What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?
 

This year, I had the honor of being chosen by my team as a Dean's List semifinalist. While I did not make finalist, one question was asked in my interview that really got me thinking.

What would you do to improve the FIRST experience?

I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas in response to this question.

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

I love FIRST and I love many things about the program, however I do hold one opinion that might not be so popular. Throughout my experience as a student in the FRC Community, we had a lot of ups and downs having to deal with the craziest of situations. Eventually that storm cooled and we were able to focus upon the team and team growth. Luckily we got to go to St. Louis that year and managed to grow the team with many different passionate students.

However, looking back on that experience, the awards were a nice form of recognition at the time. But they are not what I got out of FIRST. Leadership skills, communication skills, electrical knowledge, mechanical knowledge, physics applications, corporate relations, and many more developmental skills are what I walked away with from the program. And it changed me.

Too often I find that Alumni and Mentors focus too much on making the robot successful rather than making the team successful. If I were to change one thing in FRC, it would be to put the students before any other drive. Failing as a student is just as valuable as succeeding as one. Obviously I think there must be a balance. But when it comes to a decision of machining a component, deciding on a design, programming a robot, and making many other team decisions, I believe that there is great value in mentors only providing guidance rather than direction.

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

After attending and watching dozens and dozens of events, one thing is clear to me. There should be some kind of FMS connection checker system available to teams and maybe at inspection to make sure all teams can connect to the field without a problem. I would have it available to all teams all throughout the competition so if they messed with any code or network stuff, they can double check to make sure they can still connect to the field before they actually head out to the field and place the robot on the field. Takes a huge load off the FTA's while also making sure less teams sit dead on the field because of communication issues.

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

The vast majority of the FIRST experience is positive. Sure, there is always the Byzantine process that is inspection, and there are the occasional troublemakers that show up in any large crowd, and Recycle Rush was an underwhelming game, but negative issues/points are the exception rather than the rule.

The biggest improvement that could be made to the FIRST experience is to have MORE of the experience. Last year, 3946 won a berth to CMP, and it was transformative to our team members, and possibly to the team as time goes by. While the best teams in FRC were at CMP, we always get a fair cross section of CMP-playoff caliber teams at Bayou Regional. The things that most inspired our team members at CMP were the maker fair, the sponsor booths, and Karthik's strategy seminar (OBTW, in reverse order). Finding a way to bring a slice of these experiences to regional (and district) events would be a big improvement to a great number of teams.

Another improvement that occurs to me is something we are working on locally - that of finding a way for nearby FRC teams to work together more often. This is the first year we have mentored rookie teams (two of them!), and I can say with confidence that their rookie years were much more successful than our rookie year on many fronts. This is the first year when we had more than a very few hours interfacing with members or mentors of other FRC teams outside of FRC and FLL events. We strive to build up our relationship with our neighbors in full realization of Gracious Professionalism. It may not be exactly FIRST phrasing, but this is how one of our recent drafts of our core values defined GP:

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

I think this is an important aspect that would grow FIRST in a very positive way if utilized even more. Even teams that are not rookies should (and do, but more!) cooperate together on different pieces, helping each other succeed.

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

Agreed. After doing decent at a couple of events last year, the students started talking a third regional, or Champs waitlist. The mentors put their heads together and figured out that Champs wasn't happening, and a third regional wasn't going to happen last year.

Guess what the plans were this year? Yep, 3 regionals. And we punched our CMP ticket at the second one.


I wouldn't mind having some workshops and other similar Championship elements at regionals. If they could be fit into the schedule, and there was space for them, that could be a great addition to the regional experience.

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

I've lost the earlier thread (I think started by Boltman) about match scheduling at Central Valley Regional. I suggested that there is a better way to schedule those matches so as that we don't have oddities where the best teams (yes, there is sorting of abilities in FRC) don't play each other or end up in alliances together during qualifications. We saw the same thing happen at Silicon Valley this year. 1678, 254, 971 and 368 never played each other and 1678 was allied with all 3 others. 3 teams were unbeaten and 368 could have been unbeaten as well.

It turns out that the NFL goes through substantial schedule permutations to arrive at equitable constrained schedules for the season. (Baseball, basketball and hockey don't have this problem because each team plays the others multiple times.)

Let's not confuse "arbitrary" with "random." Random doesn't guarantee fair, especially if we don't have multiple draws. Playing 1-3 events each season doesn't guarantee that everyone will have an equitable chance. (And BTW, the current method is not truly "random" because it requires a seed value to get it started. This has long been an issue in statistical analysis.) The situation requires intervention to arrive at a fair schedule. No scheduling method will be perfect, but most efforts will be better than the arbitrary method used now.

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

Lower the cost of FRC events and increase access (Districts is one solution)
FLL increase access to more events, 1 QT is not enough

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

For anyone wondering, you can find out about the current scheduling algorithm here. You can also download it and try to create schedules for yourself.

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

I have to agree with the ability to have more teams work together in the build season.

This was my first season with FRC, and Metal Muscle 1506 is incredibly fortunate to have the FIRST Center at Kettering which we now share with 7 other teams. All of the teams located in the FIRST Center learned from each other, worked together and were able to lend a helping hand whenever needed.

I know building such a facility is no small endeavor, but it would be incredible if FIRST were able to have more of these facilities around the country and the world. I know they are building another one soon in Grand Rapids, but wouldn't it be great to have more of them scattered around? Even teams that are not part of the Center could come in and practice on the field, talk about the robots, awards, designs and collaborate on everything FIRST.

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

How do you propose events know who the top teams will be while schedules are being generated?

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

Ban Andrew Schreiber from events.

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

That would certainly help my experience.

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

Safety Award reform. Less theater, safety escorts, and taped up signs. More focus on actionable and smart suggestions and practices. I dislike having to entertain or deflect safety captains who want to interview a kid on my team who is usually busy, or having to have an extra person in the pit to be "just safety captain".

Banning any mascot with reduced speed/motion/visibility from the pit area.

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

At this point two things:
- Open up build season from kickoff till Worlds
- Unified points model / cross playing in districts

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

I know this has been discussed many times, and I don't have a solution, but if I had a magic wand I would find a way to lower the financial and logistical barriers to entry. The district system is a move in the right direction and the problem will probably become more manageable as FIRST continues to grow, but we spend a LOT of time raising funds for travel and logistics that could be better spent on team development and outreach.

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

Interesting, I never realized this information was available.

