Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I understand this argument, but I think it ignores 4 major sustainability factors beyond just time itself:

1. No B&T means we have much more room as a community to run scrimmages. This lets struggling teams get playing/testing sooner, even if on low-cost team fields with a few other robots. Even this level of insight could help a lot of the teams we're talking about, even if they don't have a second official event for that magic.

2. Using our first event as the deadline gives us all more time to help teams that are struggling/want collaboration. This would be a culture shift and would not happen automatically, but many teams (including 1640) do some limited outreach like this within the B&T deadline. More time, particularly more weekends, can help with that simply on a logistical level.

3. While poor time management can erase any gains, there is something to be said for the difference between unexpectedly losing 1 of 6 weeks to snow versus 1 of 9 (insert any numbers), particularly when the snow days are likely to still be early.

4. I won't claim this because it needs data, but I personally believe that we tend to ignore teams that truly don't meet very often. I've inspected teams that literally meet a few hours per week, end of story, for no fault of the students. I try to introduce them to VEX. There's nothing wrong with that, but there is an argument that adopting VEX/FTC's lack of B&T would open up opportunities and audiences we don't even know we don't know.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

No one blamed a team. There is a difference between separating root causes from less important variables, and assigning blame. Let's not think in terms of blame.

About the other points, there are a zillion things that FIRST could do to help struggling teams field a useful robot without altering the current length (44 days) of the initial build period - things that would help the struggling teams without tempting the healthy teams to expend even more resources on their robots.

One example would be to annually publish a how-to manual for building, and programming a simple, useful robot (plus control station), if that would be consistent with the purpose of building robots in the first place. However, my natural next thought is that any healthy team could do this already.

Or a healthy team could simply build a kit bot for themselves in the first 48 hours after the game is announced, and could then spend the rest of the build season helping N struggling teams instead of trying to win a blue banner for themselves. Imagine how well that would be received by the Chairman's Award judges ... That would be extreme, but it's a thought experiment that shines a light on the "Healthy teams need more time to help struggling teams" argument.

I understand the no bag & tag arguments, but I remain unconvinced that struggling teams' root causes will be affected.

Blake

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I get and don't disagree with your first two points and I've made the point before that we need more comprehensive tutorials.

I'm not going to tell my students they have to stop at a kit bot when there are other ways to solve this problem. This isn't just about maintaining competitiveness, forcing a limit on a team hurts their own ability to inspire their students. "Sorry but we need to artificially take away you'r ability to try to do better so we can level the playing field." The team I spent the most time helping is another 35min - 50min (varies by traffic) away. Even if I took more time away from my team my net work load in hrs per week would go up! I imagine many of us would be helping teams who are farther away than our primary team.

Or you could give me more time to help that team by:

Driving the extra 45min to visit them once in awhile but not so often

sharing our manufacturing sponsors (long lead times make it hard to fit in our own parts during six weeks)

Spend more time during the season sharing ideas and what we learned with them while they can still work

Give them time to get up to speed on CAD so they can make use of our resources

Give me more time to convince their administration that no the KOP is not literally everything you need for a successful robot and yes you should let them buy that gearbox from VEX Pro.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I'm glad we have some overlap in our ideas, but I think you misinterpreted something.

I didn't say that a dictator-mentor should hurt the students that that mentor advises. What you wrote opposing the notion that someone might do that is interesting, but off-target from the thought experiment I wanted to pose. That's not what I wanted to suggest.

My extreme example was supposed to be about illustrating that maximizing the help one team might give others is dominated by factors other than the length of the build season. It wasn't about forcing anyone to do anything.

Through more than one channel, FIRST tells us that it's not about the robot. Another way to say that is that it's not about *our* robot. If a team full of students, confident in their own abilities, decided to adopt an extreme, outward, service-before-self focus (to change a larger community than their own) for one or more seasons, they wouldn't be limiting their success, they would be a shining example of community-changers.

About the distances, Skype and similar tools shorten commutes dramatically in places where modest communication bandwidth exists.

About the other good ideas - We all should keep them coming.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I would be happy to talk to you in more detail about sustainability.
I can not type everything up right now, but if you would like to connect via email to start a dialogue, please PM me.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

It's been my experience that if you extend the deadline that it just gives you more time to not be productive. I remember being told that a goldfish will grow to a size that is comparable to size of the bowl it's kept in. Point being...if time management is the problem(which is usually the case), then you're giving them more time to mismanage. I don't know of a good solution... project management training might be an option.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Totally agreed, and I would love to see B&T go away entirely.

Just making the point that the district style unbag between events is a much more likely compromise from FIRST, and provides likely a lot more value per unit of hassle/complaint/etc that would arise from eliminating B&T entirely.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Team34Guy and I are on the same page. If you extend the period, or shorten it, without altering the root causes of the problems, the outcome will change little (not zero, but little).

Counterpoint 1: Scrimmages can be run at any time in the current build season that anyone wants to. However, if any team wants to pack as much untested function and complexity into their robot as is possible, that team will build (not scrimmage) right to whatever deadline exists. That is what most teams appear to be doing now. If a robot+drive station can be built in a weekend, then obviously teams can easily build robots in 5 weeks, then scrimmage, then spend the last 7-9 days adjusting what they built.

You don't need a longer build season in order to benefit from scrimmages. On the contrary, what you need is a plan that fits into whatever time is available (plus contingencies for weather, etc.), and you then need to execute that plan. The result might be a simpler robot that works instead of a more complex robot that doesn't. Mastering this is a hugely important skill for anyone contemplating a STEM career. Struggling teams will benefit far, far more from help planning and executing than they will benefit from more time to struggle.

Counterpoint 2: See my other posts. Teams that want to spend time helping other teams can do it right now, and they can devote as many resources as they care to devote to that activity, right now.

My very, very strong hunch is that if the build season is lengthened, teams who aren't doing it now (because building, improving, and tweaking their own robot dominates how they spend the current 44 days of building), aren't going to think of additional days as days to spend working on someone else's robot.

If that mindset existed (in practice, not hypothetically), wouldn't most/many/those teams be building less complex robots already, so that they could spend the last week of the current 44 days helping other teams??? Color me doubtful, until teams building 35-day robots become plentiful.

Counterpoint 3: If a team sets realistic goals for building a 5-week robot, manages their time well, and executes their plan; then in a year with a week of snow there will be no problem. In years without snow they will have a bonus week (yippee!).

Lengthening the build season doesn't affect the root cause of this problem. A group that is learning to correctly plan and execute a 44 day build season is going to also be a group that is learning to correctly plan and execute a 65 day build season. However, in the 65 day build season they will have X% of 65 days of planned work undone when they put their pencils down, instead of having X% of 44 days of planned work undone. It simply does not follow that more time results in more readiness.

I'm asserting that total time is not the dominant reason robots are unfinished at the end of 44 days, and I'll gladly bet a nice dinner on the topic. This was my point when I asked if anyone had a stack of anecdotes about struggling teams that were making steady progress executing a conservative plan throughout the current 44-day period, and who ran out of time because something out of their control used up more time than the cushion they built into their plan. Until those anecdotes become plentiful, again, color me doubtful.

Counterpoint 4: I 100% agree that a less-complex engineering project, like VRC or FTC might be the right choice for these folks if they want to try to build a sophisticated robot (sophisticated in comparison to their on-the-field competition).

However, a few hours per week is all that is necessary to build a simple FRC robot that will perform consistently well in the hands of a practiced driver. Good scouts know that consistency is very valuable in FRC competitions. By assessing their own strengths and weaknesses, setting appropriate goals, and executing their plan; and team that only meets a few hours per week can show up ready, and be proud of doing what they set out to do.

Lengthening the build season would allow these teams to set more ambitious goals for the robot they take to each year's tournaments, but it would also give their on-the-field competition the ability to the same. If the team that meets less gets a net of 30-50 hours out of adding three weeks to the build season, doesn't their competition get 60-150 more hours?

To me that sounds like the teams that meet less (but that still show up with usable robots) fall further and further behind the other teams as the build season get longer. It that the outcome you want?

Getting on-the-fence, and initially uninterested students to try STEM activities is the reason inspiration rules in FIRST. Mentors, teachers, coaches, parents, sponsors, and student leaders can do that without letting the circus atmosphere of the tournaments drown out a group's accomplishments - and - they can do that without a longer build season. Struggling teams need less struggle (reduce the root causes of their struggles), not a longer struggle.

Blake

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I support the idea of eliminating Bag & Tag. I believe it will improve the mean quality of robots at events beyond their initial event. I also believe that it will reduce the cost to teams associated with becoming more competitive.

I also agree that it is unlikely to change the behavior of most teams.

The District Model appears to be very successful; has it increased the sustainability of FRC teams in those areas?

The data suggests that "Retention" has improved over the past several years.

I hypothesize that the increase in "Retention" has been driven by the expansion of the District Model and the increased number of matches and "out-of-bag" time associated with the District Model has been the contributing factor.

Therefore, I also support the proposal of implementing similar "out-of-bag" times for Regional events and in particular, a "fix-it-window" for teams who qualify for Worlds.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Don't want to get too much into this conversation but in regards to hours vs performance. There is certainly a diminishing return after a certain point. A team only really needs to be "good enough" in order to be competitive at the top. Now of course the team that invests the most man-hours generally has the advantage but it doesn't make them unbeatable. For example in 2013, a team that goes from 2 cycles of frisbees to maybe 5 cycles can be a big jump for realistically not that much time(relatively). All it really takes is to have a scoring mechanism(in this case frisbee shooter) that works pretty well and doesn't jam or break. Going further than that to 6 or 7 cycles of frisbees can take a ton of optimization and practice time though. I believe John V-Neun said it best though that ~"the last 10 percent is half the work"(can't find quote). That being said, 5 cycles of frisbees vs 6 cycles isn't a huge margin of error for the underdog to pull out ahead. Even without defense, a good match for the 5 cycler can beat the 6 cycler on a bad match.

To summarize, giving both a lower and higher tier team extra time, the lower tier team is likely to improve more than a higher tier team using more of that extra time.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I don't have any data on this, but based on my personal observations Districts do have the benefit of increasing awareness of FRC in communities because there are more events at more local venues (making it easier for local spectators to attend) and districts usually are able to support more teams, thus raising awareness of the programs in schools. Reducing the cost of events, and having teams attend 2 events by default, also means teams have more opportunities to improve their robots throughout the season and have fun at competitions, preventing loss of interest by team members.

That said, the growth of Districts does have a few negative effects, including stretching sponsorship money thin as more teams are created (our main sponsor is cutting out budget in half next year because of how many teams they support now), and, for certain teams, limiting the availability of students and mentors to recruit (It makes it harder to make one, large, stable, competitive team, when all of the students and mentors in the area are being pulled into 10+ rookie teams).

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Struggling teams that we want to help/retain instead of lose, are, by definition, "struggling".

