Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

That implies that students do not want to see their robot do poorly, right?

A robot that does not perform well is not a robot those students want to see playing in a match. If a team has such a robot, for whatever reason, then more matches is not automatically a good thing.



I admit that I'm giving arguments that go against something that I personally believe: playing more matches is an appropriate goal. But I don't think I'm doing it just for the sake of arguing. I am honestly trying to answer people who seem to be asking why everyone else doesn't wholeheartedly agree that an 8-match schedule is a priori unacceptable.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

I understand that people like the regionals. If you are in the stands as a spectator and don't really get the whole robotics thing. Then yes. "more polished", air conditioned, and high quality seating is what you would probably what you want. But from a student. I will not speak for anyone but myself, but when I go to a competition, even like 10K this year where our team grenaded 3 gearboxes, broke our climber, broke our active intake, and our shooter loosened, I do not give a crap as to how comfortable the seats in the stands are. I don't care if the pits have AC. I don't care if I'm in a gym or a sports arena. If chairs really inspired me that much I would be in woodcrafting club and not robotics. I care if our robot works or not. Even if it works for 1 match but it works really well. I want to have our robot work.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

These two sentences really hit home with me. In 2013, my team had a really hard time financially and competitively. I am grateful we had the chance to play 2 events with 12 matches each. Every match was another chance for the robot to work. If we didn't have as many matches, we may not have had a chance to experience the bits of robot functionality we saw, like when we successfully blocked a full-court shooter for most of a match. Having those matches, and then a second competition after, gave us more chances to see success. If we didn't have a second competition (and if we had regionals, we wouldn't have), we may have not gotten our first judged award in four year that season.

More matches and more competitions give teams, especially struggling teams, more chances to work out their issues and be inspired by their hard work all coming together.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

Sorry to jump back a few pages I didn't have the time to post until now.

Do you think it would be worthwhile to create a video on the inspection process to walk teams through the checklist? For the most part it stays the same from year to year with new additions due to updated games/rules but a lot of the big issues like weight, size, and bumpers have been pretty consistent with a few small changes.

I know for a newbie in FIRST the inspection process was a mysterious part of competition until you go through it the first time. Sending a video like that with the inspection sheet a week before bag (if it can be made available that early) to teams could help them catch problems they might not have seen until then.

Imagine a field tour video but of a robot going through inspection.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

It might help, but it's also difficult to give good advice without the robot sitting in front of you. As an example, the 8" bumper rule has been really rough this year, but what can we do other than repeat the rule in such a video? If someone didn't understand it while reading the rules during the season, they won't understand it while having the rule read to them. And I personally won't release a video that contains anything that could be labeled as an "interpretation" of the rule. Interpretations are just too malleable. For example, take a look at the issue over Velcro on bumpers this year, or the question of legal pressure regulators. In both cases, my interpretation of the rule was changed twice in mid season, due to what I was told by HQ and the Q&A. I would support HQ doing such a video, but wouldn't want to do one all by myself, on my own initiative.

What we do already for teams, however, is offer inspection services during the build season. We have inspectors at the week-0 events (and usually an LRI at each of them!) performing inspections. I've driven to teams build spaces (up to an hour or so away) to perform inspections on them and their neighboring teams. We have inspection presentations at all of our December training events (led by an LRI) that informs teams of the biggest issues we see year to year, and covers most of the rules that generally don't change. I get emails and phone calls all season long about the Robot Rules, asking if something is legal or not, and am able to point those people to the specific rules that are most applicable, or recommend they get on the Q&A if it really is something ambiguous. All of that helps. I know there were teams competing in Minnesota that avoided serious issues at competition because those issues were identified in week-0, when they still had some time to fix them.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

Just an aside, the 8" bumper rule is, quite possibly, the most horribly communicated, critical-to-design rule in the entire game manual. Pains me to see so many rookies miss this mark.

I'm sure someone in this thread will just tell me to suggest a better a way to communicate it. Or if I care so much about it, to do it myself.

Alas, the internet.