For the Citrus Dad, if you notice the Algorithm rtfdnow linked to is from 2008. 2007 attempted to sort teams so the best teams would play against each other, rather than only with each other. They essentially proke the teams into 3 tiers by team age (team number) and each alliance was made up of one team per tier. Since Average team performance tends to be higher in older teams, this lead to high performing, young teams seeding well ahead of older teams with similar performing robots. This was widely seen as a disaster by just about everyone.

If memory serves FIRST actually solicited algorithm suggestions during/after the 2007 season.

If you have a good solution to the issue then write it up, and submit it to first. I am sure they would be willing to listen.

I don't think anyone thinks the algorithm is perfect, but the luck of match schedules is part of the game.

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

I'd like to start with a disclaimer that this is a personal opinion based on my experiences.

Move all of FLL to elementary school, and FTC to middle school. We've had a lot of success with this in Michigan and I think it creates a really smooth pipeline for students to flow from one program to the next as they age. A clear progression keeps students engaged with age appropriate challenges and results in high school freshman that are ready to hit the ground running when it comes to FRC.

Pair this with lowering the barrier to entry/cost of FRC through district systems as regions/states reach critical mass of team density and you have a great progression of programs.

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

+1^

This idea is a much better application of major sponsor funding, contrasted with another round of unsustainable rookie grants.* Kettering's program is an example that other tech universities and corporate consortia should emulate.
-----------

*Which go straight to HQ, funding neither team development nor local event improvement.

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

Reduce the registration fee for returning teams. Lower the entry bar to FRC so teams can have a little more cash to buy the stuff they really need.

Eliminate or restructure bag & tag so that all teams have out of bag work time between their events. The only teams that stop working after bag & tag are usually the ones that can't afford to build a second machine.

Emphasize the team experience from the top down. Without the teams there is no FIRST, but sometimes it feels like the teams are secondary to the organization overall.

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

FIRST should hold events at locations where teams are not captive to the (generally very terrible) concessions. Sports arena food might be survivable for a 2-4 hour event, but it is terrible to hold teams hostage for 1-2 meals per day for 3-4 days. I am sick of feeling captive to venues that are looking to make money off of selling me and my team awful food at an insane price.

I guess some people think that it is more inspiring to hold events at venues that are more glamorous than HS gyms... but I'm not so sure the sacrifice to our health and wallets is worth it.

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

One thing to note about this season that is different than the previous seasons is that the FTA needs to get permission from FIRST HQ to run the scheduling a second time. In the past it was not unheard of to re run it if for example the LRI knew that it was likely that a team would not be through inspection in time to play in match 1 or 2. So the FTAs in our area would consult with the LRI before they ran the schedule and then generate another schedule if they felt it was a good idea.

I do think something seems to be broken with regards to the smaller event sizes used in districts. For example on my team at the first event we attended we played against one team 3 times at a 40 team event. Of course our luck was such that the team in question was a known powerhouse and ended up being the #1 seed. We did not play with them a single match. With a 40 team event and 12 matches there really shouldn't be a case where teams face each other 3 times and do not face off against other teams at least once.

So I do think that a recheck of the parameters used for the software to determine what an acceptable schedule is should be reexamined.

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

I have to agree with this. While I appreciate the efforts of FIRST to provide accommodations, the food concessions, particularly at large events, is one area that has been problematic. The food is often very expensive and hard on us older folks and students with medical conditions. Also the logistics for delivering food and seating haven't historically worked well for us.

In many cases, exclusive concessions is a stipulation of the hosting arena. That creates a difficult choice. Sorry. I don't have answers to that. But the delivery logistics and seating could be handled better at large events.

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

I'd love to see metrics on the purchasing habits from the large FIRST vendors.
My recent foray into making gears for Vex gearboxes leads me to wonder what teams without resources and tools are to do when they can't get the COTS parts they need.

I think we should do away with bag & tag at the least. I agree with others it's driving cost and because we can build other robots I don't think it's stopping people from evolving their design after the bag.

There's a host of technical issues I'd love to see solved but the best thing I'd like to see is a more critical focus on common issues. For example there are a substantial number of forum posts on video co-processing and it often drives misinformation because all of that is free form. I'm not convinced, for example, that if next year's field is more flat that we will see accumulated work from this year and with this much testing you'd like to see some lessons learned narrowed down.

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

Amen!

Jim Zondag points out that although FRC has scaled up, the registration price has not scaled down. This is a shame. Lower registration would help a lot to keep FRC growing.

Regarding your second point, NorCal does not have QT slots for all the registered teams in our region. Last year, we had nearly 20% more teams than available QT slots. Eight of our FLL teams didn't get in to a QT. Apparently, it is fairly common for a region to have more teams than QT spots, at least according to FIRST HQ.

We're switching the 24 FLL teams we started in the past two years to VexIQ because it is cheaper for our teams and easier to host an event, among other things.

-Mike

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

I'd like to see more FRC sponsor money go towards FRC Teams and STEM initiatives, and less money go towards ShowReadyProductions and Venue Fees.

I think re-allocating hundreds of thousands of dollars of sponsor money could make the FIRST experience better for many struggling and disenfranchised teams.

-Mike

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

I think every robot on the field should play in every match for the full match.

I wish there was a way to help teams in queue for a match guarantee they will be able to connect to the field and operate appropriately. Too many times do teams have operational issues due to something that was entirely preventable.

I bet you cycle times would go up too!

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

Too bad the test fields are not real fields.
In the sense their equipment is a fraction of the real field control equipment.

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

Big shows in big venues were an important step toward making FIRST loud enough to be heard, back in the day when new Regionals were filling in the gaps on the map. Now the gaps are smaller.

Today, investment in building team competitiveness pays off more. Look at Robo Zone. Nearly all their remote footage is shot in high school gyms. Michigan's big show is just the last of 22 events this year. More competitive teams create more engaging shows. TV can bring new people into this tent, and that will grow the tent, faster than spending more money on the tent itself.

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

Richard,

Totally agree, it was a necessary FIRST step (ah, get it?)

The district model has shown that we don't need to spend so much money anymore to host effective events.

Even if some areas take many more years to transition to districts (looking at you, CA and MN), I hope we can collectively continue to ditch the large venues and expensive union labor fees at Regional events. This will allow regional RPC's to redirect local sponsor money back to teams that need it to stay alive or grow to a new level.

-Mike

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

I would greatly appreciate it if future playing fields are not nearly as expensive/time intensive to build as Stronghold's. Yeah, Stronghold is a really, really cool and beautiful game. And building a practice field is a fine challenge. But I don't think I'm alone in thinking that being able to build even a partial practice field from wood for this year was very difficult, even for some of the better resourced teams.