You used the phrase "lower-tier". There are plenty of nuances a reader can read into that term, but I'm pretty sure "lower-tier" and "struggling" are different in some very important ways.

With that in mind, I don't think that a struggling team will convert extra hours into results at a much, much lower rate than a non-struggling team will, regardless of whether the non-struggling team is a fierce competitor on the field, or is less strong on-the-field.

The transformation of hours into results will be affected by how far the team needs to "go" to satisfy their goals (that is your point), and by whether or not they are struggling, and by other factors.

Thinking about those two different effects, I agree that what you described is a real effect and that it applies in some situations; but my very strong hunch is that whether a team is "struggling" or not has a much, much greater effect on the benefit (or not) of a longer build season, than how far a team is from reaching it's goals.

For that reason, I don't think a longer build season is a good approach to helping struggling teams (helping them both stay in FIRST's FRC program, and become healthy teams). YMMV

Blake
PS: Remember that fielding a middle-of-the-road, or simple, or low-scoring robot doesn't identify a struggling team. Our goal isn't building robots, it's attracting students into STEM fields. A simple robot in the hands of a good FRC team can be a powerful tool for attracting students into STEM fields. Teams that accomplish that are the *good* teams.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Okay then lets have FIRST do that by:

Reducing costs

Increasing our ability to share machining and human resources*

Increase time people have to deal with school bureaucracy in getting things they need

Make it more likely a team will have a "simple robot" in there hands

Attract students to stem fields and mentors and sponsors to FIRST with more diverse and impressive machines.**


*if you can get some parts made you can reduce what you need to by with cash and thus how much you need to raise. With this build schedule I makes it very difficult to utilize these businesses because of the lead times. If I didn't need to buy hubs or sprockets or gearbox parts or pre-drilled extrusion I could use that money literally anywhere else on the team.

**Building an overall more impressive robot makes it easier to attract attention from potential students, mentors, and sponsors. Why would I want to join this club to build a large RC car? Why spend time using my years of experience and training to help build what may just seem like a large RC car? Why do people only building glorified RC cars need THAT much money? From the outside in it can be difficult to see what that RC car with a brain actually means. And it takes experience to convey that which most rookies won't have. The easiest thing to use is of course the robot. It is the best or worst analogy of what all it took to make it but is always the most universal and immediate attention grabber no matter who you are talking to.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I think we have 2 fundamental disagreements:

Logistics: As someone already involved in the outreach community, we're often limited not by misuse of person-hours but by literal dearth in weekends. Maybe we lose one to snow, one to exams, one to transportation, and all of a sudden there's only a few left out-of-bag. This isn't not because anyone bit off more than they could chew, and the problems don't scale directly with a longer season. Every season I'm in a position of saying I would've come again if there was another day. I hear this a lot from other outreachers--in fact many are volunteers rather than whole teams, so time management of the team's own build season isn't even as big a factor. It's literally just how many places you can go. Similarly, I disagree with the implication that everyone is a slave to Parkinson's law. Yes, teams that currently have poor time management will likely continue to. No argument! But not everyone does. A team that manages to run (4) 3-team weekend meets without a B&T is not incompetent because they only managed to run (1) with B&T.

Inward/Outreach Spectrum: I have minimum goals that I want to help my team toward before I allocate major resources (team or personal) outward. I expect every team falls in a different place this spectrum: maybe some can logistically run (2) 3-team meets with B&T as long as they sacrifice letting their own kids weld. Maybe some don't like that trade-off. The key is that inward goals aren't all competitive, so they don't inherently scale. Maybe it's "get N students CADing, master Y programming skill" rather than "be first seed". Without B&T (and particularly with good support resources and community norms), some teams further down the spectrum can aim for "get N+3 CADing, master Y, and meet with 2 rookie teams 3 times". I'm not saying this would happen automatically, but I think it's within our community's capabilities. Basing it around palpable schedule shift is much more realistically incentivizing than "everyone spend less time on your own team and reach out more"--even if we agreed that within the 6 week season that would benefit FRC as a whole, which I'm not totally sure I do.

I can count on one hand the number of 'few hours per week' clubs I've seen that have a practiced driver. This is hard enough logistically, but most teams have no understanding of competition mechanics at all. I'm not saying they all shouldn't understand this properly, but I don't see why we argue for them to do so on their own. Are we as a community really making the case that because we know it's possible, we'll ignore the challenges of those who struggle with it? It's just their problem? These are exactly the teams I and others try to reach during build season but struggle to within the confines of B&T. And I personally remember what it's like to be on a team that has no freaking idea how to build an appropriate robot. MOE reached out to us once, and it was huge. We would've gotten a lot less stupid a lot more quickly if only a few other teams had done so over the course of 5 years. It's not a high bar; it's just that the need far surpasses the hours.

And what about low-tier non-struggling teams? I can literally see and they often explain what more time could've done for them. And it's not 'we would've built an arm' or 'we'd've beaten everyone here!'. It's 'if we'd had a couple more more Wednesdays maybe Jane would've understood that programming skill' or 'maybe we would've convinced Carl to like electronics'. In fact I find that the infrequent club model is somewhat less susceptible to Parkinson's law, because they tend to view it primarily in this light. Unfortunately they also don't logistically get much FRC community support and the teacher tends not to continue past their event--or come back the next year. We have huge rookie attrition in this area in Philadelphia, both with struggling and non-struggling low-tiers.

In terms of the 'falling further behind' argument, I'm not sure I follow it. If Team 7000 finishes 56th with B&T and 56th without it, but in the latter Carl has decided to be an electrician and Jane understands Java and Alex came by 3 times to help with the design process, what's wrong with that? Moreover, I don't (even by your logic) see how they're falling further behind on a palpable level. As a former low-tier student, I really couldn't discern whether the Cheesy Poofs are Mars instead of the moon--or at least I wasn't upset by it. By your logic, the teams I was actually competitive against would remain pretty bad at managing their time (assuming no one got adequate outreach). The best get much better, but the ones I actually compare myself to still have the same problems I do, and there are still 24 robots in elims. Moreover, can't I switch that around and ask why teams who are bad time managers should benefit from an artificially shortened season against those that aren't? Isn't it better to incentivize time management and open more time for outreach rather than artificially compress the schedule?

Agreed. (I think they benefit from a longer season to succeed in, once the community has greater resources to help them more.) I've belabored my outreach paradigm for doing this. What's your idea?

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Although I am fully in the "eliminate bag and tag" camp for other reasons, I think the argument that its elimination will improve team sustainability is a bit tenuous. I don't think it will improve struggling teams' robots by an appreciable amount going into their first event, and since I live in a regional area, I don't think it would help out teams at all here because the struggling teams are very unlikely to attend multiple events. The same argument may not hold in district areas, but I won't speak for those.

The one way I am convinced that bag and tag elimination could dramatically improve sustainability would be if every practice bot team committed to something resembling this. If there were a big petition full of double robot teams that agree to something like this, I think FIRST might seriously consider eliminating bag day.

My best solution to improve sustainability would be to mandate that teams cannot register for an event unless they meet some set of requirements more stringent than "we might have $5000 in a couple of months." A sample set of requirements might be that all rookie teams must:

• Meet with their region's Senior mentor at least twice (remote meetings are fine)
• Submit a 2-year budget to their FIRST Senior mentor which he must approve.
• Get another FRC team to commit to being their "big sister" team for the next 2 years (remote partnerships are fine).
• Have four or fewer individuals on the team who together have at least 4 years of combined FRC, FTC, or VEX experience. These individuals may be either students or mentors.
• Complete a training guide provided by FIRST*. The training guide would take approximately 10 hours to complete, and different sections can be completed by different individuals.

One of the above requirements can be waived by the FIRST Senior mentor depending on surrounding circumstances and provided that the team excels in other areas that are not accounted for in the above requirements.

Adding these requirements will force new teams to acquire knowledge and resources that they might not have otherwise thought to pursue, and if these requirements scare off any teams from forming, they likely wouldn't have lasted long anyway.

*Which would include one of Karthik's strategic design talks

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

This thread has derailed into one where the word sustainability could be interchanged with competitiveness.

6 weeks is a lot of time to build a low to middle-tier robot (i.e. good 2nd pick robot). Building a very competitive one becomes way more time sensitive, especially those that build 2 robots.
For a team that spends quite a bit on our program, I still see building 2 robots somewhat wasteful, especially to circumvent the bag/tag rules in being more competitive.
FRC has turned into a program that had put all its eggs in the build season to one that teams schedule their build season around the events they participate in. Ironically, the robot allowance started this change in mindset/philosopical idea about what the actual build season is by allowing teams an avenue to keep working on their robots, and now many teams want to get rid of bag/tag. Wasnt the weight allowance created primarily to allow teams that got snowed out of construction?
It'll be interesting to see what FIRST does in the future, but as always, the benefit isnt always advantageous for every team that participates, similar to that of districts vs regional participating teams. I wish we would be on the receiving end of the advantage of eliminating bag/tag, but unfortunately not.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Personally believe bag&tag is doing no favors to anyone.

1. It ends up creating duplicate robots driving cost.

2. Team issues aside: the increasing reliance on COTS parts sourced from over seas means you are in risky territory with vendors in just 6 weeks.
So...
If COTS parts make it easier to field a robot and COTS parts are easier to get in 7 weeks...one leads to the other.

3. If COTS parts can build almost an entire robot and teams plan on doing that their logistics are governed by vendor availability not planning their fabrication.

4. Teams in places like NYC often do not have shops they require a lot of COTS.

5. There are few high value modern skills you will teach in that slightly longer time: however if you teach those skills between seasons you can expect more time to practice on an FRC robot headed for a field instead of other things.

I routinely stump for FIRST at Meetups: I have watched people lose all interest over that 6 week lurch of a build season. Good qualified people want to help - but - not at the expense of an unpaid fire drill.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Having been a peripheral member of our team in it's rookie year, and a serious mentor since then, (just finished our fifth year), I've been involved in a few serious "can we keep the team together through this" moments (mostly second and third year), and a few where it wasn't so serious, but the question arose. I have also been following and contributed to a number of (often anonymous OP) "Help, My Team is About to Fall Apart" threads. While the numbers are impressions, not statistics, it seems that about 75-85% of these issues center on resources - whether money, mentors, head coach, build space, or (rarely) student team members, or a combination. The other 15-25% were based on interpersonal conflict.

None of 3946's crises or the threads I recall (including a wide sampling of threads from before I joined, as I like to click on highlight threads) boiled down to: While ending Bag and Tag is likely to raise the level of competition, I see no reason to think that it will improve sustainability, which was the question.

On interpersonal issues, FIRST has limited ability to help resolve the issues systematically. The only way I can think of to help in these cases is to better advertise the FIRST senior mentors to student team members, and possibly to increase the number of senior mentors to accommodate the increased load. Based on the relatively small number of these issues and the lack of leverage that Senior Mentors have in the politics affecting an individual team, I would not be surprised if this is just too expensive for the benefit to be worthwhile.

