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I don't think anyone is trying to bring the bottom 10% up to the level of the top 10%. The goal is to increase the level of play and capacities of all teams, so matches are more exciting and more inspiring. Robots sitting dead or unable to accomplish game objectives isn't an inspiring experience for most people, not if they continue to do that year in and year out. Teams that have to put completely untested mechanisms on the field and have them fail with little hope of improvement isn't inspiring. The best teams are the best because they have worked hard, and have passionate people that have gained great skill at this sport. That won't change but for the majority of teams that are just trying to play the game, I believe they will be helped by this change. I know for sure that the teams we mentor each year would be helped by this change. They could get more days at our machine shop. They could come with us when we go scrimmage with our friends in the area. There is so much more they can do. Right now we sometimes have to help them attempt to build upgrades for their WITHHOLDING ALLOWANCE with no knowledge if it will work on their robot because it's in the bag and they don't have a duplicate or an exact CAD model.

One of the strangest things we have to do most years is to explain to the teams we help why we are building two robots or explain why we get to keep working on our robot (they may not see the bagged one) but they have to have theirs in the bag. It takes a while for most people to fully grasp that concept.

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Like I said a couple of sentences later, I currently want to start building two robots / continue working after stop build day to be more successful. If you want to get specific, I don't think it is the norm here in NC to build two robots so, on that scale, we may currently be keeping up. But it's our goal to do more than just keep up, and working longer and smarter is one of our first steps.

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Heading into year four of coaching VRC/VEX IQ with a tentative 16 teams this season. The elementary aged kids and their parents unanimously agreed that we should schedule their events earlier in the season this year (December or earlier) with an option to continue after the new year only if they REALLY want to. Our 3rd/4th graders especially were a bit burnt by the end of the season last year, after starting between July (in summer day camp) and September and meeting all the way through March. The middle school kids were overwhelmingly opposed to a short season option (their parents were mostly opposed as well, less vehemently than the kids however, and some said it would be convenient for family scheduling reasons). It wasn't a point of discussion for the high school age group. Overall they all seem aware enough of their own limits and able to balance appropriately.

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This is really great feedback!

We started 25 Vex IQ teams this year, formed in July, and competing this Oct-Nov. It sounds like 4-5 months is reasonable, but it is harder to ask the joe-shmoe team to commit to a 8-9 month season?

Just trying to get the general feel for best fit for teams.

Thanks!

-Mike

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I think you are coming at this like I am arguing heavily to keep SBD. I'm not, I'm just trying to get to the root of that argument.
The answer to your question is that there is a huge difference between unfettered access to the robot and a withholding / unbag time. The former is much more daunting. (And for those like us who want to keep working longer than 6 weeks, it is also more exciting)

Did I say I am in favor of keeping SBD? Also though, I think you are really skewing what I said. I didn't touch at all on "the rest" being "content with their current performance" or how they feel about how much they work.

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We get a new manual every year. We can pilot baglessness for a year and if the results are worse then we bring the bag back.

I believe that life without a bag would be better, but I'm prepared to accept a bag again in 2018.

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2019, that is. 2017 will definetly have a bag day, as stated by Frank.

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1678 is not an amazing and successfully competitive team because we are talented. We got to where we are today with long hours of mostly well planned out hard work.

We could not have reached as far as we have without the practice robots we build that enable us to keep iterating our designs. In 2013 we were a unknown player to the greater FRC community, nobody knew who we were outside of California. Then we won our division after being turned down by our first 3 picks. We made it that far not because of talent, but because of working our butts off to make our robot ready to compete on the world stage every moment we were able. 2014 was much the same story for us. 2015 we had a good robot, not overly amazing, but our success was because of the time and work we put into developing our can grabbers. We finished the design of our final can grabbers the day before we left for Champs, not one team ever beat those can grabbers.

Our robots would still be good if we didn't build a practice bot, but they wouldn't be Einstein good. And a good robot is useless to a driver that can't drive it to it's potential.

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I do think that the "middle of the road" option is actually going to be the best one here.

And that's the one Jim has proposed: Weekly unbag time.

Anybody else remember the FIX-IT Windows, back about 10 years? Same concept, only with robot access.

For anybody who wasn't around at the time... There were three classes of material that could be brought in. Spare, Upgrade, Raw Material. Spare was identical replacements. Raw Material, well, you can figure that one out (included COTS). Upgrade was either improved functionality in a Spare or a whole new system, or both. Long and the short of it was that Upgrades had to be built during your FIW time--the first year of that, it was one 6-hour window, IIRC, but after that it was up to two with neither shorter than 2 hours. Something along those lines. Spare... Not sure if that was buildable outside the window. Oh, and the other annoying item was that you pretty much got one per event, if memory serves.


Now, let's see what happens if you stick the robot in the bag at the 45-day mark, and then once per competition week* you get to pull it out for up to X hours.

--Access for measuring
--Access for driver practice
--Access for programming
--Access to install that one item that just didn't quite make it into the bag...

And whaddayaknow, the district areas already do this (instead of a full practice day). So you can't say that that's a total unknown. Matter of fact, it's a known.