It felt like the flashiness and effort to build the field this year took some of the focus of the robot. It would be nice if the time and expense of a practice field received greater consideration when designing the game.

I'm expecting next year's field will be completely empty except for gaffer tape. ;)

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

Aerial Assist came pretty close: four box goals, a truss (which could be simulated with a net or even a beam of light), and high goals. Only the four box goals were on the field.

Edit: Also, the number of defenses makes doing demos a bit more involved. We've given up trying to set up a tower at demos; the pyramid would have been pretty rough to demo for Ultimate Ascent (we just shot Frisbees).

Edit2:
I'll have to disagree on that one.

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

I would get rid of every song at any event that I can identify by looking at how people in the stands are dancing.

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

Oh god, my poor robot. :( Only if we limit teams to 2 CIMs or limit travel between zones with rules cuz holy crap I don't wanna take cross field hits with 6 CIMs again.



Improve Team Exp?

Focus on the team experience. Every event needs to understand they are providing a service the teams are buying. This needs to be drilled into every volunteer.

There needs to be a process for removing consistently abusive volunteers.

Transparent and open processes and procedures. (Judging and Field side)

More, events, more often. I wanna see every Saturday in February, March, April, and May have robot events on them, multiple events, around the country. Even if it's just playing scrimmages. We can't just play 2 or 3 times a year. This is all about being the STEM equivalent of getting kids bouncing that basketball for hundreds of hours, we need to provide venues for it. We don't need showy venues, or fancy AV systems. We need the robot equivalent of pickup games. We need bot jams where they show up, find out the game, build a bot, and compete in a weekend. [1] We need portable fields that can be set up by a bunch of kids in an hour to play robots.

Stop focusing on growth. unpopular statement but - teams that don't move don't inspire. Let's focus less on "a team in every school" and more on building sustainable programs. Would a school start a Division 1 football program without a coach with some basic experience or knowledge? No. Why are we doing FRC teams that way?



Those last two really have to go together - don't start teams with people who have no experience with teams. But how do they get experience? By being at these events.

[1] Didn't CD used to do this with the EduBot stuff at the Ford Sweet Repeat? Or is my memory finally going.

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

I think it would be worth investigating official practice facilities.
I mean people build gyms - and people build escape rooms - why not build robot gyms?

At this time my FIRST oriented Makerspace goals do not provide for a game field.
It's bad enough I am pouring a small retirement into tooling ;).

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

My answer builds on this. At competitions for the past couple years we have had to fight the influence of the "safety advisers" at events in order to keep our students focused on actually being safe. So many of the interactions we have with safety advisers make our students beleive that they are only concerned with safety theater and keeping up appearances.

For instance at our events you are given a slip of paper each night ranking you on your "pit safety" when you leave. We strive for a smiley-face versus a straight or frowny-face each time. At our most recent event we were given a straight-face so we asked the safety advisers to point out what we overlooked. They said that they didn't really know and that they didn't see anything unsafe. I then had to keep an ear out for our students grumbling "it doesn't matter if our pit is safe or not, they don't even look" and reinforce the importance of maintaining a safe work space.

Later that day we needed to hammer a difficult shaft back through a variety of bearings and rollers and the safety advisers determined that, because we needed to hit the end of the shaft with so much force, the repair was too dangerous and we needed to stop. Luckily we were able to get them to relent after explaining the details of the operation to them, but I hate the kind of message that this is sending to the students involved. So many of them are getting the impression that "we shouldn't take the safety advisers seriously, because they aren't advising us on real safety issues", an impression that we mentors have been fighting for years now.

My improvement to the FIRST experience would be de-emphasizing all the UL mandated safety theater and increase focus on seriously unsafe behaviors or rewarding intelligently safe policies.

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

So in a nutshell, are you're basically saying that the safety advisors are treating safety as an audit of your systems, and overlooking actual safe practices taking place?

That's a shame if it's true as I just took a safety advisor type of role with my son's team. I'm more concerned about getting the kids to focus on working safely at all times, instead of them focusing on providing the correct answer.

I think we'll just have to come up with a set of simple safety procedures and train them on those procedures. I'll also train them to be able to point out our procedures to the safety advisors, just in case they are unable to comfortably answer a question for whatever reason. I just want them to make good, sound decisions while working as relaxed as we can possibly be at the moment.

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

One of my contribution to FIRST was already mentioned. Expand the FLL programs and make that a larger event. FIRST is all about spreading STEM to young students and what a better place to start than with 4th and 5th graders. Remove the 1 QT restriction on teams. When I was involved in FLL, the competitions were the coolest thing ever. Nothing was better than watching something that my peers and I worked on for the past few months do exactly what we wanted it too!
Also, FIRST can do a little outreach on its own too. FIRST should contact local news stations to notify them of events. Do press releases for every event. There's always a local news station at my high school football and basketball games. Why not have the local news attend events for "The Sport of the Mind"? It could be argued that it should be up to the host team to do this, but I think FIRST can help with this whether it be the district organization that does this, or FIRST itself.

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

Create districts where there are regionals with 50+ teams.

Add bag time for all regional teams and start quals after lunch on the first day to give teams more matches.

Let regional teams complete in district events, stop letting district teams complete in regional events.

Upgrade the FMS system to a system that reduces the delay between matches, provides a better simulated setup for testing and isn't as affected by wifi/hotspots.

Provide better support for isolated 1 regional teams and less support for unstained rookie grants. The goal should be lower the cost to be competitive, not just lower the cost to play. Being a robot that barely moves and doesn't win 1 game or is just carried doesn't inspire anyone.

Make awards between final matches standard.

Divide FTC into middle school and high school divisions.

Actually celebrate FLL and FTC at their own worlds instead making them second fiddle to FRC.

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

+1 DING DING DING DING DING

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

I would like to see a process to prevent district teams from competing in full regionals, as well as a system that allows cross district competition to count towards district standings.

My one gripe is that a team competing in a district can travel to a regional and win an award there and qualify for Championships. I'm not here to argue the merits for and against it, but it always left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth that a team A) can pay the same amount as tam B) and gets different competition because of where they are located.

Team A plays in a district event and as a result would get 2 district events (minimum of 12 Quals each) AND can go to a regional event.

Team B would get 2 regional events.

My issue is that Team A can make the semi finals at their districts, and win an award at each which is enough to qualify for District Championships where they then get another opportunity to qualify for the Championship. However, if Team B literally does the exact same thing then their season is over unless they miraculously get off the wait list.

