Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

I have never encountered that mindset. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I do think (in my limited experience) it is pretty rare.

Have you encountered it often?

Blake

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

Improve the website.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

Silence! The beatings will continue until morale improves!
I mean you're from North Korea I bet the commute to the South for competition days is interesting.:ahh:

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

Re-reading it I think I worded what I was trying to say wrong.

I've haven't ran into much difficulty getting students into FIRST, but getting them to commit time to FIRST can be difficult. The difficulty of having them commit time raises the older students get because they have likely already commit time to other extracurricular and part-time work.

Essentially I think middle school age and older elementary school students will be more likely to commit their time to FIRST if they know there is an FRC team waiting for them in high school. But if an FRC team doesn't exist in a high school they'd be more eager to dedicate time to other extracurricular activities over FIRST.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

True. Needs more Flash and popups. :D

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

This year at Indiana State Champs we played
45: 2 with 2 against
135: 1 with 2 against
829: 1 with 2 against
1018: 1 with 2 against
1024: 1 with 4 against
1501: 0 with 3 against
1529: 0 with 2 against
1720: 1 with 2 against
1741: 1 with 2 against
3180: 1 with 2 against
3936: 0 with 2 against

The rest of our match ups were fairly low occurrence ( 1 with/against or 0 with/against). I even buy the 1 to 2 relationships since it's a small event. The thing I thought was weird was the times we had including 1024 and 1501. That's a lot of times we are both on the field.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

Do you think of this as something to be fixed (to improve the FIRST experience), something to be urgently fixed, or something that is merely interesting to notice?

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

As someone who bore witness to the weird "group play" you can get at smaller events by way of districts, I can only imagine what it is like in Indiana where there is a good chance you will see somewhere around 20+ of the same teams at all 3 events.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

More than anything, that's the result of playing 12 matches per team at a 31 team event. A new "round" starts every six matches, leaving little flexibility when intermixing teams while still maintaining minimum gaps between each teams' matches. As a result, you're going to get even more overlap than usual.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

We're getting off topic, but I think you can look at Indiana and Michigan as both having district systems that REALLY test the definition of "scalability". The systems work and give teams a lot of things they want, but they both run into really weird problems. IN can see the 5th best robot in the state miss worlds while something like 20 teams in Michigan can miss the expanded MSC elims and still make it. They have also backed themselves into some pretty interesting scenarios. IN teams practically have to leave the state if they don't want to play everyone in the state 3 times a year and FiM is having this "problem you would love to have" where they have to use a facility twice a year to run their 4-events-a-week-for-6-weeks schedule in a suitable manner.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

I agree highly with the quote in bold. I would add that no one on the team should be afraid to raise a safety concern, no matter the importance. Anyone should be able to stop an operation in progress if he or she isn't comfortable with the situation.

I would hope the award is based on solely having a good safety program in place that doesn't need to be needlessly complex. If the students want to promote safety by packaging a couple of band aids and a hair tie in an egg, I really don't have an issue with that.

I can see where this could be an easy trap to fall into, especially on well-funded teams. Follow the money...

Hopefully for us, a simple, elegant design solution will win out over something that's overly complex. Doing something just because we can isn't always the best answer. Having more points of failure adds to more headaches. Strength, reliability, and controllability is where the focus should be for a young team such as ours. I just haven't figured out the order and where I fit in with the team yet.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

Isn't that more of an issue with your own team and being dismissive of other teams' cultures than an issue of how those other teams run?

Every team is different and the level of involvement/dedication can vary greatly from both the mentors and students on any given team. I ask my own students not to judge other teams robots as "mentor built" but rather to get to know the other teams and the work they put in to their robots... both as students and mentors.

This post isn't really directed at you but at what I see as a larger issue within FRC where teams are becoming more and more dismissive of other teams' cultures. It ends up being wrapped up as overly-simplified statements like "that team's robot was built by mentors!" or "that team takes this too seriously" or "that team isn't as good as they think they are" or "that team is just acting in safety theater" or "that team should stop reading the rules for loop holes" or "that team has a mentor coach instead of student coach" and the list goes on and on and on...

I feel like as a community we are better than this and need to rise above it and learn to be more respectful of the cultural differences that exist between teams. Every team is different and I feel like it shouldn't be up to my team to judge that another team's robot was built correctly by students or incorrectly by mentors.

But hey... that's just me and what I think would make FRC better.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

I may have worded that badly. It's mostly just the new members who do this, but they make up a sizable portion of the team. But no, I don't think that it's just us dismissing other teams' cultures. When a team that has been around for almost 10 years still has mentors doing most of the work on the robot, and not even trying to engage the students, that team's culture needs a change.
We do try not to judge them, but when we're pit scouting and the students need mentors to explain how the robot works, and say that their drivetrain is "LabView", it's hard not to think that the mentors designed the robot.

Still, I agree with you. We shouldn't dismiss all good teams just because of a few of them, and we do need more cooperation. FIRST is "more than robots", so we should try to put GP and learning over winning. That's what would make FIRST a lot better.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

These quotes right here are raise a couple of common problems I'd like to see all of us work towards changing. The first problem is it's easy for us to assume a highly polished, well-designed, well-executed robot must be mentor-built. If you are at an event with such a team's robot, please go ask the students on that team how the robot works and what their process was (i.e. design, fabrication, training, project management, etc.) before jumping to such conclusions. You might learn something to help your team.

The other issue is giving into the temptation of having the most highly qualified people (usually mentors) do all of the work to the extent of crowding out of student participation. All teams want to put their best foot forward. It slows the process down if you have to incorporate less experienced students into the mix. But you have to bear in mind what the point of the program is. As much as we all love to win, the success of your team should be measured by how many highly engaged STEM students it turns out.

Re: What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

I agree with this. The only thing I would add is that just because the robot was built by mentors or is being repaired by mentors does not mean the students failed to learn or did not participate in the process. All teams are different and the level of participation by students or mentors in a given team is up to that team. On the flip side, teams should always and constantly reflect on these questions internally and I hope that they are. I know my own team does. We encourage conversations about the balance of student and mentor involvement. It has lead us to improve ourselves.