The real catch is that teams that don't want to open the bag can simply tell their members that "we're not going to use this time this week, go get some more sleep and catch up on homework".


*I'm not going to go into whether that's "week before your competition", AKA 1/event, or "week before any competition", AKA 1/week. Doesn't really matter for pure speculation.

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I think uniform unbag time would be good like Jim proposed. My only question would be does this come with a scale back on regionals to move to the district model of practice day starting at 5pm or would district teams get an extra 6 hours on top of the uniform 8? The unbag time exists so districts can operate on a shorter time frame of two full days plus one night for robot work/inspection that is scheduled from 5-10. It usually is more like 3-4 hours with teams setting up their pits, lines to unload, and other small issues.

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Regionals can partially save their poor value proposition by starting qual matches Thursday after lunch. A majority of the personnel required to run those matches are already there, you will just be really hurting on spares at key positions like refereeing.

Whether or not SBD ever goes away, a move to give RPCs an option to "hybrid" their regional into a regional on a DCMP schedule with 6 hours of bag time should be allowed by FIRST.

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That would be one to discuss. I could see a compromise where districts keep 8 hour unbag, while regionals get 4-6 hours (or something like that), with suitable adjustments to the practice-day schedule (say, opening the doors a couple hours later). But that would be a matter of detail that would probably best be worked out by HQ with appropriate input. (Hate to remind all ya district folks, but you do tend to do a lot better overall than the regional folks. So giving us a little bit of a "head start" with extra time might actually be better than evening it out.... :p:D)

Back during the FIX-IT era, that wasn't an issue--something about everybody being at a regional.

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I heard California events are making moves to high school venues like you'd see for districts. Seems like a wise choice for them to take it a step further and make them hybrid events.

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Haha those were the days. Back when Thursday morning involved a small early crew to uncrate the robots!

You are correct and it can be said 6 hours in the shop is more valuable than 6 hours at an event for most teams. I wouldn't say all because in my experience when the bag opens at a shop the productivity takes a slower, more relaxed pace than a group of 5-8 people in a pit with an immediate goal in sight.

However adding up the hours its still more time with your robot/setting up your pit than a district team so we can't tip the scales too much! :p

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I'd say that's very fair. Time in the shop, after all, is usually more valuable than in the pits (what with the access to all your machinery, parts, etc.). In fact, you could even keep regional's practice day and equalize the unbag time between regionals and districts (considering most teams do 1 regional/2 districts) that would even out the difference some more.

BTW, it's 6 hours/event currently in districts.

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I've never seen one of my 60-team regionals get more than half of the robots passed inspection by lunch on Thursday. I would worry a lot about that trying to make this switch...

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Yeah... and Wil, the refs are already there, because of practice matches (well, mostly there, as some are often still on their way early in the matches). The problem is, PRACTICE matches start at noon right now! So really, what you're saying is to completely eliminate practice matches from regionals. Or move them back to the morning, thus shortchanging the teams that need them the most. Which... would negate all the good effects of the unbag time.

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Districts start inspections on day zero and have practice matches on the morning of day 1. That is a traditional* DCMP schedule.

*Districts with team counts under ~80 run a DCMP like a regular district event.

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"Shortchanging"

Explain that to the team at a district event you gave the same number of unbag hours to but no practice matches?

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To be fair, we would have 2x the bag hours as a typical regional team because we would have 2 events instead of 1 (or 3 vs. 2).

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You do realize that at DCMP, every team has already been through two events, so they've been inspected twice already and most of them are probably ready for inspection pretty quickly after they load in, right? At regionals, that's not the case...

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They haven't been through inspection at their first district event, which allows them no more than 4-5 hours on day zero and two to three hours on day one to get inspected. It's really easy to find this information out but you seem to have trouble seeking it, so here you go:

Week 1 CHS District - Northern Virginia Event Schedule (2016)
Week 6 Chesapeake District Championship Schedule (2016)
Minnesota North Star Regional Schedule (2016)

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District teams, at least at every district I've been to get practice matches. They just aren't scheduled.

At Districts in Michigan, Thursday nights, in addition to load-in and inspections, teams who have been inspected may get in the queue and get put into practice matches on a first-come-first-serve basis. And I don't think I have ever seen a team get into one of these queues that did not get a chance to play at least 1 match (unless they showed up like 5 minutes prior to closing that is).

Not all teams can take advantage of this at their first event as some are still not finished with inspection until Friday morning (we've been this team a few times), but by their second event almost all teams get the opportunity to have a practice match or two.

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In case your memory isn't working, I believe we did agree that the exact number of hours out of the bag was something to be worked out later--doesn't have to be exactly even, but has to be something in the "fair" range. BTW, Districts are inherently unfair to Regional teams. (Cue smart-arse half-troll discussion here.)