But on top of that Team A can then go to a regional outside their district format and win a qualifying award to go to St. Louis. So either make is so that any team can compete anywhere, or that districts stay districts and regionals stay regionals.

To counteract the "teams like to play with teams from other areas" argument, I would allow districts to count for your standings no matter where you play. If a MAR team wants to compete in Michigan, or a PNW team wants to fly out to NE why shouldn't they?

At this point why not standardize the points gained from each district and allow them to collect the points towards their district standings? Have the first 2 districts count towards your standings at your "home championship" because everyone would be playing the same 2 events, and the same games.

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

To improve the FIRST experience, I would improve the spectator (layperson) experience. Set up many displays all over the premises explaining the program, explaining the game, explaining the tournament structure. I would make "you are here" maps throughout the facility, highlighting key areas of interest (field(s), pits, restrooms, concessions, vendor/sponsor booths, etc).
As it was last year, the Championship event was not welcoming to the family-who-saw-it-on-a-bus-and-stopped-in crowd. At all.

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

FIRST needs to stop being so arrogant/selfish and admit that IFI has better lower and middle level robotics competitions, and an overall better competition structure. FRC tops all, but VRC is better than FTC in every way possible, and VIQ gives teams more out of their season than FLL does. And they both cost a whole lot less. If FIRST really cared about inspiring students they'd either try their best to actually make these lower and middle level competitions better or just tell students to do VIQ and VRC. If you're promoting an educational program whose alternative is better in every way, you're not in it for the students, you're in it for yourself.

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

Dangit.

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

Oh man, don't even get me started on the whole name badge fiasco last year. Is that a thing this year still? Because I really hope it isn't. What a waste of time.

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

I haven't been in FIRST for very long and I lack a lot of experience in the program, but I would have to say a way to improve the FIRST experience would be documenting more items.

Our first year was a huge hassle. Why? Simple, we didn't know what could be done. The concept of Flywheels was foreign, Pneumatics was an expensive mystery, Advanced Drive trains were an even bigger mystery, and knowledge that would be common to a team with 3 or more years was unknown to us.

The book "FIRST® ROBOTS: Behind the Design Book" written by Vince Wilczynski and Stephanie Slezycki is definitely a great book to start teams thinking about what they can do. The pictures included also help visualize some important concepts that are hard to explain in words. However, it glazes over the concepts and mathematics that make everything work. I can't currently quote the book, pages, or sections because I do not have it with me but this is a problem.

After going through our first year, we decided that if we had a rookie team come under our wing we would make sure they had the tools and information to do amazing things. At the same time, to make sure they were creatively thinking an innovating we didn't tell them everything just our thoughts and ideas. Team 6171 this year made it to Semifinals at the Dallas Regional and received the Rookie All-Star award to take them to Championships. Also, in their robot they had things that we could only dreamed of having in our rookie bot, probably because they had 5431 10 minutes away that could give them the information they had learned the year prior.

This is a problem when you consider teams that have been around for over 18 years. No wonder we see robots from low number teams make it to the finals and Einstien so often. They have the knowledge that no one else has and the documentation that our team has personally found has been garbage. I was able to find something about flywheel launching with great documentation, but that has been it. As such, what I would do if I had the time and the money is take everything about FIRST and document it with extreme detail. If the students do not have access to knowledge, how are they expected to learn anything?

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

If they wont get rid of bag and tag day, which is #2 on my list of ways to improve FIRST, they should give all teams 6-8 hours of unbag time the week of a competition and then have qualification matches start after lunch on Thursday.

I'd also be up for regionals moving to a Fri-Sun schedule instead of a Thurs-Sat. That would take kids and teachers out of school less, mentors don't have to take as much vacation as well.

#1 to me is Districts, districts, districts. It is completely unacceptable that my team got 17 qual matches for $9,000 of registration this year while those lucky to be in districts got 24 for $5,000.

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

My family and I went as spectators on Saturday last year. Me, two boys, very pregnant wife. We had not registered - we didn't know we were supposed to as non-participants. They literally did not know how to handle us. We almost just up and left.

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

This is definitely an area where teams in a District system have an unfair advantage. I agree that keeping District teams from competing at a Regional would mitigate this, but I'm curious if there's a middle ground somewhere.

• How would your opinion change if District teams competing at a Regional were not eligible for the three qualifying awards (Chairman's, Engineering Inspiration, and Rookie All-Star)?
• What if a District team on a Regional-winning alliance generated a Wild Card Slot? In the current system, they are essentially taking up two Championship slots, one from the Regional and one from their home District's allocation. It seems like a Wild Card would be a reasonable way of awarding one of those slots to another deserving team at the Regional.

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

I actually feel like that's an amazing middle ground and one that wouldn't be too entirely hard to implement.

I realize that it is in the rules now that a team competing in a district can go to a regional after they have picked their first two plays (which I suppose is an unfair advantage as they have to wait until window 3 and see which regionals still have openings), but at the end of the day for the same $9000 they get 3 plays with exponential more opportunities to qualify for Championships over a non-district team which only gets 2 plays and only has a small handful of ways to the championships.

Having them ineligible for the "Big-3" (CA, EI, RAS) would mitigate this a bit and give more chances for local teams, and if a district team would allow for a non-district team to take their spot to Championships I think it would be a big step in the right direction.

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

Could you elaborate a little bit about why you believe VRC is "better in every way" than FLL and FTC programs?

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

Agreed. Having mentored both FLL and Vex IQ for the first time this year, I like Vex IQ a whole lot more than FLL. I like the field better(and that you can pack it in a box) and the fact that the game isn't just a mess of a bunch of random tasks. Having the students focus on one or two tasks and do them the best they can is more similar to Vex, FTC, and FRC style games. I also like how in qualifying matches, it's team based on not just solo play. I can't comment on Vex vs FTC as I've never done either.

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

Definitely like the idea of making district teams ineligible for qualifying awards at regional events. The wild card slot feels a bit weird, but maybe if there was no reward except recognition (i.e. no World qualification) to tempt district teams to compete at a regional, maybe a district team regional win would be less likely to happen. Hard to say.

I see regionals as the equivelant of a district championship for geographical areas that don't have enough FRC concentration (yet) to make a district model work. Teams in regional areas have no opportunity to get into a district championship. It doesn't seem right to have district teams take advantage. District teams have a lot more opportunity to gain extra experience and unbag time at district events over regional teams. Plus district teams potentially have another opportunity at their own district championship.