On the resource front, there are a number of things that FIRST could do, some of which might be worth the cost.

Dollars: Approach large, distributed tech and manufacturing companies, and have them commit some corporate funding to FIRST team sponsorships. Based on our experience, it is much easier to get support from a company headquartered nearby than it is to get support from a company headquartered elsewhere, even if it has a local office/production center. By working through global headquarters and emphasizing local funding, FIRST could probably grease the skids to spread funding around.

Mentors - FIRST does nothing as far as I am aware to help recruit mentors. FIRST could work through professional organizations such as ACM, IEEE, SAE, and so forth to put out the word that mentoring a FIRST team is a great way to inspire future members of these organizations. FIRST could also provide a "clearinghouse" to help prospective mentors and teams find each other, and/or work with sponsors to encourage mentorship.

Costs - Somehow reduce the entry-level cost each year. I look forward to competing in a district format someday, but as a way of increasing what the team can do with the same amount of funding, not as a fount of sustainability.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Best suggestion in the entire thread.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

No surprise that I wholeheartedly agree with this evidence-based line of thinking.

The evidence is most definitely anecdotal, but it isn't contradicted by anything in my experience, or by anything posted here yet.

There is speculation that near the end of an extended build season some healthy teams will switch from improving their own prospects to helping struggling teams get over the hump. I don't doubt that some will (more than they do now), but I don't think that an extended build season is necessary for that, nor do I think that the change (across all of FRC) will be non-trivial (FRC losses about 8% of it's teams annually. How many teams will receive enough extra help if the build season lengthens?).

If there are other reasons to lengthen the build season, they can be debated outside this thread, but without evidence off a stronger connection between the two, don't advocate doing it to increase sustainability.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I will say it again: I think there are a lot of us that feel it is relevant to the sustainability of FRC teams and that is what this thread is about.

I've got another big reason to end bag and tag for sustainability... cost to FIRST. I don't mean merely money. It costs FIRST very little from a resources perspective to end it. In fact, it saves them on bags, zip ties, and the headache involved with that portion of the inspection process.

That savings doesn't help teams become more sustainable but in comparison to other ideas in this thread, it costs FIRST pretty much nothing from a resources perspective. It is low hanging fruit.

There are a lot of us that think it will help with team sustainability by enabling teams to become more competitive and giving them that "Eureka!" moment that creates an impetus to come back and do it all over again and again in spite of failure. When that moment never comes you get burnout, exhaustion, frustration, funding dries up, and participation ends.

I have seen my share of teams collapse over the years and I'd like to think ending bag and tag would have helped more than a few of them by showing them that this program can be very rewarding. I can't predict alternative outcomes but I'm not going to let someone else who can't predict them either tell me I should take my very reasonable ideas and go home... that's not how arguing on the Internet works. ;)

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

For the love of magic smoke the bag day argument is not just a competitiveness issue! Anyone arguing that increasing competitiveness is the main issue in terms of bag day and sustainability misses the point.

Anyone who thinks bag day doesn't effect things that contribute directly to the sustainability of a team hasn't actually been reading.

"75-85% of these issues center on resources - whether money, mentors, head coach, build space, or (rarely) student team members, or a combination."

Okay lets see how eliminating bag day can help with what you listed...

1. Money

• Reduced shipping costs (edit: when ordering COTS parts)
• Greater ability to get parts made (edit: via outsourcing to sponsors) as opposed to purchasing everything COTS
• More time during the season to worry about other things like fundraising

2.Mentors/Head Coach

• More spare time for experienced mentors to help rookies
• A less frequent meeting schedule can give a mentor, who can only come to a fraction of a teams meetings, more of an effect on the team.*
• Less frequent meetings could give a head coach more time off or more time during the season to deal with admin duties on a week to week basis

3.Build space

• If for whatever reason you need to find build space (unsupportive school for instance) less frequent access needs and shorter necessary access times could make it easier to convince someone to let you use their space.

4.Student team members

• A student who can't currently commit much time to the build season can now show up less frequently and make it to a higher percentage of meetings.

These aren't the only things that can be improved by this (anyone who can add to it please do). This isn't the only way to accomplish this and obviously technical tutorials need to improve and time management training has to come along with it. But now with more time overall you can spend more of it learning without sacrificing the draw of the program.

Finally I totally agree that FIRST needs to make an effort with engineering associations and organizations to improve mentor recruitment (add WIT and SWE to that list). I would also like to see that sort of effort in universities.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

There was, briefly, a student organization (of which I was never an official member, ironically, though several of my friends and co-mentors were) at the University of Maryland that existed for the purpose of providing mentorship to local FRC teams.

Unfortunately, there was never much support - from FIRST or from the university - and it died after two years.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Second and third bullet points, I'll have a harder time arguing, so I'll leave it at: for the third, you need to be doing that all year long, and for the second, "You mean we can purchase more parts that might actually get here in time?".

The first one, though, you really didn't think through. Teams already bring their robots to competition. Shipping cost is minimal already for most teams*. So eliminating bag day saves exactly what again? You still need to bring the robot with you to competition.

I'll agree on the engineering groups to get better mentor recruitment, and I think technical/time management can improve. But the whole "people will be able to spread out the time" is hogwash.

If you can't manage your time effectively now, you'll be just as unable to effectively spread out your extra X weeks and still get your work done. Meanwhile, the teams that are being very effective already will see that they've got extra time to make better iterations, and manage their time well to get that done. And then there's Parkinson's Law...



Personally... I'd eliminate Withholding Allowance entirely. You get raw materials (unlimited) and COTS (unlimited), and have to finish your work in the pit/onsite machine shop. If it isn't in the bag, and it's fabricated, back to the shop it goes... I realize that that's an unpopular opinion, but that's pretty much how we used to play back when any given regional had something like 40-50 crates to move around.




*The exceptions here are the long-haul teams: HI, South America, China, UK, and just about any other non-North American team that's traveling to North America to compete. Everybody else can drive their robot, meaning that "shipping cost" really means "gas cost", which can be split with the humans also in the transport vehicle that needed to get there anyways. Now, just so you're aware, these teams tend to get their KOPs late, and they need to ship their robots by a designated date just to make the tournament. So they're already at a significant handicap. Eliminating bag day makes that disadvantage worse--might even eliminate some of those teams, many of whom have a hard time on the field already. Just something to chew on here.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I made an edit to be more clear on point 1.1 and 1.2. I wrote them poorly. 1.1 I'm referring to COTS parts. 1.2 is referring to how outsourcing machining to sponsors can save you money on buying COTS at the expense of time.

"If you can't manage your time effectively now, you'll be just as unable to effectively spread out your extra X weeks and still get your work done. Meanwhile, the teams that are being very effective already will see that they've got extra time to make better iterations, and manage their time well to get that done. And then there's Parkinson's Law..."

And if you can you will benefit from the extra time to focus on other aspects of running the team or your life if you so chose. Which will be easier when you aren't spending as much money and have more help from veteran teams. I know fundraising is a year round endeavor. Emphasis on year round. With a smaller leadership team it's harder to focus on these efforts during build.

"*The exceptions here are the long-haul teams: HI, South America, China, UK, and just about any other non-North American team that's traveling to North America to compete."

Is that date after the current bag day? because then they would still have more time than they do now.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

While I think the B&T rules don't necessarily dovetail very well with sustainability, I would be in favor of extending B&T if, and only if, a team does not have their robot capable of passing inspection, or able to perform a minimum of tasks (eg, for Stronghold, move), and allowing work to continue only toward those goals.

This would let struggling teams (not just rookies) get their robot into a competition-ready shape, but not allow them to work on their shooter, for example, until the robot is bagged. Perhaps this would help with some B&T and inspection stresses.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I don't understand what side you're advocating. You seem to be trying to say that eliminating bag day would help sustainability, but your arguments do not help me toward that position.

How does not putting the robot in a bag do anything to shipping costs?

How does taking longer to make parts save money over making them with a shorter deadline?

How does lengthening the "build season" give any more time?

Again, how does lengthening the "build season" give any more time?

If a mentor can only come to a fraction of the meetings, how is making the meetings farther apart going to help?

If you're not suggesting fewer meetings total, how does that give anyone more time off?

I suppose there might be some contrived situation where it would be more possible to access a space less frequently, but you've totally broken your argument by suggesting that the time you need it would simultaneously be shorter.

I don't understand this at all, sorry. If you show up less frequently, how can you attend more?

I assume that you want to argue that a student who can only commit to a certain number of meetings per week will make it to more meetings in total if they are spread out over a longer time. I will grant that as a possibility, but it seems more likely to me that a student who does not have robotics as a priority (for whatever reason) under the current system will not make more of a commitment if the build season gets longer.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Translation: We can work with a more flexible schedule. That I can buy. Basically, you don't pay the expedited shipping, and you can have someone make more stuff. (I will note that one of my team's sponsors came on very late in build--we had the parts from them in a very short turnaround. We may be the exception, though...)

Parkinson's Law says that there IS no extra time. "Work expands to fill the time allotted."

Basically, you're proving my point: The teams that already manage their time well ("the rich") will continue to do so and get even better ("get richer") (and maybe even take a couple days off, har har) and those that don't... well, guess what? That makes this an even more uneven playing field than before, which can be discouraging. Discouraged teams can become discouraged former teams a little easier than non-discouraged teams can become non-discouraged former teams.



I don't know, and I would expect that it varies by competition week and where they're coming from anyways. For a Week 1, it might actually be on bag day. For a Week 2... I checked B&T forms for "crate teams" at a Week 2, didn't see any unbag time logged. Not sure about the teams at the Week 4 I was at as I wasn't inspecting.

For those guys, you need to understand: If the robot isn't in the crate, it's gotta travel by suitcase. That gets ugly fast. Now imagine that you not only have to ship the robot, but nobody else has a "hard stop" to building theirs. They get two weeks on you, just of build time. Two weeks is a lot of time in this game.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I still haven't read one legitimate point about how bag & tag enhances the FIRST experience and makes FRC more sustainable. I've never heard a team state that because of bag & tag specifically that they had a better overall season. I'd love to hear the hard evidence that shows that bag and tag makes FIRST better.

How in the world can we produce hard anecdotal evidence for something that has never been tried in FRC? This thread is about discussing ideas that could lead to more sustainability. You don't get to tell people to go debate in some other thread because you don't think an idea won't work. I think it has legs and so do many others.

My 15 years of build season experience over 4 different FRC teams ranging from little resources to many resources tells me that every single one of those teams would have benefited from the removal of bag & tag. Bag & tag literally serves no purpose than to force teams with little to no resources to stop building while teams with mid to high resources don't skip a beat and keep right on going.

I don't get how bag & tag increases sustainability at all, please educate me.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I made edits to clarify the first two so I'll spend some time on 1.3. See my last. I'll add to 1.1 too.