If the start of inspection is not moved to Wednesday night on the "start matches at noon on Thursday" schedule, the teams that will hurt the most are the very ones that the out-of-bag time is supposed to be helping. Out here, the inspectors start camping out in pits around 6 PM on Thursday if the inspector/team ratio is sufficiently high. By the start of quals, we can usually have all but maybe 1-2 teams passing--and they've generally got multiple inspectors and other teams helping out. If there's early inspection, that can probably be moved up a bit--but at what cost?

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This is a really good thread. I’ve seen more perspectives presented that really make me try and understand the impact to teams.

Good idea.

"I advocate for eliminating bag day or at least have robot access periods because I believe it will benefit my team. My decision made no attempt to ascertain if this will be a benefit for all teams or the overall health of FIRST/FRC."

Our team has a goal to win every competition. I’m not claiming we are at that level – it’s a goal. To help meet this goal, we have been building practice robots for the past 3 seasons. Practice and making minor improvements to increase scoring effectiveness or taking time to improve autonomous modes have been the best investments.

With access periods, we would probably invest more time in improving the competition robot instead of sinking a lot of resources in a practice robot. This logic breaks down under the current rules if we qualify for Championships and have to ship the robot immediately after our last competition.

Our strategy would not change that much with open build. We may try more aggressive adjustments like adding on another feature assuming we wouldn’t negatively impact existing performance levels.

I only have personal observation and not much data to comment on this change across FRC. But there seem to be some claims that don’t make sense. Here’s the biggest one to me.

More build time will improve competition level.
No. More time to repeat the same process you have been using will not improve your result.

We’ve set a goal to finish the first robot in 4 to 5 weeks using a build schedule of about 18 to 20 hours per week. The idea is play with “version 1.1 or 1.2” robot by our week 1 regional. This season we are switching to VersaFrame construction instead of milling our own tube and gussets. We should be able to build the robot a bit faster if we are only manufacturing a few specialty parts. Getting to version 1.3 or even 2.1 may be possible.

As Jim Zondag pointed out in his analysis, about half of FRC only plays one event. Teams that play more events tend to improve. I don’t think eliminating bag day will have a dramatic impact on your first event performance. One-and-done teams will probably perform about the same as today. In other words, a district format which gives you more opportunity to play seems to be a proven improvement model. Open build makes will make it easier to make implement improvements between your first and second events plus get time to test it. Maybe no bagging requirement will have the same impact for team as districts have.

My argument may seem odd since I’m stating a change would help my team, but not most teams. My fear is most people will spend time trying to do more than do better.

David

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I completely forgot about this current rule, thanks for bringing this up.

We would need to change the rule to allow for a robot ship date before championships for all teams. I would assume the same day as the shipping date after the latest district championship for your 2 Champs would make a good starting date.

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I'll buy that. Tuesday after Week 7, this year, if I'm not mistaken. Hopefully that method wouldn't overload FedEx.

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For North Champs, Tuesday after week 6 for South Champs

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Are the teams going to pay for that expedited shipping or are we expecting FEDEX to pay for 800 teams to quick ship freight?

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That's the same timeframe as the Week 7 qualifiers currently get, about 2-3 weeks. And if you phrase it as "the deadline is X, but shipping earlier* is allowed and encouraged", I think enough teams would take that suggestion that it'd go a bit smoother.


*Earlier would be loosely defined as "any time between the Tuesday after your last Regional/DCMP/District Event and the deadline". Exactly how early would be team-dependent, obviously, but it would be team choice as to when they thought they were ready--or when the mentors thought they were burning out.

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Once everyone is in districts, we are going to have to figure it out anyway. I'm just suggesting we figure it out earlier.

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I wrote something very similar to this in my survey.

The question FRC needs to ask itself is: Does it want to emphasize the engineering, including the trade-offs that are required (everything has a trade-off), or does it want to emphasize winning a competition?

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Actually, it was 4.:rolleyes:
I'd argue that we worked just as hard as you folks. I'd also argue that there are other teams that work even harder than we do but with results that are much less successful on the field. Is it because of talent?
You brought up some good points though. But let me also ask you this. Why was your can grabbers unbeatable? Everyone else in the world saw what 118 did early on during their unveil and week 1 event.
Perhaps....talent?

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I'd call it skill not talent. Talent often has a component of natural ability that can't be learned which is where i think he was making a point that be cause they worked hard they developed the ability and skill to be world champions.

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Before you get snarky, you might want to realize that I was replying to the content of your post, which was about DCMP, not district events in general. I've been around long enough to know how they work and what their schedules are like.

You'll notice that, while districts have 4-5 hours on day 0, regionals don't. There's a couple hours for load-in, but that's just drop and go, no work or pit setup. Sure, that could change. You could increase the hours and allow teams to stay. But in my experience, you only get about 2/3 of the team loaded in the night before at regionals. All the other teams are still traveling to the event - district events are supposed to be as local as possible for teams, while regionals are hit or miss. Some teams have to travel, and getting to the regional by 5PM the day before instead of the following morning would mean different plans and possibly an additional day off school. Remember, regional teams are already missing an additional day per event compared to districts!

My point is, there are a lot of logistical concerns to consider when you talk about changing times, and those concerns are likely different for different events, based on the demographics of each event. This isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, as FIRST events are not currently one-size-fits-all.