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

I wasn't trying to suggest that a District team on a Regional-winning alliance should not qualify for a Championship slot. I don't think that would be fair. They would receive a slot from their home District's total allocation, as they currently do, and the slot they earned from the Regional would become a Wild Card instead of essentially going unused.

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

I could write a book about why VIQ/VRC are superior to FLL/FTC. Alongside the reasons listed above, teams get to compete more for less money. If we make the assumption that time involved in the program is related to inspiration (a very safe assumption, since FIRST is always promoting spending more and more time in their programs), VIQ and VRC provide more inspiration per dollar due to the greater amount of time invested into the program by the students through increased match count and number of competitions and the decreased cost of competing. Then you get to the quality of competitions. In the VEX programs, the focus of the competition is the experience of the teams and students, and they spare no expense when it comes to making things easy and accessible to teams. FLL/FTC, on the other hand, are a little less team focused. It seems that FLL/FTC care more about the quantity of teams competing ($) than the quality of each team's experience. Then you can look at the games. FLL is a mess of missions that relies on perfect programming (or perfect parents) to succeed. All age groups compete together so the younger students rarely come out on top of the older ones. VIQ, on the other hand, is less software intensive, which not only makes it more accessible to younger students, but also makes it more difficult for someone other than students to do a majority of the work. Elementary and middle schoolers are separated so that nobody is competing against someone with years of experience that they do not have. The games are simpler and involve more practice and iteration and less lining up in base carefully. FTC games are, as I've experienced, unorganized and imbalanced, and it doesn't seem like the game design committee has ever competed in an a enjoyable game before. VRC games are straightforward, easy to explain, and easy to watch, plus they're designed by a group of people who know competitive robotics inside and out. VRC is also separate by age groups so that high schoolers and middle schoolers don't compete together. I'm sure other people have examples as well, but these are my experiences.

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

The ranking should be done by an actual performance measure such as district points equivalent or OPR. (We'd probably use the previous year as a reasonable proxy.) Team number isn't a particularly good metric these days.

I have an idea of how to structure this arrangement but will wait until after Champs to write it up. The problem with "luck of match schedules" is that it is arbitrary, and teams are not viewing it as unfair. I'm not sure why it should be considered "part of the game"--it's not an obvious consideration. And as I pointed out "random" doesn't equal "fair" over such a small number of opportunities. The CVR and SVR situations are not uncommon in the large regionals. I suspect that the 2007 schedule was implemented incorrectly.

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

No, it was just BAD.

And let's stop calling the current schedule random. It is not. And one of the metrics it looks at is "number of times played with or against".

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

It seems most of your areas of concern center around the competition aspects. How would you compare the non-competition aspects of the programs? The Core Values and research projects are a central aspect of FIRST Lego League, and you are seemingly not considering them here.

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

Additionally, one of the things the FTA/Scorekeeper looks at after generating a candidate schedule is the number of unique partners and opponents for each team. If one team has a wildly different number for one of those metrics, that is grounds to run the MatchMaker algorithm a second time.

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

I've participated in quite a few different sized tournaments, and ran the gamut on types of schedules encountered.

2007 was a disaster. The basis of the scheduling algorithm was that it divided teams into three "bins" based on team number (lowest third, middle third, and upper third). Each alliance contained one member from each bin. As far as I recall, this was done by the algorithm maker without the solicitation of FIRST HQ. There were improvements made to the system as the season progressed, but the concept was fundamentally flawed.

In 2007 week one, the system was impossibly bad. If you study team 116's schedule from VCU you'll begin to see why. Because VCU had 66 teams, a number divisible by 6 (the quantity of teams in each match), VCU ended up with a very rigid schedule. The teams in lowest age bracket ended up facing one another every single match. In the case of 116, that meant all 8 qualification matches were against 122. 116's middle bracket opponents in one match would be their middle bracket partners in their next match (in graduating numerical order). This is obviously unacceptable.

While FIRST and the algorithm designers rectified the most egregious of those errors as the season progressed, both the fundamental concept aned execution were still flawed. While the practice match schedules from Championship 2007 don't exist explicitly, you can determine them by looking at the first few matches on any given teams' qualification schedule (they were identical, albeit with filler line teams as necessary). That's both an execution and a conceptual issue. While the best of the best teams could often overcome the biased schedules, the rankings were rather skewed that season. Younger teams capable of executing the game had a distinct advantage. As a result, you saw a number of "weaker" alliance captains. 1712 was not a top 8 robot on Galileo that season, but being a sophomore team capable of scoring consistently gave 1712 a very favorable schedule when matched against predominantly other second and third year teams. This is a conceptual flaw.

Regardless of how you determine team skill, whether it be age, OPR, district points, or some other metric, attempting to create a biased schedule creates inequality. When you create a metric-based strength of schedule constraint on the scheduling algorithm, it ends up creating additional reward for teams who outperform their previous metric (and implicitly punishing teams unfortunate enough to draw them). The same applies in reverse to teams that underperform their metrics. Think of how a rookie star like 5985 or 5817 would fit into such a system, and the impact they would have on scheduling. Think of how a powerhouse team that lost key mentors would impact the system.

An example of this is looking at the OPR for 2007 Galileo. Every team in the top 15 was a member of the highest numbered (youngest) bin. While the exponential scoring on 2007 makes OPR essentially useless for that game, this demonstrates the scheduling bias in play (and also demonstrates how introducing a strength of schedule constraint ends up invalidating the metrics you're using to create the strength of schedule).

More importantly, once you start adding additional constraints to the schedule, you have to be more flexible on the existing constraints. That was one of the huge issues with the 2007 algorithm, and is a fundamental problem with any attempt at adding a strength of schedule constraint. When you factor in strength of schedule, suddenly you have to be more willing to flex on one or more of the other constraints (minimum time between matches, round parity, minimum schedule repeats, etc). While the execution of the 2007 scheduling algorithm was tremendously poor in this respect (namely in terms of minimizing repeats), it's not purely an execution issue.

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

Yeah, that's a good analogy. And to be fair, there are plenty of instances of them recommending good safety practices and ensuring that intelligent safety does get recognized. It can just be a challenge to deal with the unfortunate examples. When a student saw me get accidentally arm-barred by a safety volunteer a couple of years ago, it was an awkward conversation to have to ensure her that the volunteer was acting with my best interests at heart, he was maybe just a little over aggressive.

Overall, I think our students (and it sounds like yours too) have a healthy respect for their own and others' safety while working. After all, they made "Safety Always" one of team slogans!