1.1,
Longer time to work means parts don't need to get to you as fast so one of two things happens. A. you ship parts as fast as possible anyway and get done sooner or B. you can now afford to ship things slower and thus cheaper without worrying about the deadline as much.

on 1.3,
If you have a small leadership team and human resources are split between supporting the build effort and more of the work that gets done to maintain a successful program and all the planning for events etc, etc, then if you are able to focus on the build it self less often during the span of a week then you would have more time in that week for other things. Assuming that you spend roughly the same total hrs working on the robot between kickoff and competition as you did between kickoff and Feb X.


On 2

Again if you choose to work roughly the same #of hrs you have more days per week that you won't need physically be at your own program, and more time between meetings to do things like prepare for the next meeting or in the case of 2.1 drive or skype to another team you are working with.

In the case of 2.2,
Say Jim from GE can only spare 2 afternoon week days a week mentoring FRC. Regardless of remote presence options that's all the spare time he has. Lets say this rookie team meets 4 weekdays and a Saturday. That's 30 total team meetings and Jim could do 12 (40%). If the team met 3 weekdays and a Saturday for 8 weeks he made 16 total (50%). More time overall but the mentor also got to guide them through more of the work than before.

2.3,

The problem wouldn't be total work it would be how many different things is this new and likely small mentor base having to juggle at the same time. Burnout is burnout. You need more power to do x amount in 1 unit time than x amount in 2 unit time. I can give a more specific anecdote/example if you want.

3. Say management of X property would rather you end your meetings at 7 but you usually end at 8 on weekdays. Say in six weeks you met 3 weekdays from 5-8 and you can push it up because school. That's 54 hrs of weekdays in 6 weeks. If you have 8 weeks with the same number of weekday meetings you would have 48hrs(89%) as opposed to just 36hrs (67%). Now you have less of a deficit to make up by adding meeting days or adding weekend time (by ~22%). If management of X property didn't care than it wouldn't affect you and would be a wash.

4. Similar to 2.2-3,

If a team meets more often than a student is able to show up they can be left behind or not be able to join. If meetings were less frequent but you still had just as many they would be able to attend a higher percentage of said meetings.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Oh you are the exception... before I explained the build schedule to our sheet metal fabricator he quoted 3 weeks for our parts...

I've found most dedicated machine shops have over 4 week turnarounds for milling & turning. Die makers are more. Everyone isn't the same and 2D (water, laser, plasma) is faster but limited. It also depends on time of year or if a tool is down or anything else you don't want to hear in week 4. Iv'e found that business that have these tools but don't just make parts for people (ie. manufacture their own products with them) can be a bit better but A. they have to be able to brake production B. the machinists need to be able to handle more than what the machine normally sees C. these businesses are a bit harder to identify. They don't advertise as job shops so it can be hard to know who would have that kind of tooling.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I see what you were getting at regarding costs now. I agree with Eric's summary of the benefit: extending the build season gives you more options for scheduling parts build and delivery.

In my experience, power is not the limiting factor. Energy is. You're trying to argue that doing less for a longer time is preferable to doing more for a shorter time. The counterarguments come at that from both directions: a team that "needs more time" isn't going to benefit from doing the same amount of work across more weeks, and a team that already manages their time effectively is not likely to reduce their power in the way you're suggesting that "struggling" teams will be able to benefit from. You haven't obviously helped anyone, and you have very likely increased the divide between "low-tier" and "high-tier" teams.

I also disagree with your claim that "burnout is burnout". In isolation, that might be true. But add in mentors' families and you will find that it's often calendar days that matter, not just days of high effort. Even if I work with the team only three days per week for eight weeks instead of four days per week for six weeks, I'm still spending concentrated time on robotics for two more weeks according to the people at home who are counting.

This probably makes sense to you, but it's just number salad to me. I can see where the 54 comes from, but no matter how I look at it, I can't find a way to get any of the other hours or percentages you list. Six weeks gives 54, but adding two more weeks "with the same number of weekday meetings" somehow gives six fewer hours? Where does the "as opposed to just 36hrs" come from?

The first sentence seems to say you aren't working within the property manager's preferences, so how is any of this relevant anyway? And what the heck does "push it up because school" mean?

Based on the changes you made to your first two arguments, I figure there's just something in your head that didn't quite make it out your fingers clearly enough for me to work with.

This would be true if the only reason a student can't attend is an absolute lack of hours in the week to spend on the team.

But if the problem is a conflict between the meeting times and either a job or some other extracurricular activities, simply cutting out some of those meetings isn't necessarily going to help. And if the problem is that the student just is not sufficiently committed to the team, spreading out the meetings won't change the situation.

You also ignore the fact that teams are already meeting after bag & tag day. For many teams, if you reduce the frequency of meetings during the first six weeks after kickoff, all you've done is reduce the total number of times they meet.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

You seem to be just barely missing the main point. "extending the build season gives you more options for scheduling parts build and delivery." Change that to, "extending the build season gives you more options for scheduling everything about how you run your team between Jan and April"

As for power I literary mean work over time which is my example. X amount of work in 1 unit time vs X amount of work in 2 units time. If you would rather do X work in 1 unit time than how am I stopping you? If a team can function better doing X work in 2 units time then you are hurting them.

"This would be true if the only reason a student can't attend is an absolute lack of hours in the week to spend on the team." And? That's one more sub group of students that can attend that couldn't. Meanwhile the examples you mentioned aren't even hurt by the change. Explain how that is not a net gain.

"You also ignore the fact that teams are already meeting after bag & tag day. For many teams, if you reduce the frequency of meetings during the first six weeks after kickoff, all you've done is reduce the total number of times they meet."
If you already meet after bag and tag then this doesn't affect you. My argument isn't about how much extra time you get to build a robot it's about how much extra time you get to do everything else since you can focus on the robot a little less. If you are already meeting after bag & tag day then don't change your schedule unless you want to. Again how is that not a net gain?

"I can see where the 54 comes from..."

Yes I spelled it out. I'll do it farther.

3 weekdays, 3hrs each, 6 weeks. 3*3*6=54 hrs

Management of X property would rather you end your weekday meetings 1 hr sooner. You can't make up the time by meeting earlier in the day because it is a school day.

If the build is still six weeks:
3 weekdays, 2hrs each, 6 weeks. 3*2*6=36 hrs or 67% of the amount of time you had when your meetings were 3hrs long

If their is no bag and tag (we'll use 8 weeks as an example).

3 weekdays. 2hrs each, 8 weeks. 3*2*8=48 hrs or 89% of the amount of time you had when your meetings were 3hrs long and you had 6 weeks.

A difference of 22%.

If management of X property doesn't care how long you stay than it doesn't matter and you lose nothing. Net gain.

I'm not saying everyone should or can do anything I'm writing rather I'm giving you some examples of how someone can use the added time to improve their specific situation. If you would rather not spread out your meetings then don't. If you want to meet every day anyway then do. You seem to think I think that everyone will benefit significantly and that for this idea to be valid everyone needs to. Of course everyone won't take advantage of it properly but their are people who will and if that ends up saving that team it was worth it.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

What we're saying is this:

If you want to be competitive with your local powerhouse, this schedule will make. things. worse. I can't be any clearer than that. You're not helping the teams that don't do time management well.

And the reason is that while you're spreading out your time to ease up a little on your crew, they're maintaining their schedule and using that extra time to get that last 10% of untapped optimization down to 5%, 2.5%, you get the idea.


Let me put it this way: I can think of at least one team that would still show up at their first event needing a lot of help. And by a lot of help I mean that they'll be lucky to have a structure with some functional parts mounted to it when they show up. Not having to deal with a bag probably won't make a difference.

What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

This thread has largely devolved into a "Will Not/Will Too" conversation. The opinions are so clearly opposite as to what will or will not improve sustainability, and no one seems to be shifting position, or even understanding the other side's arguments, as though we're having two different arguments. As a first hack at this apparent Gordian Knot, I'll ask (and answer) the question:

What does FRC sustainability mean to you?

My definition derives from a more general definition I found on line. Applied to an FRC team, to me it means:

The ability of an existing active FRC team to continue being an active FRC team indefinitely.

As lack of sustainability is the primary source of team attrition, attrition rates (or more precisely retention rates) are a good first order measure of team sustainability. Teams can improve their sustainability through diversification of their various resources (mentors, students, money, facilities, supplies), and even more so through implementing a plan or culture through which new mentors, students, and sponsors are regularly identified/recruited at least as fast as the existing ones cease.

Does FRC sustainability mean this, or something different, to you?

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Forgive the bluntness, but nope.

Eliminating (or delaying) a bag & tag deadline will not give you any more scheduling options for anything which does not involve building a robot, because you have all those options already.

The examples I mentioned can definitely suffer if the robot build takes longer. Don't you notice an obvious increase in "catching up" with schoolwork, chores, social events, etc. once the robot is in the bag? That's not likely to change just because the team meetings are an hour shorter. If the problem is time management in general, adding time is not a useful solution.

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I think I might have been confused by a missing "not" (or at least a missing "'t" on the word "can") in your original post, and I know I was confused by failing to grasp that the 3 hour meetings were being changed to 2 hour meetings.

I mostly understand what you're saying now. I don't accept the outcome, because there are many unaddressed factors, but I do accept the math of what you do address.

I have seen many teams. I have seen how a lot of them work, and I have seen how a lot of them struggle. I can point to none of them as being able to benefit from applying their present build effort over a longer time.

If getting rid of bag & tag will help a team become more sustainable, it's going to be because they can spend more time on the robot, period. You have described well how to reduce the number of hours spent per week, but you have not shown any evidence that the number of hours spent per week is a problem.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

I agree with this definition.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Well, damm. Please 'splain to me in small words how bag and tag kills teams.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

I also agree with the definition, and would like an explanation in similar words how shipping the robot would do the same. Read as: why we're complaining about this now instead of 10 years ago.

(I'm an old-timer, when I graduated high school everybody stuck their robot in a crate and turned it over to the shipping folks by midnight on ship day instead of sticking it in a bag at midnight on ship day--and what's this thing about "withholding allowance" again?)

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Second...

And to go off on a long limb (this does not reflect back on you or your comment, GeeTwo, just a tangent)...

What is so bad about attrition as long as the FRC pool of teams continues to rise? In essence - some teams die on the vine and others flourish. This is not a reflection on FRC but an exercise of Darwin's 'natural selection'. Teams that have what it takes can make it - and others do not. FIRST and it's sponsors have already done their work by spreading out their resources to teams that may need it - but how have those teams used these resources?

Or are we in a place in FRC that we all need equal access to all resources?

Yes, my team wants to have what the best of the best have - but we are confined to the resources in our area. And I will be honest with you, I believe that we have enough resources to compete with the 'best of FRC teams'. We feel that our greatest resource is 'time' with 'talent' being a close second.

So here is what sustainability means to me:

Build/create a strong mentor core that can withstand the exit of student talent. Have a SWOT plan in place so that we can withstand long-term ebb and flow of sponsors/student talent/space/etc. Creating a Booster Club to aid in our fundraising efforts and back the team/club when the School Board is making significant changes that effect our funding. Founding and supporting FTC and FLL teams that will produce the new wave of innovation for the FRC team. Creating a HUB from teams in a similar geography to aid each other in time of need.

