to keep them engaged. Yes the deadline serves this purpose but there are better ways.

On the other hand, as I pointed out before, weather can be dangerous and storms do not move just because someone sets a deadline. Also a lot of business have critical deadlines in those first 6 weeks of a year. When it comes down to it this is about time management: do you manage the time that pays the bills and feeds you family or do you manage the time for something that extends critical missing skills into your school system that taxes the money you earn to continue to operate?

Again I can build a robot in 1 day with the parts in my barn right now. What does it do for my community to do that?

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I can be done in less time. ;)

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

This may have been mentioned earlier and I missed the post but I remember a video back in 2011 where Dean Kamen was explaining a purposeful _feature_ of FRC was the 6 Week Build-period.

Dean explained that he wanted FRC teams to have a close to real-life engineering experience where students were given a substantial project to complete, like professional engineers get everyday, without the best budget and not enough time.

I believe he said a survey was done of engineers asking generally how much time their bosses give them to take a concept and then deliver a working machine and the average time came out to 6 weeks--so that's the genesis right there.

I think we need to look at 6 week build as a baked-in pillar by the founder.

On our team since our 2nd season/2012 we have built full-twin practice bots (minus the powder coating) and we just keep whacking-on-it (our term for being iterative - lol) and moving the improvements over to the comp bot till our season ends--we never stop improving/learning.

But we're a well-funded team, hopefully again this season, and I get the cost barrier to some teams to producing a 2nd practice bot. However, there's a way around this, not perfect but it works, and is the approach we took in our Rookie year/2011 when we unexpectedly were on the Alamo winning alliance and on our way to Champs.

What we did was take a load of pictures and exact measurements of our only bot before it was bagged/tagged and impounded for Champs and then we built an inexpensive wood-framed replica of the chassis/structures in order to add an extensive Minibot feature that was completely missing from our competition bot. We put the wood chassis on casters and hand pushed the "bot" to approach and line-up for Minibot deployment--it worked really well in the shop and when we dismantled and installed on the bot in St. Louis everything fit perfectly.

Because of this approach of finding a way to make it work... we were able to have a new offensive capability that resulted in Ranking 17th in Archimedes in 2011--though no one picked us--yes it still stings. ;-)

I only provide this info to highlight that there are ways to achieve success even with a 6 Week Build-period _and_ not enough money to have a second practice bot.

--Michael Blake

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

This, I think, is the crucial point right here.

And I hear the people who are talking about burnout. I am very nearly burned-out myself at this point, having invested far more of myself in FRC over these past few years than was at all wise for a college student (in fact, I am still deciding to what extent I will be involved this coming season, even though I will have graduated by then - I do not think it would be healthy for me to repeat what I've been doing). But a six-week build season did not make the burnout any less bad, because as has been noted, work never really stops after the robot is in the bag.

In 2014, I spent the entirety of my spring break scrambling to hobble together a practice bot so that we could debug and drive test a design that was put in the bag without ever having actually run. Sure, this was a "choice" - but the "choice" was between this and a guaranteed flop at our first regional. How many mentors do you know who'd have chosen the latter? And the fact is, we barely got that practice bot together, at rather huge out-of-pocket cost to some of our students' parents, to boot. The cost to our team from not having access to our robot after bag day was massive.

I do not think this is a cost that is equal across teams of wildly varying resources, and for that reason I think the bag day should go.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Again, your missing the point. You can build a SUCCESSFUL robot in 6 weeks. Over the past 9 years, my team has only made significant changes at competition twice. We've been finalists 3 times, winners twice, and almost always play in eliminations (usually as captain or first round pick). And all of that is done with a student led team that emphasizes training and experience over getting the perfect robot out. Sure, if it was just the mentors on our team building, we'd be done in a week. But the mentors do very, very little building.

The point is, the schedule may be a limiting factor to how much you can do, but it shouldn't be a limiting factor in producing a successful robot if your team can develop a good process and plan for the season.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I could see arguments to both. As a team that builds a practice bot, I'm sure our team is for removing stop build day since we work through competitions season anyways. That being said, low resource teams or teams with not so time committed mentors might not like the change. Stop build day is a good excuse for mentors to not have to work for another 6-8 weeks and although building a practice bot is an option, it's a HUGE obstacle a team has to overcome both financially and time wise in order to continue working after stop build day. By removing the obstacle, their really isn't that great of an excuse to stop working other than the fact that you don't want to and all the less time committed mentors would be looked at as real bad guys. Heck the rest of the school might look down upon the team if they stopped working after 6 weeks when their season is 12. So yes while teams that don't want to work past 6 weeks could just decide not to, there is a lot of pressure to continue working, especially if the students want to(let's be real, most students would want to).

I'm okay with whatever FIRST decides. Especially since the scenario I laid out is probably the reality of the majority of FRC teams. Even some higher caliber teams as indicated in this thread shows this.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

That's fine. You built the robot and it placed highly in competition.
My point is that building the robot is not enough.
The fact you can take longer to build the robot is not always about adding features.

Team 11 & 193 (both in Mount Olive High School) both student led teams build generally at least 3 robots sometimes 4 in 6 weeks. Sometimes we add on a few prototypes as we go. One major reason we split the team was because with so many people on just Team 11 wouldn't get the full experience they could have. Now we facilitate that at the cost of a whole extra team.

So it's not just about building the robot. If it was I wouldn't need FIRST.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

YES!

The program's founder(s) and eminent spokesmen, are publicly proud about this. It's definitely a feature, and not a problem.