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Interesting point. FIRST's goal is to inspire students and grow to reach as many students as possible. It emphasizes Gracious Professionalism and Co-opertition. Engineering and competition are just a means to that end.

I don't have the wisdom to know if eliminating bag day will negatively or positively impact those goals. My gut feel is it will provide more opportunities for teams to interact outside of competition which is a net positive to FIRST.

The change to a district event structure actually emphasizes competition more than dropping bag day. (More matches... same money ... better use of resources is the theme presented.) Are districts overemphasizing competition?

Food for thought.

David

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You need excellent engineering skills to win in a competition in the first place. Yes giving teams more time with the robot would likely help people "win" more, but ask your self why. Getting more time to work directly on the subject of the team's engineering efforts I presume would give more opportunity to improve the engineering skills of the students.

Why bag up the primary teaching tool at the point when we have the most mentor, student, and sponsor engagement of any other time of the year?

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I think these are two great points on this subject:

The following is just from my own observations from watching competitions over the years in a district system.

I think there are teams out there with a very low "ceiling" on their robots/teams performance that would not be solved with infinite amount of time available to them. This can be due to lack talent/resources/skill/capability/knowledge or whatever terminology you want to use.

However, I think there is a much larger subset of teams that do have the knowledge/talent/capability to have a high "ceiling" but run out of time to realize the "ceiling" that they have.

I get to watch a lot of the same teams in person at FIM districts and see a lot of the same teams from the first to second event. There are many that fall into the too little too late to make it into the DCMP. Many matches in the district system allows you to iterate and get better, with more time than regionals, but you still need to come out punching or you'll miss the DCMP boat. Believe me, been there, done that.

I'm in favor of removing bag day because I see many teams reach their "ceiling" at their second event and be competitive, when they were barely able to perform at their first event.

Also, removing should remove a level of bureaucracy with the sign in and out that is not value added IMO.

People have shown to be very adaptive to the situation they were given. I don't think there will be the extreme cases of eliminating bag day will cause all the robots to be competitive, or it will burn all the mentors and students out. I just think it will help the middle tier teams reach their potential. To me, it's not that drastic of a change.

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I can see the argument going both ways.

No: The districts can be seen as allowing for the iterative process because you test your robot, then make changes. All engineering requires an iterative process.

Yes: For the reasons you mention above, plus the goal of getting to DCMP.

Personally, not only would I like to keep SBD, but I would like to get rid of the unbag times before the districts. Unbag times defeat the purpose of SBD. (Unbag times between events makes sense to fix things.)

I've been on teams that went to regionals, champs, and districts. Districts are the same length of time as regionals (3 days), so why is there a different structure to the unbagging rules? It makes no sense to me.

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1. If you're primary teaching tool is at that time, then you're not utilizing the rest of your year well.

2. If you need to "win" because of sponsor donations, you need to reset in the sponsor's minds what this program is about.

3. Engineers have drop dead dates. When they don't meet those dates, there are stiff penalties, typically financial in nature. The lesson of a drop dead date seems to be getting lost on people these days.

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Yes FRC is supposed to at least resemble the real world of engineering and in the real world deadlines are common and in some cases there are penalties that can be financial in nature to the company and if the company has to pay up because that deadline was missed the person or persons who failed to meet that internal deadline are likely to come under the scrutiny of their boss.

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This is kind of minor point but I haven't seen anyone make it.

Over 20+ years as an engineer in the semiconductor industry I have learned to appreciate good marketing requirements at the beginning of a project. There is nothing is worse than working on a project with shifting requirements and projects with really poor requirements have a habit of getting a lot of good engineers laid off. In FRC the equivalent to market requirements is the robot strategy that drives the build season. I would argue that consistently good teams are the teams that do the best job of predicting how the game is going to be played early in the build season. More build time and more chances to reset the design does de-emphasize this aspect of the program.

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I've snipped out a couple of pretty major points.

1) Yes, there are teams that, given an infinite amount of time will simply not be able to build a functional, let alone, competitive robot.

2) I'm not convinced of this. I'm convinced they run out of time because they think their ceiling is far higher than it realistically should be.

3) I think this is more an issue of teams needing to compete more.

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Regionals and District Events are not the same lengths of time. Using your team's event schedule, PNW Glacier Peak had load-in on Friday (11 March 2016) at 5PM. Opening Ceremonies were the next day at 10:30AM, and Awards were scheduled for the following day at 4PM. Also in 2016, Robodox went to the LA Regional, which loaded in 6PM Wednesday (9 March 2016). Opening Ceremonies weren't until Friday at 8:30AM, and closing ceremonies were scheduled for Saturday 4:30PM. District unbag time is replacing the Thursday you see between load-in and Opening Ceremonies on the LA Regional schedule.

This sounds essentially like what can happen if you miss a deadline for FRC, wherein deadline = event. SBD is an artificial deadline before that happens, and it isn't a hard one at that. It's just harder for some than others. Changing this would require not just banning the WH allowance but banning practice bots and other development, which, in addition to not having a clear meaning is the clearest example of holding back student inspiration and development that I can think of. My kids have learned and grown incredibly with practice bots over the years, not to mention the difference between unbag time and regional pit time.