You see, none of these rely upon FIRST - and none truly go back to the students themselves. If your FRC team is set up to succeed - it is set up so that the students can succeed as the mentors and support groups do the work that they are designed to do. Yes, it takes a lot of work by the lead mentors; and yes it may take years to establish this culture... but for us in Becker, MN - it has served us well. FRC 4607 is a success as it graduates 10-15 students each season and we look to bring in another 10-20 that can take the place of those that graduated. How do we do this? By creating opportunities for those in the lower grades. Last year we started 3 FTC teams and 3 FLL teams.

Last Wednesday we registered students for our FTC teams and we are now creating 2 more teams... and by September I am expecting to create 2 more. That means in a town of 4500 people, we will have 6-7 FTC teams. These teams will be made up of kids from Becker, St Cloud, Big Lake, Clearwater, etc. And I am certain we will have at least 5-6 FLL teams as well.

Oh - and our largest sponsor gives us $3500 a year. Most of our sponsors give between $250-500 (cash and in-kind). And we have 24 of these - all of which we worked our butts off to bring into the fold. And we are in Central Minnesota, in the middle of Potato Fields - 9-15 miles in every direction.

edit - I am not saying that teams need to fold, but teams need to have strong leadership. Money can entice leaders, but it does not guarantee strong leaders.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

How about when a first year team has a miserable first year because they can't iterate on their design due to a stupid plastic bag...

How about when a first year mentor gets scolded by an LRI because they lost the B&T form and that causes them to have a terrible event experience (seriously, happened this year)...

Explain to me how keeping B&T keeps teams alive. You can use big words though.

I can't guarantee that giving teams more time to iterate on their designs will help everyone but it has the ability to help some and it is a reasonable idea. Eliminate the bags! #NeverBag

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Story time.

In 2015 our team was coming off 2 terrible seasons. We had designs both those seasons but failed to execute them running out of time every year.

We had a design and executed the whole thing in time. Our issue however was that, that design did not work. We could have probably fixed all the flaws and had a decent season but, we found this out on bag day.

I even frantically posted this thread for help - http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=134801

But.... It was too late.

We went to our one and only competition spent the entire time trying to get it to work only to ultimately fail due to our lack of tooling and time.

We finished in dead last and continued our 5 year streak of no awards.

If bag and tag was not there we may have been able to gut the old system put a new one and compete at the very least.

This year we finished week 3. I guess that's a result of SBDSD.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

People have been doing this the whole time, but you don't really consider their arguments valid or correct, so why bother?

The biggest impact is on teams barely going to two events - they have a robot in the bag they know can be fixed but their chance to fix problems is artificially limited by a garbage bag that a third of FRC has a stronger emotional attachment to than the actual goals of the program. This was my old team, 2791, for many years. Small changes we could make, big changes we could not. We went to the CT regional in 2011 knowing we were terrible, that we had almost no chance of making the elimination rounds, and with really no opportunity to make improvements to the robot. The team almost died that year. Obviously there's more to the story than "the robot was in a bag" but these things were related.

Several people are posting arguments to the effect of "well, some teams will still be bad, therefore it won't completely solve the problem, therefore we shouldn't do it". What a bunch of hogwash. If even a few struggling teams do better this way and can play at a more sustainable and competitive level, isn't it worth it? This will make some FRC teams more sustainable, it's just a matter of if we're willing to do it, or if the people that don't feel like trying after 6 weeks without the self control to stop themselves will make the entire league worse for the sake of an outdated tradition.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

It may not outright kill teams, but it sure isn't doing us any favors when trying to grow & sustain FRC teams.

I've personally witnessed team success drive team sustainability. Many argue that robot performance does not matter at all, that it has zero bearing on if a team will succeed or fail long-term. I believe that this is false and that long term sustainability and long term improvement - both on and off the playing field - share a common link.

A team that plays well and to the best of their abilities and has some measure of success at a competition is an inspired team. They're excited, they're happy, they're proud. The students, mentors, & sponsors feel good because all of the time and effort they put into their teams paid off in some tangible way. Not an intangible "we really learned a lot this year, have a pat on the back" way but "wow, we programmed 3 autonomous modes that worked in 90% of our matches and won an award because of our consistency, and made it to the elimination rounds."

There are teams that never have that second moment I just described, ever. And at some point enough is enough - the students, mentors and sponsors don't see the students getting excited and they as a team aren't feeling inspired. Those are teams that fold after repeated years of feeling not so great after competitions.

Could ending bag and tag help improve the above scenario? I'd argue yes, it very well could for many teams. It gives teams a little more time to have that 'ah ha!' moment and get things working. It doesn't punish teams that can't build an extra drive base to put their 30 lbs of withholding allowance on to continue to practice and iterating. If we can raise the bar even a little bit for the lower and mid-tier teams, isn't that worth it?

Look to the VEX robotics competition if you want an example of how it should be done - no bag and tag. Constant robot access for iteration, improvement and practice. Would VRC be half of what it is today if they had a tools down / bag & tag policy? I'd argue no.

I still haven't read one statement arguing why bag and tag is still necessary other than statements that hint at "It's the way we've always done it!" I'm sorry, but that's not a good enough reason to continue to do it. There were plenty of people who shot down the district model because it was different. Now it's the future of FRC.

As a community that's supposed to be innovative and trying to drive culture change, we sure are afraid of trying anything new.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Zing!

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

B&T is the epitome of doing something just because we always have. FIRST is about innovation and inspiration. Removing B&T has a huge ability to do both.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

For the sake of giving you an answer, since you've asked a few times, and because adding more chaos sounds like a great idea. 6 weeks has always been a selling point. We always tell potential sponsors/students/mentors how we build this robot in SIX WEEKS.

So while I can't argue it's necessity, the value it does provide is a universal limited time frame that's apparently significantly shorter than real world projects. I view it as a really really good opportunity to learn about project/time management.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Which doesn't go away if you lose bag and tag. Tell your sponsors you have an 8 week or 10 week build season. They are still going to be hella impressed at your time management.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Is B&T actively killing teams? No. Absolutely not.

Is removing it going to make FRC harder for at risk teams? I don't have evidence to believe so.

Is keeping it making life harder for those same teams? I believe so.


What benefit does B&T really bring to our program besides an artificial constraint? And is that artificial constraint important to the goals of the program?

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Every time I tell someone we built our robot in six weeks, my nose grows a few inches...

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

While that is a nice selling point, that's mostly what it is - just marketing. With withholding allowances and second robots, plenty of teams keep right on building and iterating past bag & tag. Replace six weeks with eight or ten and it's no less impressive to a potential sponsor or mentor. I fear that the 6 week selling point has been engrained in FRC's culture for so long now that it's basically a non-starter for discussion.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

The 6 weeks came about also because of the out dated need to actually have FedEx come pick up your robot so they could get it to your competition in time.

We no longer ship our robot why are we bagging it?

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

It's obviously not the way we've always done it. Back in the day, FRC had a single deadline for crating and shipping the robot. At the very beginning of FRC, that was perfectly understandable, because there was a single competition. As regional competitions came to be, with different dates for some of them, it still made sense to keep a consistent crate & ship date so that every team got the same number of days to design and build their robot. Now that shipping crates to competitions is no longer a universal thing, we get the same effect by having a single deadline for placing the robot out of reach of tools.

So there's the past and the present. Now let's consider the future.

Is it still reasonable to "artificially" end robot work on the same day for every team? I think it is. It keeps the playing field level and doesn't put early-competing teams at a disadvantage by giving them less time to work on their robot. High-resource teams can find ways to make productive use of additional time even without access to the robot, of course, but I believe that to be a team strength that should yield benefits. It is not something that can be easily addressed on the "playing field" front.

Having the six week deadline is also a concept that I know many mentors plan on in order to justify deep involvement with a team during the build. Without it, I myself would definitely cut down the time I spend in a given week, and I am pretty sure I would end up contributing significantly less time in total outside the actual competitions.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Why is that? Surely you don't work on the robot between the time you bag it on the prescribed date and the time you regain access to it for your first competition. Are you nitpicking the difference between 42 and 45 days? Or are you bagging an unfinished robot and counting on a withholding allowance to let you build the rest of it outside the official build time to bolt on later?

Instead of removing bag & tag, I would very much like to see the withholding rules go back to the "identical spare parts" wording, or even go away entirely.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

My daughter was a Freshman this year and this was her first year of FRC after two years of FTC. She made the comment to me that one of the things she liked about FRC versus FTC was bag and tag.

In FTC, it always seemed like someone would have an idea about how to make this part or that part better. The result was the robot would get torn apart between competitions and it became a stressful race against the clock to get it back together. She liked the fact that the competition bot for FRC was safe in a bag between competitions and the tinkerers had to work their improvements out elsewhere.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

The artificial stop build day is what I refer to when I say 'it's always been done this way.'

Back when we shipped robots it made sense - there were few competitions and transit time needed to be factored in. Now we bag and tag for some reason - even though it really doesn't make sense to. There's no need (except international teams) to crate up the robot and ship it anymore.

Why stifle a team's creativity and innovation by making them put their robot into a bag a few weeks before they'll actually compete?

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Our robot is built in 16 weeks, not 6. The robot on Einstein was very different than the robot at our first regional. This has been the case for 1678 the past 4 years, just look at our photo albums online.

We build three robots and develop throughout the four month build season. We use withholding allowance to get new parts on the robot. We are not alone.

To say we built our championship robot in 6 weeks/45 days is simply not true.

I do miss the "identical spare parts" wording. That would be very nice for spares.

However, getting rid of withholding means we have to make all of our parts at the regional if we want to upgrade our robot. Don't worry, we would still upgrade our robot between events. CNC router, lathe and drill press in the pit would help make that possible.

Adding more barriers between teams and their robots will make the best teams even better than everyone else. We have the resources to get around every barrier you (or FIRST) can think of. Just stop trying.

-Mike

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I agree 100% with this!

I even plan on making a bag and tag rule for my FTC teams this upcoming year to help manage teenage procrastination and the tinkerer syndrome.

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

And if you don't have them, you can get them. Thus denying either those resources or time you could have given to teams in need.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

What some people negatively refer to as "tinkerer syndrome", others positively refer to as "continuous improvement".

Re: What does FRC sustainability mean to you?
 

