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Moving Championships back
We all know that AP testing is one of the severe limiters to the length of the FRC season. However, what would happen if the championships were moved to AFTER AP testing, such as near the end of May. The result would be in a 3-4 week gap between when champs would normally be and when it would be with the change. This would have a few advantages and disadvantages as to what I can see.
Some pros: - Teams have another month to work. - Waitlisted teams have more time to sort out their affairs before champs. - Competition season is not as rushed. - You could theoretically have both champs at the same time. - No chance of conflict with VEX champs. Some cons: - Teams have another month to work. :D - Depending on where you live and when your school lets out, champs could be during the beginning of summer vacation. - Having champs after AP testing could lead to students still pulling long hours during testing and adversely affecting their scores. What are your thoughts on this? |
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"Competition season is not as rushed."
That's a lot of the point of competition season. :rolleyes: |
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A few things that could be conflicts that immediately come to mind are
1. Studying for final exams. 2. Some schools end in mid/late May so champs could potentially be during the last week of school and therefore interfere with final exams. 3. Lots of other school clubs/teams/organizations start to have their banquets around mid/late May. 4. Extending the season further puts more pressure on mentors/teachers/students/parents. 5. Some states have state champs starting in May. |
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One more for the "Pro" list:
More time to develop uses for the 30lb weight withholding allowance. Some teams (us included some years) will add/improve capability under the weight withholding allowance. The extra weeks would allow further refinement and improvement. I also see this as a drawback for the same reasons. |
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I love the idea. It makes it so much less stressful for teams qualifying at later regionals. For us, we qualified at SVR (Week 6) and we had a huge time crunch to get everything together, so much that we almost didn't go. It also gives way more time to iterate, because we had very little time (<1 week) to get everything together and get it shipped. Thus, we had to focus our time on making spares for damaged components at SVR.
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Many schools wouldn't allow recently graduated seniors to travel with the team if the school year ends before championships happen. For that sole reason, I am opposed to moving championships back.
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We promote robotics as a "winter sport", and stretch that definition a little by running all the way to the end of April. Students get involved with other things - tennis, soccer, golf, baseball, to name a few. I know my team has lost students to these other activities during our week-6 regional and Champs as it is (for example, one of our best builders the past few years is also a star in golf in the State, and we lose her as soon as that season starts up)... pushing it back even more would only make the problem worse and introduce additional conflicts for people.
As much as many of us treat robotics as a year-round commitment, a large number of students and teams can't treat it like that. We need to work to keep it within a single, typical sports season as much as possible, with off-season activities helping to spread it out for those that have the time and energy to do it year-round. |
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Not going to happen. Some schools will not allow travel outside of the school year. FIRST would NEVER do this.
Not even worth discussing. |
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This would occur after a lot of schools end, and many schools forbid access to workshops / student travel "with" the school outside of the school year.
Why would FIRST do something that would only hurt their teams that qualify for champs? (Opinions are my own.) |
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If I may, however, it seems the tone of your message may come off as slightly negative, with the all capitalized NEVER and your final comment of "Not even worth discussing.". Now, does that bother me? Not at all, but Poseidon5817 appears to be a student, and shutting down a student's idea in a harsh way may lead to students shying away from sharing their new ideas to the public (especially when it comes from a mentor of 254, whom students look up to on this site). The idea may not work out, but next time I'd suggest explaining your thought process as to why it may not work as well as the student intended and avoid the phrasing that makes it sound like "No, your idea is terrible!". That way next time this student has a good idea (and while it doesn't work, I still think this is a good idea to combat a well-known problem in FRC), the student will feel more comfortable sharing what he/she thinks up and instead isn't hesitant to speak because previously others shut him/her down right away. Just an idea :) Let's build students up instead of breaking them down. |
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I like this, but (emphasis on the but), for me if we put it after AP exams, then we have to also start dodging final exams, which start for some schools immediately after that, and for other school occur at the end of June. Basically, this means that to not have students missing both study time and the actual exams, Champs would land somewhere in the end of June/beginning of July.
That I would find problematic for the obvious reasons stated above already. |
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And in all honesty, Cory IS right. There's no reason not to be blunt about it. |
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I've been wrong before though. |
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The mechanism has some inherent value in the process - design, manufacture, evaluate, iterate. An idea that is a nonstarter (such as FIRST should crowd source the game design this year), while it may spark some interesting discussion, has significantly less value as an educational tool because there's no feedback loop to see if the discussion is correct. And if it's something that is already proven there's no real point in discussing it. Which category does this discussion fall into? As worded - the former. As Cory stated, FIRST is not going to move the World Exhibition Events past the end date of school years. The Pros and Cons are largely irrelevant for that discussion. However, of value may be a discussion of the impact off season events have on teams. It's effectively the same question (can we move the competition season to include some of the summer vacation?) but it is practical, applicable, and can actually be evaluated. Also - schools don't all end at the same time across the globe, perhaps that would be another avenue of discussion. - Does the current World Exhibition Event fall within your school year? What impact does it have on your attendance? |
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For all those saying it will never happen.