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Thanks for the clarification. I have a better understanding of your perspective.

I'd rather extend that unbagging rule to regional teams than deny districts that option. We'll agree to disagree on that point.

It's a good debate to have. However, the survey didn't address this middle ground that already exists within the district system.

David

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My one-liner - "I support tightening the current stop-build restrictions because I don't want to see the total FRC program slide too far down the slippery slope of over-emphasizing the competition part of an otherwise well-rounded spectrum of activities."

Something that I think fits into the topic(s) of some recent posts ...

IMO, there is a tangible difference between inspiring someone to consider becoming a Scientist, Technologist, Engineer, or Mathematician (or whatever), and attempting to actually transform an inspired person into one of those.

Like most/all of us, I love seeing students become better at STEM skills, but I also try to stay aware of the difference between creating the inspiration, and subsequently taking on responsibility for replacing the formal training available from other sources.

Sure, you feed the STEM hunger of eager/inspired students, and you feed them as much as you and they can handle - because it's fun.

But, while there is no doubt a lot of overlap between inspiration and subsequent training, the two things aren't interchangeable.

When planning club/team activities, whenever we reached the point of having to choose/recommend how we are going to spend our chunks of scarce time, I try to think hard about whether I/we should invest those hours and energy into making an OK robot better, or into introducing new people to STEM opportunities.

Those two things certainly aren't 100% mutually-exclusive, but they aren't 100% identical either; and the clock is a merciless taskmaster.

Blake

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1. I am... I said "the most" not "the only". The most motivation to learn what can be at times less exciting material and skills comes during the excitement of build season. Competitions also provide a quick pay off and referendum of the work you did. Gratification for what you did right and the resultant consequences of your mistakes. It is the most effective learning environment IMHO.

2. By "Sponsor engagement" I mean that I have the most material and financial resources available to me via sponsors than any other time of the year. None of our sponsors care much about how well we do at competitions.

3. A competition is just a better drop dead date to me. The consequences are more tangible. It's also not like I can't set my own deadlines for my students anyway.

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Spending my off Friday writing a long note about a long topic.... Not a ton of content I haven't posted elsewhere, but this 23 page thread really felt like it needed another wall of text, so here goes...

In 2012, I was a mentor with 33 (2005-2013 seasons) and Jim asked myself and another mentor to do some survey work to understand the importance of a practice robot and practice field towards exceling in FRC.

Some background:
33 has generally been a very good team with typical performances pre 2011 usually making it to the semi-finals or occasionally the finals, but they did not win a regular season event from 2005 through 2010 (to my knowledge). During that time, Jim and the other mentors were aware that the best teams were building practice robots, but we couldn't quite get one made. In 2007, we built a really close one probably about 75% accurate with the biggest difference being it did not have the ramps. The competition team got about 10 hours of practice (actual operating hours) before the robot self destructed. That did very well, and we came crazy close to beating the eventual World champions that year. 2008, no practice robot, and the driver (2nd year) nearly destroyed our season in the first match as he hit the overpass too fast. That was a very good robot, but not the contender we were looking for. 2009, very complicated robot. Pretty tricky to drive. Our driver never really got the hang of it. 2010, Made a practice robot that was pretty close say 80-90%. It was missing its hanger, and did not go over the bumps as well, but the driver did get practice gathering and scoring. That robot was a real contender. 2011, renewed focus on making an even better practice robot. That practice bot was very close on the order of 95% similar. The team was practicing on a 2/3 scale field and got a lot of practice. This was the first year the team started winning competitions. We had an issue with the minibot firing device that was only on the comp bot, and was incredibly frustrating to diagnose. 2012- An even hirer focus on making comp bot and practice bot "the same" was put into effect. Practice bot was working great, but at first competition, comp bot had a shooting issue that did not get resolved until the last round of qualifying. This was the year Jim asked me to conduct the survey as we were still practicing on a 2/3 practice field.

2012 Survey Portion:
That survey asked teams if they had a practice robot, estimate of how similar, did they have a practice field or access to one, number of mentors, number of "core mentors", number of students, and number of students engaged in build.
The survey was focused on the top 25 OPR teams in each division. We were able to talk to 85 of those 100 teams. 71/85 teams had some sort of practice robot. The most basic was for a team to use an old robot for driving practice. This was done by a couple teams that use very similar chassis year to year and often have very good FRC success.