Speaking as head coach of a team that's spent three years consciously working towards being highly competitive (observing and interviewing top teams, and emulating them)... limiting withholding to identical spare parts or removing it entirely wouldn't particularly have an effect on our ability to work outside the six weeks and within the rules. We rebuilt a significant portion of our robot at one of our events this year (state champs) and when we ran out of withholding allowance we simply designed mechanisms that we could build from raw materials & COTS, during the practice match period, and with equipment we can reasonably fit in our 10x10 pit. We built up the new mechanisms once or twice at home to make sure we knew what problems to expect, used the practice robot to do dry runs of tearing mechanisms down and rebuilding them to improve speed, and then left all that at home and packed up the raw material and COTS to do it all over again. From week one of build we planned our season around continuous iteration through World Champs. District #1 goal was breach & score low, District #2 goal was breach and score high, State Champs goal was vision tracking auto (spectacular fail, busy rebuilding everything else), and World Champs goal was add scaling (also fail, turns out it's hard to do much in the 10 days between states and worlds).

Per the original topic on what HQ can do to remove barriers to continued participation... reduce costs, particularly in registration fees. I guess I've always assumed that the initial registration fee is a marketing decision (it's like a fancy car, would lose prestige if it were lower) but I'll give HQ benefit of the doubt and say that the current revenues are justified and well utilized. What would we be willing to go without in exchange for reduced initial registration fee and/or reduced district champs/second regional registration fee? Kit of Parts? Personally I'd probably give up KoP if it meant a few thousand saved.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Except for the fact it is both easier and cheaper to completely rebuild a FTC robot compared to an FRC robot.

Arguments about teams having a lack of self control and knowing when to take breaks or not do something to their robot are BS. Its not up to FIRST to control how and when your team meets or how much work your team puts in. If you don't have the will to stop when your burnt out then that's your problem.

B&T only costs teams money, time, and heartache. It does not level the playing field. It does not save people/teams from them selves. It does not inspire. It does not do anything of benefit.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

The poster even noted how they were implementing a similar rule in FTC. Note how they didn't have to change the rules of FTC worldwide to impose that restriction on themselves! They just decided to use self control and to limit themselves by their own choice.

Getting rid of B&T doesn't stop anyone who wants to stop working from doing so. They are still free to put their tools down on ship day. Sure, nobody else who is competitive (and able to keep working) will stop working on ship day, but they already weren't stopping anyway. I bet for most of the top teams in FRC, their meeting schedule doesn't even change after bag day.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Gentlemen! Congratulations on a fantastic thread so far. I have been hesitant to enter the fray up until this point, but the discussion is just so riveting and well reasoned, I finally stopped bloodying up the wall at my desk with my head to post this. The bag and tag <SNIP> has never been so incredible to bear witness to.

At this point you are either trolling or refuse to read the thread. On the first page of the thread, a poster made this comment on it:

So if the inverse was true, bag and tag in his eyes increases logistical and financial barriers to entry.

Whether or not you choose to believe that line of thinking is not on me, but you aren't doing yourself a lot of favors by complaining that people do not understand one side of the argument when you seemingly blatantly are ignoring the already existing replies on the topic. I would applaud such a breathtaking troll job but I fear you are sincere.


I think people can argue over whether there is direct causation of team sustainability coming from on-field success, but I hypothesize that 95% of teams who make eliminations in one year make it to the next year, and the number is significantly lower for those teams who do not. There is a correlation there worthy of investigation.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the 365 day season of VRC is not necessarily all sunshine and roses. I'll spare this board the invoking of BnS or asking the rhetorical questions like "Why does 118 wait until right before VEX champs to unveil their VEX bots publicly?" but I do not think the design convergence would happen to the same extent in a 15 week FRC season.

**ATTENTION CDENIZENS: PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT TALK ABOUT DESIGN CONVERGENCE'S RELATION TO BAG AND TAG IN THIS THREAD**

My favorite part about FIRST is how that more often than not, people like to argue things that make sense when grouped together into a philosophy or other school of thought, but when using a point in favor or against one thing in the group of opinions, it betrays another part of the philosophy.

For example here, I totally agree with you, but some yahoo is going to have an opening here to tell you about why you should like the ending of the singular cmp for the two postseason expos is an example of change people don't like. Then we can circle back to stuff like "Why aren't we all just buying stuff out of the Small Parts catalog from Amazon?" and we'd be talking about the 10 regionals Michigan has.

However one of the most interesting things about this round of the b&t bout is that those who are against its removal seem to be avoiding arguing for how bag and tag improves sustainability. It's been hit on, but not for the sake of telling you how bag and tag keeps the playing field level. I don't give a flying fish about the playing field being level if we are having a problem keeping teams alive. CONSTANTLY DYING FRC TEAMS CAN BE WORSE THAN NO TEAMS. I've been fortunate to be part of only a few totally DoA seasons and they suck and make everyone feel sad. That's not the competitor in me, that's me seeing upset students and worn out mentors. I don't understand why we want to keep putting that on people unless it's a masochism thing.

The internet has evolved into "meme culture". However, one of the OG memes is not something like Rick'Rolling or SANDSTORM DARUDE, but the 6 week build season.

The entirety of my 8 years in FIRST, this line has become more and more farcical.

I find the idea of telling mentors and students you build the robot in six weeks to be interesting. How many mentors do you keep when you tell them what is essentially a giant lie up front? How many families? Maybe your team literally does nothing outside of the competitions after you bag it. If not, you're lying.

When it comes to sponsors, we actually talked to our key sponsors this year about our plan to run a true 16 week build season. We talked about how we can improve student engagement by planning a season around building two robots and competing at 5 events over 16 weeks. How did they respond to us wanting to double our build load and triple our competition load? They doubled our money. I'm not saying you get this from every potential sponsor, but taking the opportunity to show them what value we get out of extra events and extra robots really excited them.

Pretty much. Ever since we stopped saying it, student and sponsor retention has gone up!

The sphere of thinking that concerns B&T enabling a level playing field requires some mental gymnastics to get to the idea that B&T aids sustainability. One alliance wins a given tournament but all FRC teams have a chance to chase their own success and catch inspiration along the way. How much success can a team catch if they can't drive their robot?

As far as I know, no one is putting a gun that could shoot you in the head in the same bag and tag as the robot your team builds. No one makes me show up to a 422 meeting. I think FIRST would be better off instituting a weekly hours limit with no bag and tag. I am hanging that one out there so someone can tell me its unenforceable.

I hope you are in the same trolling academy as GeeTwo. 1678 has to compete like hell to get into worlds in the state of California, as they have to compete in the regional system with no rolling pre-qualifiers to the championship or the new postseason expositions. You're welcome to gum up machine shops at regionals under your proposed rule change. That'll earn a lot of fans.

Although we are guaranteed to get at least 30 more posts in this thread over a bunch of freakin' garbage bags, Andrew did us the favor of putting the horse down already:
I eagerly look forward to what I can only imagine to be <SNIP> that is more circular discussion of a bunch of plastic bags!

----

I think the argument about what you are saying comes down to whether or not you believe the primary growth model of FRC should be shotgunning rookie registrations and seeing what happens. As far as I know, there is not a double digit loss of high school lacrosse programs every year. I would like to believe the powers that be know what is best for growing FIRST, but with each passing year I doubt the "shooting the money wad" strategy more and more.

I think how you approach the challenge of sustainability in FRC depends on your answers to at elast these two questions:

Is the current "money shotgun to rookies" growth model still the primary way we should be growing FRC?

Is a bad FRC team better than no FRC team?

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

TL,DR: Teams that struggle to build a sound robot will be best helped by practice before the build season, and the ability to reuse what they accomplish, not a by longer build season for all of FRC.

I'm at the LOL stage. Not the beating my head on a wall stage, and certainly not the thunderous applause stage.

Every argument you (PT) listed has a decent counterargument, and every one of those counterarguments has a decent counter-counterargument,. A few from one side or another have been left out, but most are here somewhere.

What comes to mind most often for me over the last couple of days are these thoughts:

• That someone in FIRST didn't set the 44 day limit because of shipping deadlines. That would only be possibly true if the build start date were a law of the universe. It's not. So, does it make sense to drop that line of reasoning? From day one FIRST could have kicked off each season in the Summer/Fall, if they wanted to, and could have created a 6 month build season.
• That while the length of the build season is creating a lot of virtual smoke and thunder now, some time in the future I'm confident that robot weight limits, or the number and types of allowed motors, or the rule(s) about restarting from scratch each season, or mandatory bumpers, or ... will be the bete noire and cause celebre. ALL of those cause struggling teams to struggle more when building an FRC robot. ALL of those are arbitrary decisions someone took when they were explicitly deciding what challenges/constraints the FRC annual challenge would entail. But! They were/are arbitrary only in the sense that they involve some judgment/wisdom. I'm 100% sure that their current settings were not chosen capriciously. FRC isn't about building the best robot that can play each game. A part of FRC is about the learning experience of satisfying lots of constraints to build a compromised robot that can do well at the game. Time is simply one of those constraints. This (and the previous bullet) is my observation for Ryan D. and others who rail against the imposition of a time constraint.
  
• That helping struggling teams have a successful build will be best done by helping them practice the construction, programming, and project management before the build season. I say this in the sense of helping them learn to fish, instead of giving them a fish. I suggest adding an inexpensive, Fall, annual, robot-building & project management curriculum, and KOP/BOM, and letting the simple robots built during the Fall compete unmodified (maybe allow some modest changes) in the Winter/Spring (think of plowie in Dave's animations). There will be plenty of devils in the details, including avoiding letting too much of the game cat out of the bag, but the intent behind the current 44-day time constraint will be preserved (won't be circumvented further) in a useful sense; and struggling teams will have a valuable safety net. Siri asked earlier what my idea it's. This is it.

Blake

PS: My suggested Fall curriculum would contain a double-dose of mentor training to dislodge the instinct that "It is about the robot/banner"; and to help them learn how to inspire students to try STEM activities and careers without falling into the trap of letting their team's year in FRC be overly influenced by the few hours they spend at a tournament.

PPS: Did anyone notice what I tried to do in that 3rd bullet? I suggested giving struggling teams a much longer build season, and a way to increase the strength of their team's foundations; without giving non-struggling teams a free pass to over-invest (any more than they might now) in the robot-building part of FRC.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Brace yourselves, reality check incoming.

I would first like to preface this response by letting everyone know that a bag and tag discussion as intense and "bloodying" as this one was not my intention when creating the thread. I also did not think it would morph into an argument this strong.

Before we address the topic of Bag and Tag and whether or not it leads to more sustainable teams, we should define FRC team sustainability itself.

What is FRC sustainability?

Sustainability, by Wikipedia definition, is the capacity to endure. I will alter this definition slightly for the purposes of future discussion in this thread:

Sustainability, in an FRC sense, is the ability of a team to have a good enough foundation to stay as participants year after year. This foundation is comprised of a team's community support, mentor (technical/business knowledge) support, monetary support/sponsor relations, and finally, a school/student partnership (an incoming stream of students). This foundation should be strong enough that if there is mentor or student turnover, the team should be relatively unaffected in its' ability to continue to participate in the program.

We do NOT need to define sustainability as a level of competition. Being competitive doesn't necessarily mean that a team is sustainable. However, the key here is that when teams improve sustainability and build up their foundations, increased level of competition will come as a side effect.

