Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

Trying to do robotics and too many other sports/clubs/activities will cause burnout no matter if SBD exists or not.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

Parkinson's Law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

ending stop build day would not necessarily mean you spread the same amount of time over a longer period. It could easily mean that you expand your work to try to accomplish more stuff, increasing the overall amount of time spent at robotics.

If FIRST did away with stop build day, there'd be no way for them to prevent that. However, we can, as a community, make an effort to shape our overall expectations towards the goal of tapering off work after 6 weeks. There's been some discussion, should stop build day go away, about the possibility of "week-0" events happening any time between week-0 and your competition. If we make a concerted effort, across all of FIRST, to keep week-0 events on week-0, then that could provide the impulse to get the robot done in 6 weeks, get some testing in at an event, then spend the rest of the time before your event on improvements or fixes for issues. But if you wait until right before your week 6 event to go to a "week-0" event, then that doesn't really happen. Instead, you've just expanded your work to fill 11 weeks instead of 6.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

The dedicated students and mentors on my team all either have varsity sports (myself and about 80% of our leadership team) or jobs that go until 5. We all put in over 300 in a 6 week build season. Please don't argue that robotics and sports don't mix.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

I've yet to hear any suggestion for an enforceable policy that would result in teams not being able to gainfully work after bag day, especially one that would not be far harder to bypass for low-resource teams than for high-resource teams (which is the fundamental problem with bag day as it currently exists, in my mind).

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

Good luck finding a high school sports team that will let a student practice only 1 day / week, or a job that lets a student work only 1 shift / week...

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

Then meet fewer days a week for more hours per day over a more weeks.

Or just do ~"45" days like you would otherwise...

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

Again, I had 2.5 hour long varsity sports every school day in high school, showered and went to robotics afterwards from about 5:30 to 10:30. Your logic is completely flawed.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

WOah, what calendar are you looking at?

7-4=1?!?!?!?!?!

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

No, teams can continue to work after stop build... but the fact that you have the robot in a bag means that very, very many, if not most, teams take a break after bagging the robot, and the level of work significantly decreases. Take away the bag, and you risk losing that - That's kind of the whole point of my post. Create an incentive for teams to finish their robot early and many will, which will by definition help to decrease the load after that point.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

Not every robotics team is setup the same way, in the same way that not every track and field, baseball, tennis or golf team is the same. Conflicts will vary by school and by team, but having a short build season lets students pursue other activities.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

Our team captain quit his job busing tables from 6pm to 2am on Fridays and Saturdays because a day of school for 6.5 hours-meeting 2.5 hours-work 8 hours-sleep for 6 hours-meeting 9 hours-work 8 hours somehow wasn't feasible for him. Under a no SBE situation, he still likely would have been able to handle that job long term because those are the only two meeting days we would not cut. On the other hand, we had a member of the drive team who could have been more involved in drama under SBD because MTWR meetings would be significantly cut across what would also be the early spring musical and late spring One Acts seasons. At the same time, we had a member of the drive team who would not be able to function as well with no SBD because her family business of running a food truck sees a lot more time in the spring than the winter.

These situations happen on a case by case basis and create a lot of noise that detract from the overall argument. There will be activities that conflict with robotics out of season, and in season, until the end of time, regardless of how often a team meets. The fear of students running the risk of adding too much to their plate exists with SBD.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

That is great that it worked for you but many teams are unable to work that late for one reason or another. On my current team we only work until 6pm M-F with maybe 1 or 2 Saturdays during the build season. So for our team sports and robotics don't mix well at all.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

Again, this has not been my experience, and I've not been mentoring teams who have practice bots. The quantity of work does decrease after bag day, but certainly not to the point where it's insignificant, and the biggest result of having the robot in the bag is that the resulting post-bag-day work is extremely inefficient and frustrating for teams that are not sufficiently well-off to have a practice bot to work on.

It seems that your argument is that the extremely regressive effects of the current policy discourage many low-resource teams from pursuing post-bag-day work. This argument seems to me sort of perverse - it is arguing that removing artificial restrictions on low-resource teams (i.e., the pragmatic effect of the current policy) is bad because more teams would then choose to take advantage of the resources they're currently (unfairly) prevented from using efficiently.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

You really don't seem to be grasping my point. I'm not necessarily arguing for or against SBD, but rather for an expectation of work hours that is similar to what many teams have right now. What I don't want to see is a 150-hour, 6 week build season turn into a 300-hour 12 week build season. You may believe everyone is already doing that, but I can tell you from my experience that it is a relatively small percentage of teams.

My team, for example, goes from meeting 15 hours a week to maybe 3 after stop build day (And trust me - no one in MN would say my team is low-resource). It's a huge change that allows students to get caught up on work and enjoy other activities. Many of my students in the past have started up with golf, soccer, softball, or other spring activities shortly after stop-build, and if we were to extend our normal meeting times for another 6 weeks those students would either have to drop out of the team at that point or drop their spring activities. Do you want to force them to make that choice just because you want a robotics activity that spans multiple sport seasons?

What my whole post was saying was that yes, teams that WANT to can keep working at a break-neck pace for 12 weeks. Buts we can work as a community to create a culture that supports more manageable time investments, and I think you'd find a lot of teams willingly go along with it. But if we instead create a culture that expects everyone to work full-out for 12 weeks, it could be damaging to the program as a whole.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

I think the only way to effectively move towards this in a fair manner would be to eliminate the long time period between stop build day and the first week of competitions. I'm open to suggestions for other policies that might have the same effect without the logistical issues, but I can't think of any and don't recall ever coming across any feasible ones.

I would argue that the culture you warn against already exists, in large part, and to the extent that it doesn't exist among lower-resource teams, its absence is mostly explained by the regressive impact of stop-build-day.