-Mike

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

Wow people, I take a few hours to make a dent in my taxes and you add three pages of posts. I have a few things to add here so try and follow me it will be a bumpy ride...
Long overdue is my praise of the NDSU students at Duluth. I heard praise from almost everyone at the event. They handled themselves very well, doing the hard work that does need to get done at any event. From what I could see the FTA and other Key Volunteers, just pointed and said "go do (this)" and the next time they saw them it was done. Nice job everyone! I can give no higher praise that to say 'I would work with again, anytime'. I am thankful that you had a school schedule that allowed to attend the events.

Andrew, no one thinks less is more. I would love to see more than ten matches especially if my team could only attend one event. That being said, there are all kinds of issues that rear their ugly head that will compress that schedule. Every minute that is delayed, means the next regional will likely have less time to unload and setup. Regionals do not make the truck schedule. Districts will still have to transport the field, generators and other equipment from regional to regional. In districts in small states that is a lot easier than in larger states like Michigan and Minnesota. (BTW Michigan is larger than Minnesota in area)

A few things that haven't been mentioned yet...
Every team wants to take home hardware. Too many teams are missing out on the awards because or their travel schedule now. They end up leaving prior to the finals matches if they are not competing. If it was me, every team would get some kind of award. However, even the awards that we do give out, all take time to present. We could compress that little by making presentations during finals matches. Say for Highest Rookie Seed, Entrepreneur, Excellence in Design, etc. In a six minute reset time that is a good use of time.
Judges stay to the end (to present awards) and all of them have been going full on interviewing teams for two solid days and deliberating. To lengthen the day adds to their tough day. They are the very ones we want to keep happy as they are leaders in industry (at least many of them) and we are hoping that will garner sponsors for our teams and events. Many of those people have to travel as well. Districts have less awards so they have less time dedicated to presenting.
Finally, we need to load out the field. There is a lot of time in tearing down the field, getting it packed (correctly), loading the truck and getting it on the road. Any delay here may affect the next regional. Having been in Minnesota when the truck didn't show until midnight on Wednesday, I can tell you, it is very distressing. A team that did not attend that event stayed until the field was setup, after 4 AM on Thursday morning.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

Mike,
By far and away, more veteran teams had issues with the 8" rule than rookies (OK maybe 50/50). It has been very distressing that teams did not interpret the rules correctly, even after the Team Update #5 that added to the bumper drawings came out in Week 3 of build. There is a big arrow pointing to a bumper segment that is "<8 inches" as being "not OK".

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

No 8 play regionals are not reasonable, but I think thy are just a symptom of another issue. I don't think 64 team regionals are reasonable.

Good schedule is just far too important in a 64 team regional. Since, in a 64 team 8 play regional, before playoffs, teams can only play with 25% of teams and against 37.5% of teams. Where as in a 40 team 12 play event, team could play with 60% of the teams and against 90% of the teams before the playoffs. Now of course in the 40 team event you are likely to get repeats.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

I agree that the 8" minimum bumper width was a problem for Veteran teams not just Rookies. Granted there are far fewer Rookies but I only had one Rookie that showed up at the events I was at that had significant bumper problems and there were a number of Veterans with similar or bigger problems.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

Alan,

I appreciate you playing devil's advocate on the issue. I think this thread has made the benefits of more matches for more successful teams clear already, but there are a couple of reasons that struggling teams could also be motivated by playing more matches:

1. They are more likely to win and play with good teams. For some teams, just winning a match, even if they are contributing marginally, can be a great confidence booster. There was a rookie toaster-bot in Iowa who must have gone 2-8 or so, but every time they won a match their drive team was elated. By this same token, playing with a good team can help a robot contribute to a greater accomplishment than they would achieve on their own. If a team can only score one low goal in match, it's going to be much more exciting for students to see that boulder be the final one needed to capture the tower, than to be the only boulder scored in a match with two tortuga'd alliance members. At 10K Lakes, there were only about 3 really good robots, making it hard for the other 60 teams to get in matches with them.