On the topic of B&T...

Short and simple, Bag and Tag will help improve team sustainability indirectly by allowing lower resource teams to have a longer build season, but it will increase teams' level of competition more than it would increase sustainability. For this reason, I believe that Bag and Tag would be a nice thing to eliminate, BUT building foundations for weak and unstable teams is FAR more conducive to sustainability than getting rid of Bag and Tag.

Edit: To summarize: Help teams build foundations and that will lead to infinitely more sustainable teams.

Now, everybody take your mind off sustainability for a while and go read 254's technical binder. It's awesome.

Remember, the majority of participants in this thread are members of sustainable teams. We should be thinking about several of the new teams in the 5-6000s that had no foundation and will not be participating next year, and how FIRST - the community AND the organization in New Hampshire - can save these teams from going defunct and help grow all of FIRST as a result.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I frankly couldn't give a toss about counter-argument vs argument in the way that my post wasn't really there to take a side on any opinion on B&T; I just wanted to make sure I was not alone in witnessing a stunning lack of awareness of some posters.

On the topic that you were pushing in to, I have a loosely developed idea of how a Division II of FRC could work in some areas but it's not hammered out really well right now and is part of a larger post that this thread at the moment would not benefit from...

Essentially a Division II FRC would take place from August to December, playing a modified version of the game Division I experienced from January to April.

Targeted benefits of Division II
-Cheaper registration fee: Division II events would essentially be FIRST sanctioned offseasons in their structure and venue. You are playing on a worn field. You could/should be able to register a team for $1000 and get two district events?
-Allow Division I teams to mentor Division II teams: it's out of season for potential division I teams so they can use some outreach efforts just by taking their robot to a division II team shop and showing them what they did, or they could invite a division II team in to their shop.
-Train up new volunteers in new roles: pretty much moving a benefit from an offseason competition into a "second season" competition.
-Try out new higher-level rules like no bag and tag, motor allotments, bumpers.
-Give COTS manufacturers time to develop and stock relevant items to lower the cost for these teams
-Probably more benefits

I could also list the drawbacks that I have already considered but frankly I'm interested into seeing how people try to rip it apart. At the administrative level it's hard to see how this can work in anywhere that isn't Ontario, Minnesota, California, or Michigan, and these teams likely would not go to a postseason exposition like Division I has, but the idea is that they might not be able to afford it anyway.

+1

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

When I thought about creating a division-style split among the teams in order to help struggling teams, I thought of some reasons that discouraged me from suggesting it

A) It would definitely have an effect on struggling teams, but I think the change doesn't directly attack a root cause of teams' struggles. I think those root causes are being ill-prepared for starting the build season part of FRC, plus a few others.

B) I think that struggling teams need a foundation of being better prepared, and need a safety net. Competing in a lower-performing division is still competing (that will include some learning), and competing is distracting. To me creating two divisions didn't shed enough of the problems teams encounter in the current annual rhythm, and didn't focus enough on zero-risk education and practice (that would carry over as a safety net in the Spring).

Blake

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Caution, long post.

If I can summarize the B&T debate succinctly so we can get back to increasing sustainability, and be advised that the numbers are just to identify, and assigned in no particular order:

Side 1 says that eliminating B&T makes more sense, would help them more, and teams can still choose to follow B&T if they want to. Side 1 says Side 2 just doesn't get it (and rather openly, I might add).

Side 2 says that keeping B&T makes more sense, and would help them more, for usually opposite reasons than Side 1. And Side 2 also says Side 1 doesn't get it (also rather openly).

Side 3 (a very small minority, generally landing with side 2) says that Side 1 and 2 are both wrong and we should still be operating under robot shipping rules as far as withholding goes.

And no side is willing to back down. I guess Side 4 would be "It doesn't matter what we say, we'll see what FIRST says, now can we get back to discussing sustainability?"

So how about we agree to disagree on that topic (at least for another six months or so, when FIRST announces whether or not B&T is back), assume that at least as far as sustainability is concerned it's a wash either way, and continue on?


Sustainability. What I see there isn't necessarily something HQ can actually do much about. I mean, short of lowering the barrier to entry (anybody not want to pay $4K instead of $5K?), the financial side is always going to be problematic. (I figure a rookie team budget for their first year to be an absolute minimum of $10K--registration, robot, and maybe some cheap T-shirts and tools.) If a team can get that part taken care of, they might or might not be sustainable--let's go with they'd be 33% more sustainable if they can guarantee a revenue stream (and remember, 83% of all statistics are made up on the spot, including the last two.) Maybe Dean's Homework this year will help. Maybe it won't.

Mentoring can be a problem too. I've got a challenge for all ya mentors out there. I see that a lot of experienced folks move to a new area and end up with an established team. A team that's got mentors and has been around a while, and is sustainable. How many teams could you help turn from "maybe they show up with a robot" to "sustainable" by simply working to mentor them instead of the more established team? Think about it. (There's other considerations, I'm aware--for example, the team actually needs mentors because they're set on the rest but NOT mentors--but that's kind of been niggling at me the last 3-4 years.)

Nomadic teams tend to have problems too, I'd think. Imagine having to move every. single. year. Can it be done, sure. I've heard of those teams succeeding despite all the moves. But I think it can be argued that an established "home base" can do a lot more for a team's sustainability than overzealous parents can.:p At least they know where to find the team...

And then there's the dedicated student factor. As in, the students so dedicated that when they graduate the collective team knowledge is gone... Or not dedicated enough to bother showing up.

How many of those

What can FIRST HQ do? More seminars on team management (fundraising, recruiting and retention, finding places to build--that's a start, maybe include "replacing your primary sponsor"). Lower costs of entry. And more Senior Mentors to help teams find those missing pieces. That'd be my top 3 for things that FIRST can do.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Tricky thing about sustainability - the two resources are time and money. If all of the members are stressed out and burned out at the end of the season, the team risks folding because low participation time the next year.

--- (my musings on this thread) ---

At this point, I'm of the opinion that most school-based teams would be better served if their finances were a split between a school district and an independent NPO. So many state and local legislatures screw with how extracurriculars are funded/allocated that, IMO, the booster club model is the only real way to sustain a team that doesn't have one large central sponsor. I wonder what FIRST would come up with if they analyzed creating a membership-based financial arm that served as that NPO entity for teams. This would allow GREAT fundraising by a single group of students/adults to really have an impact in later years - something that usually isn't possible in a school budget.

The B&T debate (for me, FWIW) isn't about competitiveness or challenge so much as it is about the stress of a season. As a team who has consistently made it to Worlds we know that our competition season extends the build season by another 8-9 weeks. Even take away all of the CA wins, we would consistently make it to DCMP's now, meaning the season is another 6 weeks after build season.

The 6 week season is a lie for participants who are held accountable for robot performance, and has been for about 8 years. B&T stresses every single one of my build team members - adults and kids - long after 'bag day'.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

It should be informative to look back at this year's PNW funding structure and see the influence it might have on team sustainability.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

So how would this fit into the existing offseason events? It might be more fruitful to modify the offseason events to emphasize the experiences for the Div II teams. Changing the draft rules to break up power teams could be one small step. Changing rules to increase the value of easier tasks is another. Other ideas?

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I think this is a potentially fruitful strategy. The question is how to got more experienced teams to find it in their best interest to reach out--incentives can be incredibly powerful. I suggest that FIRST announce in September that some form of team work will be needed to score maximum points in the upcoming game. In 2014 it was the assist, this year it was getting on the batter to capture. On the other hand, in 2015 a third robot too often became a liability. FIRST should be delivering a clear message about the benefits of coopertition before the build season starts.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

SE Michigan already does something similar to this. A local robotics competition, called OCCRA, is held from September-November. Robots are slightly smaller (but on the same scale) as FRC. Games usually borrow elements from past FRC and VEX games. Some of the key differences:

• No direct mentor help
• No precision machining (bandsaw and drill press is about as precise as you can get)
• No B&T, build throughout the season

A rule book can be found here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/at...7&d=1410283204

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Yes & Thanks for the hopeful thumbs-up.

My suggested criterion/goal would be "Carry out this lesson plan, and you will build a simple robot (plus driver controls) you can (re)use. Additionally, if you fully take the lessons to heart you will learn how to plan and build a custom robot whenever you feel ready to take that plunge".

Because of the uneven nature of help from other teams, I would urge FIRST to produce a set of pre-season-build, how-to instructions/classes that FIRST standardizes. Experienced teams could become familiar with the instructions and supply valuable face-to-face help.

For new teams FIRST might even make completing the simple bot mandatory in teams' rookie years?

For long-established teams going through a rough patch, building the simple bot gets students' and adults' feet back on the ground, (re)teaches technical and/or project mgmt skills that might have been lost, defuses some arguing & churn, is inexpensive with an easy BOM, generally simplifies everyone's season/year, and ensures that the team will have something to show for their work.

However, getting back to your points, help during the pre-season (wherever it might show up) from experienced teams would be a good thing, and coopertition points to make the resulting simple, consistent robots more useful on-the-field would be a good thing too.

Blake

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

What I think teams need, and which has only been mentioned a couple times in this thread, is institutional support from FIRST in procuring human and financial resources.

Teams fold because they lose mentors and/or money. There are other reasons, but those are the ones I've seen the most, they're the ones I've experienced myself, and they're the ones that seem to be most prevalent in the (limited) data we have. If FIRST wants to do something about team attrition, they need to do something to help with this. Everything else is just, to use a tired metaphor, rearranging deck chairs in the titanic.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

As a newbie to FIRST and robotics in general, as this is my first season, and in a rookie team at that, I would like to offer a few observations. But first I must make a few qualifying statements. We are blessed with great machining facilities, several higly qualified mentors who are well versed in machining and engineering, and decent income. We are not connected to a school, which is a plus factor in some ways, and negatives in others. All in all, we have done well for ourselves in competition in several of the teams we have active. That being said, I look at a few things that have happened, and scratch my head a bit. I originally thought that B&T was a good idea, but since we were able to build a second bot to experiment and tweak and for practice purposes, I guess the B&T idea kinda stopped making as much sense. We did as others do, build a second bot and so recreate our comp bot to an extent because we had the ability to see where a measurement may be off a bit, a motor not tough enough, or a tolerence needing adjusted. SO, B&T was observed, and adhered to stringently to the rules, but we were able to work past that deadline using our practice bot. Not everyone has that ability.
Being that we are not school based, but area based, we don't have to seek permissions that schools ask to 1) travel out of state 2) arrange school transportations 3) deal with class time restrictions 4) beg a school for funding. But we have our own issues anyways as most of you already are aware can arise. Our local school systems are in very tight budget restraints and our independent status is a plus for us. Our money flow is different, and our mentor base is not restricted to a school system's requirements.
But.. as to mentoring needs, there is a goldmine of retired people out there who would love to mentor. There are people in nursing homes that would love to share their expertise with students in the areas of business, and mechanical talents. I personally know a man who was retired that worked for Ford making cars and R&D on rocketpacks!!! Perhaps some of these folks could be tapped? And some retired people have great shop facilities, by the way.
But mentoring can be a great financial aid where money is tight, to reduce the costs of prototyping a design and possibly wasting materials in experimentation, a mentor may be able to steer discussion to more usable directions and avoid obvious mechanical failures.
I guess what I am saying is, B&T is part of the game, but there are ways around it.... if you have the money and wherewithal to afford 2 bots or similar solutions. Mentors are out there, but maybe we need to look in unusual places to find unusual mentors. And utilization of our resources greatly depends on the individual constraints of each individual team. No silver bullet is going to fix all or even most of the problems. I kinda like the dual tier ideas being passed around.
Just my piddling two cents worth from a newbie.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Allowing struggling teams to build in the Fall, and use in the Spring, a simple, inexpensive, standard, teaching robot (capable of helping win tournament matches); would allow them to need fewer mentors, to need less from the mentors they have, and to train new mentors.

