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.