2. They are more likely to have a mechanism work. There are some robot add-ons that need to have the stars align in order to work. There isn't necessarily a good fix for it in the pits, some teams just build mechanisms that need to have some luck involved to work (i.e. making the tolerances too small, or using pneumatics that are too weak to work reliably). My team's climber only worked once throughout the entire 10K lakes regional, but when it did, it was an incredibly exciting and inspiring moment for the team, and especially for those who had spent the most time on it.

And going the extra step to districts would obviously help, as there is clear data to show that scores rise at a team's second event.

I understand that it is incredibly difficult to free up time/space for more matches in MN right now, but saying that struggling teams would actually prefer having fewer matches is absolutely ridiculous. You can't give teams improper resources to succeed and grow (which is what's perpetuated with the 8-plays-a-season super regionals), and then use their lack of success as an excuse to continue those same practices.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

We had 26 rookies in Australia.

Issac, I have teams who came to their event hoping only to be able to drive. Their goal was to get on the field and when they did that they celebrated. We, of course, want more but we build on the accomplishments that are achieved. Many of those teams do exactly that. I did have one team that won the first match they played and decided to go out and have a big lunch to celebrate. They missed their next match. They only had red bumpers built and were working on the blue set, but as luck would have it, they only had red matches all day on Friday.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

In the PNW District we were blessed that Frank Merrick attended the DCMP. I took the opportunity to discuss the problems that we experienced with the 8" min bumper width rule this season. We came to an agreement that part of the problem is that the person writing the rules knows what they are trying to communicate and thus they are highly predisposed to read what they have written as clearly communicating the idea. That is because they know what they are trying to communicate and thus read into the words the intention behind the rules, that is present in their mind.

So I agree that reading the rules word for word will not do anything to make it clear to person who doesn't understand them by reading it themselves, because they don't have their own knowledge on what the intention was.

I do believe that a video that showed what defines a "side" and more importantly for this season a segment of a "side" if done properly, could go a long way to furthering the understanding of the rules by everyone.

A great example was with a team I saw at an event this season. Their mentor's argument was that there is no magic number that defines what creates a bumper that provides adequate protection. Their Robot had ~6" bumpers and they covered the full length of both frame segments on the front of their Robot. Extending the bumpers 2" in the direction of the center of the robot on both sides would have meant that they had an opening smaller than the diameter of the ball. So the conversation quickly turned to "making our bumpers wider will make our robot useless, so maybe we should just go home". (not the only time I heard that argument this season)

Once I explained to him that I agreed that their bumpers fully protected their robot, BUT that the 8" bumper width was created in part to make teams decide on the trade offs of their choice of robot size. Fact is that on the one hand you want as wide of an opening as possible to make it easier to acquire a ball without the need for perfect alignment, but on the other hand you want as narrow of a robot as possible to make fitting through the defense dividers and to fit on the batter/scale w/o interference from the batter dividers or an adjacent scaling robot, without perfect alignment, he accepted it. We then went to work creating a plan for a robot that was wider at the front that it was at the back to meet the rules.

Now to be frank I don't know for certain if that was the intention of the people who wrote the rules, but it did work to diffuse the situation and move from "you are making our robot worthless", to accepting my idea to increase the width of the front of the robot to be within the rules and still be able to intake a ball with their current opening and intake system.

So adding a little more explanation of the intention of the rules would also help to ensure that the reader fully understands what is required to be compliant with the rule.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

This was in part a design challenge to make you think about picking up boulders and adjusting your frame opening accordingly. However, this is not the first year that 8" segments were the rule.

Re: Are 8 play regional reasonable?
 

I don't help write the rules, so I can't know for sure... But I've always been under the impression that 8" was used to accommodate 4 digit team numbers. 8" plus 3.25" from having a noodle in the corner is enough room at a common font to fit a max sized team number (and many teams I see do fill the space on the bumper entirely with their number). This came from several years ago when they first introduced the 8" rule, and that year splitting team numbers was prohibited (which was also a headache to explain to some teams).

And as you said, it does help to force design tradeoffs, and encourage critical thinking about the game challenge.