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

I am a huge fan of the V** programs, but FTC does have at least one significant, positive difference from VRC, and there are other more debatable differences.

If you want to design and create custom parts, FTC offers far more opportunities. Designing and creating more custom parts doesn't equal more inspiration (at least not in my book); but it can equal more fun. It can also equal less fun, and/or a barrier to entry. YMMV

My bottom line: Let's not ascribe malice to either program, or attempt to kick either to the curb. Both encourage students to stick their toes into STEM waters at low-ish cost, and with low-ish mentoring requirements. If both tripled in size, they/we still would only be nibbling at satisfying the total North American (not to mention the rest of the world) needs.

Tell students, adults, and sponsors about both and let them pick the one that is right for them. Don't attempt to make the choice for them, graciously and professionally let them choose the one that best suits their circumstances.

Blake

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

::safety::

I just started a couple of weeks ago, just after the season was effectively over for us. I had heard that we did need to improve on safety after the regional. I haven't had the chance to see what kind of safety program is currently in place yet.

It isn't such a bad thing to be exposed to what audits are like in a corporate structure, though. No matter what system in place is being audited, it can be a painful experience. It can be a powerful lesson in grace under pressure.

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

Richard, et all,

For your reference while working on an improved algorithm, I wrote up a script that calculated the {max, min, median, mean} for the number of unique partners each team played with and against for each event this year. These are the numbers that the FTA/Scorekeeper look at after they generate a schedule. Since it's a large amount of data, I won't post it here, but you can access the files on GitHub.

Hope that information is helpful!

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

After dabbling with creating a scheduler a few years ago (I still have the code), I believe that there is a huge unnecessary burden in the methods I *think* are still being used to create schedules for both FIRST and VEX tournaments.

Think about this.

It is possible to create and store, in advance of any tournament, for any/all possible numbers of participants, "canned" match schedules that satisfy any constraints desired, and that include N matches (where N is much larger than the number matches expected in any reasonable tournament).

The number of schedules to be created and the storage space they would consume are both more than zero, but both are trivial in modern computers.

On the day of a tournament:

If T teams are participating, the canned schedule designed for T teams is used.

The actual teams participating can be randomly assigned to the T placeholder teams used to generate that canned schedule (Real team X becomes team 1 in the canned schedule, real team Y, becomes team 2 in the canned schedule, etc.).

The actual match schedule to be used is then produced by picking a random starting point with the N sets of matches in the canned schedule, and simply using the next M sets of matches for the tournament.

Even a slow, modern computer could accomplish (or repeat) the day-of-the-tournament part of the process in a trivial amount of time.

Furthermore, I can't think of any reason not to publish the pre-computed, canned schedules.

If the canned schedules were published in advance, then, on the day of a tournament (or well before?), tournament organizers could publish that event's random real-to-placeholder team assignments, and the event's randomly chosen starting point within the N matches of the canned schedule being used.

Once that info (above) is published - voila! - scouts/anyone could easily produce a perfect copy of the entire event's schedule, without having to retype it, scan it, web scrape it, etc.

I believe that adopting this approach to creating match schedules would improve the FIRST/VEX/whatever experience.

Blake

PS: Also, just think how much fun people could have debating the "fairness" of pre-computed schedules (the entire thing, or selected stretches). If the practice was adopted, someone could start a thread on both evaluating that, and determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Many hours of popcorn-munching entertainment would follow.

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

Big picture:

• Make it easier for students and adults to participate (lower barriers to entry).
• Focus more on giving all members of teams opportunities to make hands-on contributions to their team's STEM product.
• Make it easier to put on formal tournaments, off-season tournaments, and scrimmage events (I'm thinking about much more than switching to "districts").
• Have a growth path for students who become inspired to try introductory STEM, and then want to see how far they can develop their skills while still in school.

For me this adds up to a near reversal of the current relative emphasis on FRC vs FTC.

In order to reach more students, and especially in areas that might need STEM programs more that others, I would make FTC (or something similar) the primary/flagship high school emphasis of FIRST, and would let FRC become an advanced program, for those students and adults in locations that want to pay (in time and money) for a more complex challenge.

FTC is the far easier way (far less intimidating, faster tangible results, easier what-if experimentation, etc. etc.) to introduce an uninspired novice to STEM robotics. FTC is the far less costly program. FTC is the far less time-consuming program. FTC is the far more hands-on program. FTC events are far easily to produce, etc.

Blake
PS: Remember that simply convincing K-12 students to try a STEM education/career is a success. It isn't necessary to actually train them (deeply) in any of the various STEM disciplines. That happens in vocational schools, colleges and afterward.

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

Not for this season, I halfheartedly complained to the FTAs at our first event this season that our schedule had us playing against a known powerhouse team, that did end up ranked #1, 3 times at a 40 team 12 match event. He told me that as of this season they are not allowed to run the match scheduling program a second time without calling HQ first. I know they weren't messing with me because I've known two of them since well before they were FTAs as we were mentors for the same team for many years before I moved to my new team.

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

I'm pretty sure I remember Danny saying this year that one of the few cases where a second run would be acceptable is a drastic mismatch in the generated schedule stats. So if all teams play against ~25 opponents, but a few play against only 15, for example. Of course, you'd still have to check with HQ, but that's one of the situations where they could allow it.

I don't think it would have applied to your particular case though, since the with/against numbers for your team (and all others) could still have been in an acceptable range, even with a couple repeated opponents.

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

And, just to reiterate an advantage of pre-computed match schedules (described here). Any/all "unfairness" could be scrubbed out of them ahead of time, with the result guaranteed to satisfy FIRST's fairness criteria, whatever they might be.

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

I agree with this. It doesn't remove FRC and it doesn't stop FRC from teaching skills to people that are nearly adults. It reaches out to students that are about to have greater freedom to make elections towards their future before they do so. Hopefully that way if they choose to step into FRC they can set their goals realistically.

To put that in perspective: I was a vocational student before I left high school. I left the later part of the day and was taken to the vocational school to spend several hours working on a real world skill. FIRST wasn't available to me back then, my motivator was I already knew what I liked doing because I did it in my family business. I don't know if 2 years at the start of high school would drive most people to commit like that. 2 years in high school and a few years before that would give a lot of people a great idea where they want to be.

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

Clearly if two teams played each other 8 times then something was very wrong with the scheduling algorithm. I will note that it is very common now to see 2 teams play with each other in one match and then against each other the next so that issue still exists and clearly is acceptable.