The general trend from that was the better the team, the closer the practice bot was to the competition robot. There was a mix of building 2 copies of the robot, building practice first, and building practice second. Teams with a lot of automated/CNC/waterjet tended to build two copies and try to keep them the same. 1114 was a neat team to talk to as they tended to build their practice first, and learn, and then very quickly build their competition robot towards the later part of build season. I believe this is still true, though I see more and more CNC/Waterjet on their bots each year which makes me wonder how that has influenced this practice. For instance, Simbot SS from 2008 appeared to be fully rough fabricated vs. automated machining.
********************************
Additional thoughts:
Jim's paper's thoughts and Causation vs. Correlation
I have not conducted such a survey since then, but I believe Jim has conducted other surveys which we have discussed results and I know are background to a lot of the hypothesis that are in his paper. IE, he is aware correlation is not necessarily causation, but the other anecdotes and data over the years tends to support those ideas. Jim is a coach which means every competition he interfaces with roughly 20 to 24 other coaches during qualifying. Multiply that by 2 districts and 1 MSC and 1 World championship (total of about 75 to 100 coaches) per year times 8 years since districts has started, and you have about 500 to 800 coach to coach interactions. In line, he talks with them about the match, but also about how their season is going, and what kind of challenges they are having. Sure, a lot of those repeats, but when talking to the same coach and seeing them having a good year vs. last year's bad year, you can get a much better idea of what they did to improve (or in some cases what they did that is causing them trouble).
Most mentors that are not coaches do not get this level of interface and diversity of team interface. We spend a lot of time with our team. Some time talking to friends, and probably some time talking with teams we admire. As a coach, you are forced to talk with that diversity.
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What I do now and My thoughts on SBD:

I left 33 after 2013 season as my job had moved sites, and my job role had changed to where I could not be the kind of mentor for the team that I wanted to be. I also was taking on increasing responsibility within FiM with regards to LRI and LRI prep. I have been helping 469 the last couple years, but frankly I am a crappy mentor as my priorities are now family, Job, FiM events, then 469 students, then 469 team. If you ask my wife or use hours to equate to priorities, then it would be Job, FiM, Family, 469 students, 469 team January through end of April then Job, Family, FIRST the rest of the year.

My current thoughts on SBD are as and FRC Enthusiast, LRI/Volunteer, then mentor:
As an enthusiast, I would say get rid of SBD. I think the robots would get better overall, the competition would get better, especially in early season, and I think you could get something more television worthy which would do wonders for Spreading knowledge about FRC.

As an LRI, in the district system. I think I get to interface with a lot more teams then most mentors. This is especially true of teams that are struggling to pass inspection. The "second event" portion of the season (weeks 4 and beyond) tend to go much smoother than the first couple of weeks. There are few things more rewarding than seeing a team make the improvements to get some "success" during an event or competition. This is not necessarily winning the event, but it usually involves getting something to work that has not worked before.

I personally believe, having talked with the teams, that they would do better with more access (IE weekly chunk of time), but some of them might actually do worse if the SBD was removed al together (though I am a general proponent of removing it). The reason for this is the SBD helps teams with an intermediate deadline that is not the competition itself. Having participated in Solarcar, Supermileage, and volunteered at SAE competitions, I can tell you that a decent chunk of teams procrastinate and are still trying to get the car running at competition. This is because their view is that the design will work as long as they have it working by competition. Because of this, they end up with Student Syndrome which can turn into all nighters the week of the competition, only to be exhausted, cranky, and frustrated at the event. I believe this would happen with FRC if SBD was removed, and might exacerbate the condition which can be dangerous when teams are driving 4 hours to get to the closest competition. There was a deadly incident of such in FSAE. I believe similar such crashes have occurred in Solarcar whose event is typically driving cross country for long periods of time in slow moving (read boring) convoys. While that was the only 1 incident in FSAE history that I know of, I can't help but think that there have been many other close calls over the years. With FRC having an order of magnitude more teams, and a couple orders of magnitude more competitions, I wonder what the additional dice rolls might result in.
While I personally would like a fully open season, IE stop the Stop build... I would have a hard time recommending it knowing that it would bring harm (possibly lethal harm) to some in the community.

Developing Developers:

I am 110% behind adding additional access though as I believe one of the biggest disservice that we do to many FRC students is get rid of the "development" period of an FRC project. I worked in Auto at an OEM for 8 years, and most of that engineering is development engineering. IE the Advanced Vehicle engineers already have layed out the concept and configuration. As a Design and Release engineer, you are to develop that design into a refined product ready to unleash on the masses. In my current job, planning in periods for development is often met with "oh you want to do a Science experiement" sarcasm as there is a fear of long development periods. Management often takes excite in pulling out the "Sometimes you have to shoot the engineer" catch phrase. While I do believe some may tinker too long, I really think development and fixing and improving issues is truly what makes great products.

If you have watched slingshot, imagine if Dean and the team at DEKA were only allowed to design the first prototype, and then it would either go into production, or not....
Imagine if Rocket engines were designed, and had to work on the first shot as opposed to all the trial runs in the test cell.
Imagine that Rolls Royce put passengers on the first flight of a newly released engine...
Have you ever beta tested a game or piece of software? Ever played an AP that was put out in the market too soon.

Why do we expect students to get it right the first shot? Why do we get upset with those that give their students a taste of development.

Cheating our students of the opportunity to make or design something, fail, then figure out what it takes to make it better is really cheating them of a greater experience.