Who ever thought first would make 2 Champs? Bottom line is you never know. And too all those that are saying by having this outside of the school year it will hurt attendance it's worth mentioning that this system allows much more time for teams to fundraise. Think of all the district qualifiers, wait list qualifiers, or late regional qualifiers that have scrambled to get funds and come up short. |
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My point is guys, that there is no reason to be rude and condescending to someone on here for an idea. I wasn't spamming, I wasn't flaming anyone, just posting an idea wanting to hear the community's opinion. |
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I'm... neutral on the idea.
You don't have to dodge AP testing, which is a good thing... except that you lose any ability for the students who are doing AP tests to do robot work for a couple weeks. (I'd bank on that being the case, with testing being so important to academics these days. Shame that education isn't as important to academics. Whether it's the school or the parents clamping down, you'll lose those students.) On the other hand, for anybody who's not doing AP (and is doing CMP), you add another several weeks to an already long season. 14 weeks from Kickoff to the Week 7 events isn't exactly short! There's ways to mitigate that, admittedly, but that's still something to factor in. I can see the pro of having more time to plan travel; that's always a plus. (And you can do fundraising at that time, too, even better.) But then you get to the whole "end of school year" if you run it too late. Now, out here, school year ends in the early June timeframe, give or take a couple weeks (depending on start date); if you snuck CMP in early in May you've got a shot but anything later is going to be trouble. For the college mentors, they might be getting out earlier still, so that introduces some interesting complications. Could it be done? Sure. Not for another 5 years, though. Venue contracts are signed, don't want to undo that. Is it a good idea? Eh, maybe they'll come up with something totally different by then, like having Kickoff in December. |
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What many people forget is if you feel a topic is not worth your time or impossible you do not have to respond. Not responding is better then being rude. A few years ago at kickoff we had a presentation about how NASA was designing a 7 ton mars exploration lander. An intern whose ideas were beneath them showed a concept that led to the Mars rover. People learn from other's ideas. Now that I have that off my chest. I feel that all the serous ideas that are con are correct except that FIRST would never do it. If FIRST thought that they could land a few big sponsors then I feel it could happen.
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Who needs presents? We have Kickoff! If only I had family in New Hampshire... |
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As for FRC state champs, don't you think that they'd just swap the dates to early May or late April instead to fill the void? As for post-school championships, there are many national sports championships held in June and July. But there may be a problem with schools covering team expenses. On the other hand, how many FRC programs are formally embedded into schools the same way that sports teams are? In my experience, they run like clubs, and many musical and performing arts clubs have summer tours. |
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High school graduation in St. Tammany schools in 2017 is May 3 through May 9th. The seinior's last day is somewhat before that. If CMP were moved back even one more week from St. Louis, we would probably lose all our seniors.
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Summer job, getting a head start on college, taking a break from school (hey, if you had a chance to get out of there, you'd take it, right? ;)), or just plain school policies. I believe that someone noted above that schools may not allow alumni to be treated as students, or support the team at all after the end of the school year. Also, there's a very gray area with respect to the rules of the competition, for any seniors on the drive team that might graduate before a May Champs event: Drivers and HPs are pre-college by definition. Whether that includes students who have graduated high school and have yet to attend college has not been asked, as far as I know; should the move happen I'm sure someone will think to ask the question. |
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The second suggestion is more straightforwards: That's always an option. But, that would mean that they'd be traveling on their own dime, in most cases--the school wouldn't be able (er, willing) to help out; in some cases that could also mean that the team wouldn't be able to help out. That alone would probably drop a number of graduated students. The first suggestion has a large impact on team finances and dynamics. OK, so you graduated. You are now a mentor. That means that instead of bunking with 3 other persons in the room, you get only 1. That means that the number of rooms needed for those seniors doubles--and the cost to have those rooms doubles. (This would be driven by school and team policies, mind you, but that's a pretty typical breakdown.) Better be good at fundraising. And the team dynamics part... Let's put it this way, could YOU mentor a team, as a MENTOR (including all roles filled by the mentors), and have the students that were your peers two weeks ago treat you as a mentor? I doubt it--there are very few people that could make that sort of transition that quickly and easily. So as the seniors find their new roles with the team, there's bound to be some, shall we say, establishment of the pecking order--which would have an unfortunate tendency to create friction within the team that doesn't need to be there. Could it be done, sure. Is it going to be more hassle than it's worth, probably. I actually had something similar in college--but in that case, most of the team was seniors and this was the senior project, and as an engineering competition team sponsored by the school, we weren't the only team competing after the end of the semester so they're somewhat used to that sort of thing. I'd figure that most high schools shut down their teams after graduation and only resume them for preseason conditioning workouts. |
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Edit - Oh wow, how ninja'd on this. Slidell does not have any college or University. Most of our graduates pursuing STEM degrees go to LA Tech in Ruston (5 hours away), with UL Lafayette a second choice (3 hours away). LSU, SEL, and UNO are closer, but are all better known here as party or liberal arts colleges. We have never had a veteran mentor attend more than a score of team meetings after graduation. The best we've had was Gixxy, the team founder (also my son), who mentored the summer following graduation, and the next summer, and also attended a few other meetings that fell during LA Tech holidays. My best estimate for him is 16. Otherwise, I cannot think of any who have come back for more than about six meetings, certainly not to provide any real mentoring. Slidell is a bedroom community, and while there are those few whose family has been here for five or more generations, most of us arrived in the last sixty years. (In the case of the Michels, we moved to Slidell in June 2001, just fifteen years ago). I do not expect any of my children to live in Slidell in 2025. |
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Just some thoughts for your consideration. . . . some observations. . . .that's all.