I think it's very interesting this year how younger teams are ranking much higher than previously. Look at how many events had rookies as the first qualifier. At SVR this year, 3 alliance captains were rookies or 2nd year teams. This is a function of RPs often not being a function of W-L records. I suspect that the 2007 results may have been just as much about the scoring system as the match scheduling.

(BTW, something is wrong int he OPR calculations for Galielo in 2007--they imply that the OPRs for the other teams are strongly negative. Archimedes and Newton have the same problem. Curie might be correct. I suspect the problem is in the bin-method of scheduling took away a key element of solving the matrix problem. So it's not the scoring method that messed with the OPRs; it's the way that teams were matched up. So the bottom line is that the OPRs are worthless for comparison in 2007.)

Don't confuse random and lucky with fair. I'm not sure how being lucky creates equality of scheduling. And as someone pointed out earlier the schedule isn't truly random--it's already constrained, AND it's subject to the judgement of an official that it looks "sufficiently" balanced. Why not make the balancing method transparent rather than heaping arbitrary on top of arbitrary.

I have an idea of how to structure the schedule in a very simple way that solves the constraint problems and can be executed very quickly. But I don't have time to put a demo together until after Champs (I have other scouting duties to attend to first.) I'll have something in May to show.

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

Thanks. I'll take a look. I also agree with Blake that there is an easy way to preset the schedules and then just randomize the team numbers to be assigned to slots.

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

Cannot agree with you more.

However, One of the odd things with FIRST is that it's difficult to convince middle/elementary aged kids (and in an extent parents) to invest their time in FIRST unless there is an FRC team they can see themselves joining later in high school. If there isn't an FRC team that students know they can join later being on a JFLL-FTC team may not seem to be worthwhile of their time.

To (quickly) make sustainable FIRST programs it almost has to begin with an FRC team. I think FIRST needs to put more emphasis on the importance the lower levels of FIRST are to a successful and sustainable FRC team to rookie teams.

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

I'm not contesting that the execution of that algorithm was very poor. However, that poor execution highlighted some of the fundamental issues with strength of schedule as an algorithm parameter.

In terms of current partners becoming opponents, it's not a direct issue per se. However, the consistency of it in the week one schedules helps allow for reverse engineering of how the algorithm functioned, and demonstrates the rigidity of an over constrained algorithm.


That was my point. When you create imbalanced schedules, it invalidates the metrics you used to establish those schedules. In this extreme case, it quite literally almost broke the matrix. In a less extreme case, using a district point based system would create schedules that would lower the district points of the high end and raise the district points of the low end (harming the metric in future iterations of the schedule).

With regards to OPR in 2007, I still stand by it being a pretty poor metric. The end game was cooperative and the primary scoring method was both exponential and cooperative (multiple teams building a row together). Both of those things play very poorly with OPR. Further still, facing off against tougher competition actually hurt your scores, since smart placement of their tubes denied longer rows. I suspect this played a significant role in why low numbered teams were implied such large negative contributions.

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

Reform safety awards, and pit safety in general. The teams that go around giving out mostly useless safety giveaways (Easter eggs with 2 Band-Aids and a hair tie, for example) are not actually trying to improve other teams' safety. Every team I've seen has those supplies already. They just want an award. In my experience, the best way to be safe is to make sure everyone in the pit knows how to safely use their tools and has some common sense. I don't know how you give an award for that , though.

OK, that rant's over. On to the next thing, which is doing something about teams where the mentors build the robot. I know that this is often thrown around unfairly, but at least where I am (CHS), at almost every event I have been to, I've seen at least one team where the mentors are fixing the robot with no students around. This indicates that the mentors understand the robot better than the students, which means that they likely designed it. I understand that the mentors take an active role on many teams, and some teams do need a lot of help, but when the mentors are working without any students around to help or at least observe, the students don't learn anything and in many cases, get to play with one of the best robots at the event. This is not only unfair to the students on the team (always veteran teams, I might add), since they get little out of FRC, but to the other teams where students were heavily involved in the build process, only to get beaten by professional engineers. It has gotten to the point where, on my team, any winning robot is dismissed as "mentor-built". This is often untrue, and is especially unfair to the teams who win without needing a mentor-built robot. My point is, FIRST should be about learning, not just about getting a winning robot.

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.

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

I totally agree with this. Last year, my team started developing this very thing - we call it WAPUR, for Washtenaw (county) Pickup Robotics. The goal was to design a game that could be played as a pickup - the field fits in the back of a trunk and is quickly set up, and the robots are smaller than FRC. For our build season, we used rules inspired by OCCRA - no precision machining and limited mentor help. Last year, we used it as a fun fall training exercise, but this year we're looking to expand to more teams in our area. We'd be happy to give the game information or answer questions to anyone who's interested.

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

Going back a bit to the FTC/VRC thing:

FTC needs to start treating its teams better. Specifically this past season where they essentially had thousands of teams beta test a control system during their actual season, after barely even being warned that they would have to drop hundreds of dollars on a new control system (which has a number of major design flaws that could have been caught with FRC-style beta testing). There is so much right with FTC (custom robots? no weight limit? no cost limit? open season? Yes please!), but having used the VRC control system it is just so much easier to work with (of course, this comes with the trade off of having weak motors and weak on-board processing). I don't really have any claims about the tournament side of things, but that's because the partner in Minnesota is absolutely fantastic and does some things that are against the grain (like provide feedback to teams).

In general, I'll agree with an earlier poster that more emphasis needs to be put on the FTC program. It's the more sustainable program that can fit better into existing educational models. FRC is great, but FTC is probably the most flexible robotics program in existence right now, including non-FIRST competitions. That flexibility can be leveraged into growing "right" both inside and outside the US.

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

Nah. They are neither weak, nor strong. They simply are what they are; and are part of a fairly well-integrated suite of parts.

Let's not disparage or diefy other programs. Let's suggest ways to improve FIRST programs.

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

If what you took from that is that I'm disparaging VEX and deifying FTC, I don't really know what to say, because the first half of that sentence is literally saying that the VEX control system is just so much easier to work with than the current FTC control system (which I previously stated has major issues). Frankly the next FTC control system should take some hints from the VEX control system and the current FRC control system, both on the physical and virtual sides.

More to the point, the VEX motors ARE weak compared to most of the allowed FTC motors and the Cortex IS weaker in processing power compared to the phones used for FTC. This isn't disparaging VEX, it's stating a simple fact. The VEX components work well in the VEX system, which is exactly what they're designed to do. In the context of comparing them to FTC, they have some clear limiting factors that allow them to be so simple.