The great teams are giving that experience. As I said earlier, I have not conducted another survey on practice robots, but instead, I try to visit a team for a couple hours and see how they operate. I have usually targeted the better teams in FRC to understand what their "magic" is. Some are driven by an extremely talented, driven, passionate mentor that will not stop until the teams achieves excellence. Most of a the really good teams have a core group of mentors (3+) that have at least a couple of those attributes. The usual mode for most teams that keep it to a healthy competitiveness (as judged by me) is that a mentor starts an effort and does well with it to the point that it inspires some students to get more engaged and model that behavior. The mentor then works with the student to build up that skill set if they are around for more years until the student is nearly as skilled as the mentor by the time they graduate. Teams that continue to do well year after year will then have students take on the bulk of that effort as the team grows, and the mentors move into a role of advisor/decision maker in that area. Within a couple years of continuous dedicated improvement, you have a juggernaut of a team with the students doing the bulk of the work alongside mentors continuously improving an area or branching into a new area the team has been relatively weak at. This is why many mentors that have developed their students to know how to iterate and develop a design successfully get upset when they are accused of doing the work for the student. When you have invested a couple years in building the confidence and skill set (sometimes skill set then confidence) of a student to see it damaged by a callous statement, it will make your blood boil...
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Practice... yes practice

In Outliers, Gladwell often entions 10,000 hrs. of deliberate practice turning into expertise. Not 10,000 hrs of doing the same thing the same way, but 10,000 hrs. focused on getting better at something. I think that with each order of magnitude of deliberate practice/experience, we get better noticeably better than those with an order of magnitude less.

You can do this exercise with any skill you do not have a natural talent for previous experience. For instance, throwing darts or throwing cards in a hat.
For darts, pick a distance where you can hit the board and aim for a specific spot (say bullseye). Your first 10 darts are likely to be all over the place. If you continue to throw until you have thrown 100 darts, I wm willing to bet that you last 10 darts have a much closing grouping than your first 10. If you continued over a week throwing 100 darts a night for 10 nights, by the time you get to 1,000 darts, you likely are getting way way tighter grouping and probably hitting most shots close to the bullseye. Of note, It only take about 1 minute to throw 9 darts in 3 dart groups treading back and fourth, so 100 darts is really only about a 10-15 minute exercise. 1000 darts would be just under 2 hours of your life. By this point, you are still very much a novice at throwing darts, but you will be much better than you were at 10 darts. If you continued that trend over a year say throwing on weeknights 100 darts every two weeks you would hit a new thousand, or you would have thrown roughly 10,000 darts 2 months later. By this point, you would likely be considerably better than that 1,000 dart thrower (but again, you are only about 20 hours into it). I pause at this point, because you will have illustrated what what many of the top 5% of FRC teams get for practice/exerience going into the Championship. They will have competed in about 60 real matches or 2 hours of experience, and likely double that for practice matches and test and tune sessions with their robot and maybe some focused practice. This equates to about 4 hours of actual driving time, and 10 to 20 hours of dealing with getting the robot ready for matches or repairing your practice bot due to thrown chains or xyz. If the total stick times equates to about 120 real matches, you are now a 10X more experience than that team that went to one regional, and got their robot working for 8 qualifying matches and was picked up by a team that was knocked out in the QFs....
*The top 1% (IE FRC top 25 caliber) will roughly double that amount of stick time with the majority of it spent on practice including running specific drills and scenarios to see if they can build that one extra stack, or hang that 9th tube which completes another row or shave off 6 seconds for the line-up of that end game. Mind you we are only talking now 8 hours of stick time and likely 40 hours of concentrated practice. (as a reminder, 8 hours per week x 6 weeks = 48 which is greater than 40...).

*That top 0.1% or top 3-5 teams each year likely see 2-5X that. Or 16 to 40 hours of stick time. Still within that 48 hours of acess we are talking about, though very unlikely to occur with a robot as you have now likely worn out several thing and had to fix/repair them. This 16 to 40 hours of stick-time likely equates to 64 to 120 hours dedicated towards practice. They are definitely mixing up specific skill based drills and 2 minute periods.

I bring this up because I have seen numerous times where a team struggling to hang 2 tubes when they start can get 2 rows within a couple hours.
I have seen a team struggling to build a stack get to where they are consistently at 2 stacks within a couple hours.
I have watched a team struggling to get 50% and 2 cycles of Frisbees hit 75% with 4+ cycles after a couple hours.

FYI: To get very god at Darts, it is recommended to throw 500/weeknight (roughly 1 hour) every night for a year 125,000 darts and 200 hrs. If you still like playing darts, and want o become world champion, up it to 1,000 per night and another 10 hours on the weekend or 500,000 per year and roughly 1,000 hrs/year. Acording to the 10,000 theory, you would be an expert in 10 years. Though realistically, you would appear to be an expert to many after that first year. While this seems crazy, there are a lot of people that put in that much time in video games, pool table, darts, or other sports while taking a full course load in college. At the end of 4 years, they have literally devoted 4,000+ hours to those efforts.

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So how does this relate to SBD?