The objective was to spread FIRST to all high schools. That's a good reason for districts, and associated district championships. To provide a CMP experience to as many as possible, multiple CMP events are required. So, FIRST is going through growth pains. The program may need to settle with a mix of districts and regionals based on team density and logistics. Some new rules of district-regional crossover would need to be established. Multiple CMPs may be the "new normal". I was a mentor for two years in regionals and two years of districts in Michigan. I have been a judge ever since (districts, district CMP and World CMP), it's a new normal. If a single CMP is desired, the season must be longer to accommodate an extra tier of playoff events. Difficult since FIRST is international. I'm not sure of how many high school based team based sports have a national championship, let alone, a world championship. Little League Baseball is over the summer anyway. The issue of a longer season is the issue of this thread. All sights appear to be on the end of the season. What about the beginning? This would place more pressure on the GDC. Make the games a little easier so the build season could be reduced, giving more flexibility at the end of season. Kick-off in December is not practical, although, a number of high school activities already may start in some form over the holidays, such as spring musicals (set building, auditions). This may be unpopular, but there are already challenges during the build/competition seasons as it is. Could this alleviate some of that pressure? Again, just some ideas to consider, and nothing more. |
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It is probably worth mentioning that as a distance runner my coach would definitely make me choose between robotics and outdoor track if champs impacted the running championship season. It is already hard enough to convince him champs is more important than one of our midseason invitationals. Granted the real distance running season is cross country, but that is another story.
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If a longer competition season is required, I think it would be more practical to start build season earlier. Do kickoff around December 1st, bag robots over Christmas break, and resume in January. For 2016-2017, I'd say Kickoff on Dec 3rd, Sprint 1 from Dec 3rd to Dec 19th, and Sprint 2 from Jan 3rd to 31st.
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We could just shorten build season to 4 weeks. (or not.) |
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So, would that be fair to teams in areas without State Championships? |
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If we need/want a longer season I think the best option would be to move the kickoff to mid October, Bag & Tag to mid December, start regionals & district events in January, have District Champs on what is now week one and then have worlds champs in what is now week 4 & 5. This way there are gaps between events and champs for both levels.
This way no trouble with AP tests or finals and state champs can be held during the school year. One issue with this idea is that FTC season would have to start sooner or be shortened as they have their super regionals in march currently and I am not sure about the FLL season schedule. |
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Also: I would be in favor of a shortened build season. Four may be a bit aggressive; perhaps five weeks? |
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Maybe FIRST could grow so big that AP testing has to schedule around them...
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At ISEF (much bigger crossover with AP exams than FIRST) students take their APs right at the event. That way they don't need to schedule the event around them. That might be a future option for FIRST.
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Do (and how do) other HS competitions hold major events in June? SkillsUSA held their championship on June 19-23. Does anyone know if graduating/graduated seniors attend this and how? How do they and other organizations (if there are any) get around the pitfalls discussed herein?
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The second is to push the state champs to after the FRC Champs (or Super Regionals). Either way, I don't think the existence of unofficial off season events should constrain moving Champs to the benefit of all teams if that's so determined. |
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I don't know about others districts, but in my school district the AP teachers don't have a super hard final. They were preparing you for the AP test and getting a low score on that is going to affect you more (probably) than a final exam. At least that's how it works in my area.
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