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on the engineering aspects of the FTC control system (though I spent an entire season as a CSA and FTA dealing with its massive issues), but the main point here is that future FTC control system rollouts need to be handled with the same care given to the FRC system rollout-- that includes beta and alpha testing with actual teams, and better communication about future changes. The way this last system rolled out rubbed a lot of people (myself included) the wrong way.

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

I am not certain how FIRST as a world-wide organization can do better. It is the premier Robotics organization for high school/prep students. The formula is working wonders. There are concerns moving forward with a dual champs in the near future - but I believe that FIRST has a greater plan in the works (dual champs evolving into super-regionals with districts and regionals feeding into these super-regionals) with a return of a singular championship in the coming years.

My concern is within Minnesota. Not the Regional vs. Districts model (lets not go there...), but how outstate Minnesota is relatively untapped in terms of FTC. Many of the schools that 4607 reaches out to comes back with 'we already offer robotics'. It should not be surprising - for those that know Minnesota recognize that BEST and VRC have already made great inroads into Central and Western Minnesota.

This does not mean that I have any issues with BEST or VRC (I am in the process of creating two courses that revolve around VRC/VexEDR), but if FRC and MNFIRST want to continue their growth in the state, we need to make certain that the administrations of outstate schools understand the difference between BEST, VRC, and FIRST. However, most of the administrators see that they have robotics programs and just rubber-stamp 'STEM initiative' on them.

We also need at least one more regional that can stand on its own legs - not propped up by the MPLS regionals.

The addition of the MSHSL State Tournament has definitely opened many doors to our local schools - and more are becoming aware of the advantages of FIRST and FRC. However, FIRST lacks in curriculum - and VEX EDR has a strong presence in this area. In fact, the local Tech College based in St Cloud hosts the MN State VEX Robotics Championships, and many in my own community and school mistake this for my own team's work and affiliation with FRC.

My concern is the follow through from High Tech Kids in Minnesota. We have a strong FLL following, but it seems that without great communication and common goals between HTK and MNFIRST, we are struggling to tie up loose ends. Even last summer, when we were trying to secure a space for a fall training event, the people at St Cloud State University were trying to include VEX teams - and even expressed the want to include VEX in the MSHSL State Tournament. Most of the common public see robot program = robot program and do not distinguish between FIRST, VEX, and BEST.

This is what I hope to change in Central and Western MN in the coming years - a true understanding and appreciation for VRC and FRC and the differences they hold.

I will state this - and I know that many in our CD community are strong proponents/supporters of VEX and VRC - but when I try to talk about FIRST in local circles, VRC folks do try to discredit FRC with the cost issues, organization in Minnesota, and 'VEX has a State Tournament', etc. It is within these circles, with potential sponsors listening in, it makes it difficult to state that FRC has the backing of the MSHSL and is the only Robotics program with this authority behind it without coming across as arrogant or off-putting. I do not want to create a dust up (in the presence of these sponsors) as we should be working towards the same goals. Instead of stripping sponsors from the other organization, we should be working to create opportunities for both. It can be very disheartening at times - especially knowing that these sponsors already work with teams that we value so much.

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

Here are my comments as a 15th-year FIRSTer:

• Revitalize the ability to be highly competitive with lower costs involved (get rid of the practice bot & practice field advantage due to bagging, among other things)
• Bring back the benefit to and emphasis on designing and manufacturing your own solutions, rather than buying a bunch of COTS stuff to put together.
• Reduce annual costs all around
• Incorporate elements that the general public will understand and care about (medieval castle whatnow?)
• Reduce the luck factors in the competition
• Reduce or cap the number of hours spent per year, and especially per week. In some sense, we have all really been duped into entering a competition of who can spend more hours than the next guy on this project.
• Reduce the focus on growing FIRST nationally as an organization, and increase the focus on each team growing themselves an organization
• Increase focus on student skill and knowledge attainment
• Track FIRST alumni
• Provide resources to help integrate FIRST with education, and with schools. Create more tie-ins with education. Organizations such as SkillsUSA have, why hasn't FIRST?
• Provide feedback on the Chairman's Award to teams who request it
• Get the story straight as to what the Chairman's and Engineering Inspiration Awards are and are not, and how they relate or do not relate to one another, and how they are judged.
• Eliminate about 1/4 of the volunteers. Sorry, I know that sounds harsh. The rainbows and butterflys story is that we love all of our volunteers (heck, I used to be one, for years). But the reality is, you look at (offseason) events that don't have as many, and they run very well, because the people they do have know what they're doing, and there's no extra people to hassle you about anything. Most of my most unpleasant times in FIRST have been those in which I've been hassled by a volunteer. I will say it has gotten a lot better in recent times though.

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

I was spoiled while I was with the teams in LA having a machine shop at the high school, as well as the college, that were used to manufacture our own gearboxes and other stuff. With my rookie team this year, we had metal cutting hacksaws that the mentors purchased, a drill press, a band saw that couldn't cut wood straight, a miter saw, and some hand drills that the mentors brought in. Designing solutions using COTS materials turns out to be just as good a challenge, albeit a different one. All of the same engineering goes into the design regardless if it's a custom built or COTS designed system.

As for the volunteers, which ones would you eliminate?

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

This is happening. It's a slow process and it is a lot more difficult than everyone realizes. It's not as simple as collecting survey responses as it turns out and if you think about the number of teams that don't have all of their students registered in STIMS, it is an even larger issue for teams to track student/mentor involvement. How many FRC teams have internal political battles because "that person isn't really on the team"?

After I asked my question to Frank about this exact subject on the AMA he did in the fall I was put in touch with Michelle Long at FIRST. Michelle is awesome and this is a problem that she is actively working on along with many others.

So, yes, it is an issue, yes FIRST is aware of it, and yes they are doing something about it and you can expect to see them continue to improve in this area.

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

It's even difficult in a small District area. It's an area for growth for us in IndianaFIRST too.

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

Yeah, I wish FIRST had a policy to allow their employees to post on CD but they don't... However, if they did, I think Michelle would say something like this:

Make sure you all stop by the Alumni booth at the exhibit hall in St Louis to see the work they are doing with Nvidia, BAE, SpaceX, and other companies to encourage FIRST alumni to stay involved and to help them get awesome jobs with awesome companies.

I'm sure she would also tell you to encourage graduating alumni to stay involved through the local state/regional/district organizations and that teams can help by getting all of their students registered online in STIMS.