It would also probably reduce costs (at least a little), while freeing up students and mentors for fundraising activities, instead of consuming them in a typical year's build prep, build, and post-build upgrade time sinks.

The suggestion isn't a miracle cure, but it does seem to help (at least in my head) on several fronts.

Established teams who choose to adopt the option would be consciously choosing to put the robot on the back burner for a year (it's not about the robot) in order to focus on other matters, like getting their funding and/or mentoring house(s) in order; without having to abandon participating in tournaments, etc.

If FIRST did implement something along these lines it wouldn't be the type of direct institutional support from FIRST HQ you had in mind Oblarg, but it would at least be indirect support in that it takes some pressure off struggling teams by putting an easily implemented floor under the robot part of their annual task list.

Blake

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

This response is so late that I feel bad but roughly speaking yeah a teams resources should be going to growing themselves instead of advertising the benefits of FRC.
FRC has the ability to represent itself better then any group of students (come at me people who disagree) because the people in FRC have better points of contact in industries where if we got more support we would be better off. If we grow the relations between the real world and FRC then a team has a better platform and more support to stand on. If companies more actively came out and sponsored teams as opposed to teams going to companies that sends a pretty strong message. That says this company supports what we are doing, a business is investing actual time or money into these students (or both). That is some great evidence for a school board or a parent who goes "what have you been doing after school?". That would mean that the small team of 5 students and some crazy mentor have some real solid proponents and advocates that help when dealing with naysayers.

IMO...

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Like the FIRST Senior Mentor position, you mean?

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

For those not interested in doing the digging:
http://www.firstinspires.org/senior-mentors

"FIRST® Senior Mentors (FSMs) are a group of highly skilled and talented technical and non-technical individuals, who focus on recruiting, supporting and expanding all four FIRST programs. Founded in 2005, the FIRST Senior Mentor program prides itself in its cross-program, grass-roots approach...."

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I posted this because:
We do not have them in Michigan (to my knowledge), so I didn't know there was such a thing until probably 2012 (after 7 years of involvement in FRC).

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I understand your general rhetoric, but I'm still having trouble seeing how anything changes in reality. Are you saying you think FIRST HQ needs to attempt to recruit sponsors to help various individual teams?

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

What I interpret it as saying is: FIRST should have companies that would be willing to consider sponsoring FRC team(s) make it more obvious that they will consider it. When you are seeking out sponsors, it is usually easier to get a sponsorship from a place that you have a 'way in', or direct connection to (i.e. parent or mentor works there, etc.). But if the company is willing to consider sponsoring FRC team(s), then FIRST could help make it so that saying "I'm from FRC team ####" can be your 'way in'. Not sure if that makes sense, but that's my interpretation.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

One person for a large number of teams is not very much "institutional support."

The problem with placing the onus of finding money and mentors (especially mentors) entirely on teams is that it results in a "rich get richer" system. Teams that are struggling to scramble enough resources to produce a working robot at the end of build season naturally do not tend to have overflowing spare time with which to pursue acquiring new resources. On the other hand, teams that have a comfortable amount of resources and lots of spare manpower can spend quite a bit of time hunting down new mentors and sources of funding.

It is tempting to appeal to the "well, if you want to do well, work harder!" line of rhetoric (and I have seen many people do so), but this fundamentally ignores the fact that teams that are struggling and at risk of collapse often have mentors who are overworked in the first place. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I took a semester off from my undergraduate education and loaned a large chunk of money out of my pocket just to keep 4464 afloat in 2015. I burned out pretty badly as is. It was not reasonable to expect me to hunt for mentors to replace ones who had left, or even to search for my own replacement for future years. My hands were full.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

As Alan mentioned earlier, I think the pilot funding model that PNW introduced this year is a great first step towards this "institutional support". By simplifying the cash flow model through teams/local FIRST organizations/HQ, FIRSTWA was better equipped to fundraise on the behalf of the teams. Looking at the registration fees that PNW teams paid this year, there was a substantial benefit.

Yes, this only addresses the monetary aspect, but I think it's a good starting point.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I agree this is a problem, or at least a symptom of a problem.

Do you have a method in mind for accomplishing what you would like to see change?

Do you think what I suggested (suggestion) (or paynetrain's two-divisions suggestion) would take a big bite out of this reason why teams struggle?

Blake

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

So.... like the NASA grants?

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

How many FIRST Senior Mentors would you want in order to call it sufficient support? This past season, I think there were enough to average one for about every 65 teams.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Keep in mind that the FIRST Senior Mentor program is for every program FLL Jr. through FRC. So that number might be a little small :)

On a personal note, there are more teams in MN between the 4 programs than I have time to support. I do everything in my power to do so but at the end of the day I do need sleep. In an ideal world, we would have many more FSMs.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

I can imagine, but not realistically expect FIRST HQ, or any other entity I know about, will be able to hire "enough".

Oblarg might have a different expectation.

Seems like recently posted data showed about 8% of roughly 3000 teams dropping out of FRC annually. If most of those are teams that wanted to stay but couldn't because of too much struggling, and if FIRST HQ wanted to have someone meet with each once every two weeks throughout a 26? 52? week period...

Back of the envelope says:
8% of 3000-ish teams = 240 FRC teams to be helped.
Traveling to visit 8 FRC teams every 2 weeks = Visitor's rate
(240 FRC teams every 2 weeks) / (8 FRC teams every 2 weeks / visitor) = 30 visitors.

Employing 30 people on the road across North America, and a few other parts of the world, for 26? 52? weeks per year to try to prevent 8% of the FRC teams from leaving the program would be a huge expense, and might not have a large effect.

Also, what I roughed out above would not give any special attention to the remaining 17% (510) FRC teams that would be in the bottom quartile (in terms of team "health") each year.

Maybe investing in online classes, and similar training/help would give a bigger total ROI, and consume a smaller total investment?

Blake

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

1/regional, plus an additional 1 per 50 teams in a district, would be the bare minimum, I'd think, if it was just FRC. And I do mean bare minimum (it's not uncommon to find 3 FSMs at a single SoCal regional of 40-60 teams--and at least two of the same three at a different SoCal regional a week later).

The problem is that when you add FTC, FLL, and JrFLL, a 1:50 ratio rapidly turns into more like 1:200+. Not all teams will need the FSM's help (and the "smaller" teams are more likely to be able to get 3-4 teams helped at once, courtesy of often having 3-4 teams per school), but even so, the poor FSM is trying to coordinate help to way too many teams. If you were to call it a 1:100 ratio across the board, you might be able to get there... but that's a LOT of FSMs, something like 300 for FRC alone.



My thought would be to, in addition to adding FSMs, have various "instructional" videos on various ways to find funding, mentors, facilities, and other things that teams need.


I also like the idea of an early simple robot. Concept: Teams who opt for the kitbot in their KOP have it shipped to them and are allowed to build it immediately, and use it in competition that season as their drivebase. Teams that don't opt for the kitbot would have to wait for Kickoff to build stuff for competition. Basically, you got drivetrain going right away, you got 6 weeks to build the superstructure and make it work. (Or...not. BLT robots work too, now you got 16 weeks of driver practice!)

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Little bit of both well minus picking favorite teams.
If FIRST was more mainstream, if more people heard about it, if companies took FIRST seriously getting sponsors would be a lot easier for any team. It would shift the appeal to sponsors away from what impact a team has made and move it to "oh you guys are with FIRST sponsoring someone in FIRST is a smart decision cause of how good the program is."
If FIRST was more mainstream and more prominent in its impact with the world, more schools would be open to the program, and more schools wouldn't just view having a FIRST team as a money sink and a legal risk.
If FIRST was mainstream it would be a lot more likely that teams would have helping coming to them.
I'm not saying being part of FIRST should make us entitled to help, I'm saying that if FIRST was a household name, and taken more seriously it would promote an environment where growing is easier.

FIRST needs to step up its presence on social media, and general presence to the public. It isn't a shocker that people don't take FIRST teams seriously when they don't understand what FIRST is or frankly even know about it.

The other thing FIRST needs to do is towards its clients towards the teams it needs to find a better way to deliver information to where it is needed. Teams shouldn't be coming to chief delphi for information FIRST is supposed to be in charge of distributing. Its dumb, the best way to deliver content about your product isn't through someone elses website. Even those of us who participate in FIRST people like me who aren't "hardcore" not knowing resources exist is kind of weird.

An interesting aspect to point out about the community is that FIRST doesn't have a decent wikia (which I find hilarious). With a community this large you think someone would have thrown together a wikia for FIRST. Most video game communities come together and get a solid reference point and factual database done for a video game in like a year. Yet somehow nobody has spearheaded a top level FIRST wikia where we centralize useful information taking some of the burden off of FIRST to distribute said information...

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Every year I have been involved in FIRST, I learn about a new piece of documentation or document repository that I've never heard of previously that has been around for more than a few years. FIRST as a whole needs to sort out the documentation process and library/catalog. It's a mess. In fairness to FIRST, they know it is a mess based on the conversations I've had and there are plans to work on it. I'm not convinced putting out all of the documentation in a single place will make teams more sustainable but it will help with the headache of constant searching and data collection.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

On top of that, unintentionally fractured communications can be overwhelming to coaches. As a raging buffoon, one of the few ways I attempt to gain a competitive advantage for 422 is trying to get plugged in to every movement in the community.

This shouldn't mean that I am in rare company for being someone who had to go through the championship website, email blasts, the blog, and team updates to piece together the entire load in procedure! It's harrowing to think about how easy FIRST makes it for coaches to be uninformed.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

These should be unified and not disparate. Information should be over-communicated and duplicated on all of these. You hear me Frank?

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

Not really what I'm saying at all. For instance, we use mailchimp for unifying our team communication. Our team emails go out via email, Facebook, Twitter, and on the web all at once.

Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
 

There is no way the one Senior Mentor could connect with as many potential sponsors/mentors as the 65 teams could. They do supplement the effort the teams make to generate interest in FIRST creating potential for more mentors and resources.