I don't remember ever hearing one of them complain that the best (or any) on-field robots needed a few more weeks of work put into them. I don't remember ever hearing them complain that participants aren't receiving enough vocational training.

I do remember hearing them encourage everyone in FRC spend time adding/inspiring new participants, and helping rookies or struggling vets have a good, inspiring, experience.

Encouraging everyone to invest any excess competitive passion into looking outward, rather than inward, remains my 2¢

Blake

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

That's actually my point. I am not sure that we are making this easily accessible with that deadline. So even if we can inspire we are inspiring people to do something hard and in the process we are raising the cost to them.

However we are often not raising the costs (consider all the various kinds of cost) in the same way for everyone. Pardon me for saying but I see no study that shows what the impact of this deadline is. Shouldn't that be the barometer: an act of scientific understanding?

I mean I understand the value of our leaders here, but then again no organization can run on shear good will alone.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Except you can already keep building after 6 weeks if you want to! Current "stop build day" is only a stop build day if you are unwilling (or financially/logistically unable) to continue working on your withholding allowance and/or a second robot.

I think (the general lack of) local access to good practice fields is what short changes the cycle. Many teams don't put their "1.0" robot on anything resembling an FRC field until their first competition, and then they have to react and scramble to adjust without their robot in their shop. This is why year after year, the stats show that robots get dramatically better after their first event.

I agree that if you made build season 8 or 10 weeks long and don't address this, many teams will show up to their first event with little more than slightly more polished versions of the same robots they show up with now. The difference is that getting to 1.1 and 1.2 (and in some cases 2.0) has fewer barriers. The difference between your 1.0 and 1.1 robots can be the difference between a student having a wholly disappointing experience and an extremely rewarding one - every team should have that opportunity, and shouldn't have to work through artificial barriers to do so!

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

At the risk of poking the bear...

Is it disingenuous to say to people that "these teams built these robots in just six weeks" when in fact it is often 10 or 12 weeks for many (not all) of the top teams?

I know that I've had more than one comment from a mentor that they didn't expect to invest more than 6 weeks into the FRC build season only to find out that they invest a lot more time.

EDIT: Changed a word.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I would say a robot is a lot like a home. There is likely a date when the house finished being built, but that doesn't mean your finished making it your home.

If the goal of the statement is a nice sound-bite for an investor/reporter, I think you can generally make that statement and sleep at night. If you are trying to warn a prospective mentor, then I think it is wise to give a range. IE, this is the minimum amount of time we would be looking for to still be considered a mentor. Maximum amount of time can vary up to XX hrs/week for potentially 4 months...

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

I'm going to commit to stop talking about the 6 week build season. I moved to calling it 45 days a few years ago but I think I'm done with that too. At this point if anyone says "All the teams have only six weeks to build their robots.", it's pretty much a lie. If that is helping get sponsors we shouldn't be doing it anymore since it's not the truth. Does "building a robot in 6-12 weeks" sound all that less impressive?

From and including: Saturday, January 9, 2016 (Kickoff)
To and including: Saturday, April 30, 2016 (Last Day of Championship)
Result: 113 days

#113Days

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

If I understand you correctly, what you are writing about are some of the reasons I would love to see this thread morph a robust discussion of the extremely complex subject of how to have a true 6-week build season, even if what gets built in that period might not be *every* single thing a team takes to a competition.

Human nature, and North American culture, being what they are, I don't expect that will happen; but that doesn't mean I can't lean in the direction of a cultural change. ;)

Blake

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

We need an award for best robot built entirely at the competition ;) with a runner up for the most neatly organized box of parts.

http://static.themetapicture.com/med...nt-kidding.jpg :D

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Having a Week 0 scrimmage event is just as good as having a bag day for the purpose of creating an incentive to meet a deadline ahead of a team's first event.

The Bag and Tag deadline is purely a disadvantage for our team from that perspective. We already have a strong incentive to get to a functional state in 6 weeks, and we already continue working after that 6 week period ends. Bag and Tag only adds cost and hassle. Purely artificial and unnecessary cost and hassle, I might add.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Teams that already do well will continue to do well without a bag day.
Teams that already struggle to build a robot will continue to struggle without a bag day.
Teams that already don't use all the time they have will continue to do so without a bag day.
Teams that already have trouble allocating time properly will continue to have trouble without a bag day.

But teams that are able to build a decent robot in six weeks but don't have the funds to build a practice robot built benefit from the elimination of a bag day.


Speaking as someone who has to deal with the school/robotics balance, and from a team that will probably take the lack of a bag day to mean we can put off making decisions even longer, I would definitely miss the bag day. But it's my (or my team's) own responsibility to allocate time properly.

It doesn't make sense to punish a very specific group of teams because of a rule that to many basically doesn't exist.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Interesting take on it, Rachel. I think we fall into this category, yet I don't see how we'd benefit from eliminating bag day. We can build a decent robot in 6 weeks, then we get to stop for a little while and relax. I really like that.

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

As a supplement to this discussion, I posted a poll here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=139390

Re: Mythical Six Week Build Season
 

Michael, in the end, once you bag your robot, you can build as many practice robots as you want but all you can do is fine tune the one you have in the bag. By opening up the build season, you can look at competitions, see what works, and build a completely new robot from scratch. The majority of teams can't do that. By keeping the six week build season, you're limited to minor changes to your robot, which can be achieved without a practice robot. In my opinion, this helps low resource teams be competitive and allows teams to dial down their schedule after build season.