I think you should keep it, but add the access windows all season long. My recommendation is 6 hours, but I am fine with Jim's 8 will be enough that teams will get an additional 24 to 64 hours of robot access during the season depending how far they make it.

Before their first event, they will have put the robot in a bag, and should have a discussion to plan out what their new priorities are before the first event. Is it get it moving? Is it giving the programmers 4 hours to calibrate all the sensors and have a basic auton? Is it to tweak the gripper that just isn't gripping thing? Is it a chance to give the driver some needed practice?

Before their second event (it is trending some the majority of teams actually have a second event), they will then have intimate knowledge of what worked and didn't work on their robot. They will get the opportunity to make that change/fix they desperately wanted at the last competition.

Should they make it to a 3rd event, they will have hopefully arranged some practice with some other teams.

The window won't stop the great teams from building extra robots. As many have stated, they would utilize them as programming assets and would not want to wear out their robot (even if you got rid of weight, with a 120 AMP main breaker and single battery, you really don't want a 200 lb gorilla out of the floor unless pushing/holding position is mandatory towards your strategy).

The windows will let more teams get that development experience that is critical towards making and improving their students and their team. It should also let the programmers and drivers get some much needed access so that Auton is less boring, and drivers are less crappy (yes most drive teams suck when they start out. Some continue to suck.) Keeping the SBD let's the marketers keep their catch phrase, and will help some from possibly hurting themselves.

*The practice schedules I reference are estimates from talking with teams about how often and what kind of practice they do. These discussions often very from the fairly reasonable we practice 3 nights a week for about 1 hour and 2-3 hours on Saturdays though we are in the shop 3 hrs. per night 4 nights a week and all day Saturday... To "We practice hundreds of hours". I have had students give me figures that are absolutely laughable. IE I spent 600+ hours during build season in the shop which would be over 13 hours on average. Over six weeks, If they spent 20 hours Saturday, and 20 hours Sunday, they would still need to spend 12 hours each weeknight in the shop to hit their 600 hours... I have had a 20 hour day in the shop and cannot imagine what 12 of those in a build season would do to me.

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

I still wouldn't say it's talent, it was mostly a somewhat reckless view of the safety implications. We were just crazier than everyone else so we put a LOT of surgical tubing on those things, cocking them was a 3 person operation. They hit the cans at somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 mph. The whole process of developing those grabbers had a HUGE pile of fail to get the final design.

One interesting thing I have noticed is a lot of teams seem to meet for short hours every or most days during build season(from what I keep reading here on CD). It's typically less efficient to do that from a productivity view, you end up loosing the first and last 15 minutes or so of your meeting times to getting started and cleaning up. That's a big deal when you only meet 3 hours. We get the vast majority of our work done on weekends because we work 9-5 which is 8 straight hours to do things. I know we get more done per unit of meeting time on the all day weekend meetings.

If I had to attribute our success on the field to just 3 things it would be the following in order of value.
1. How we deconstruct every element of the game and rules in our best attempt to determine what strategies will be used at the highest levels of play and selecting what features our robot must have in order to use those strategies, then and only then do we begin to come up with mechanisms to test and later design into a robot.(see post #342)
2. Heavily prototype key robot features to determine the variables that are important for them to succeed and continually iterate our designs and strategies until they work 100% of the time.
3. We put a lot of time and effort into training and practice for all our team members in the off season to maintain and expand our teams knowledge base. A big part of which is building a team culture where veteran students take on mentorship responsibilities with the newer students. In a given year I could give 15-20 students a working knowledge of mechanical fabrication or I could give 4 or 5 students a far greater depth of knowledge that they can then pass on to several others during the time they are on the team, greatly lessening the teaching burden on myself.

Number 2 is made easier by the removal or significant modification of Stop Build Day. Number 3 is also made much easier because when there is less immediate pressure to get something finished and into a bag there is more time to teach, mentor, and maintain the knowledge base of your team. I have seen many teams have a number of students graduate and see the results of the loss to their knowledge base because they were unable to train their juniors with the knowledge they gained over the years. It is so much easier to teach someone when you don't feel like the process is going to slow you down enough to where you will miss a deadline.(see post #337)

Now we do have talented people on our team that contribute a great deal to our overall success, but talent alone is worth nothing without the practice and training to use it well and the time and hard work to make valuable use of it. In almost every single case, talent just means you learn faster than the rest because you have the drive to learn and work hard on your own. Talent is not something you are born with, it's something you were inspired and driven to embrace.

Talent is never enough. With few exceptions the best players are the hardest workers. -Magic Johnson

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

The great thing about Surveys are that usually the results are posted. I would expect FRC and Frank to release the survey results along with their response. I find it hard to believe that they would release this survey question without the possibility of significantly altering bag day procedures. My question is this.

Would any changes that might result go into effect this season, or would they be for 2017/2018?

Re: [FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey
 

I in no way blame you for not knowing that they posted a follow up blog about this very subject:

http://www.firstinspires.org/robotic...rn-of-an-award

Frank, remember how I said you needed to unify communication and over-communicate? Perhaps sending out another email with the clarification in it would have been in order.