[FRC Blog] Stop Build Day Survey Results
 

Posted on the FRC Blog, 10/21/16: http://www.firstinspires.org/robotic...survey-results

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Is Hallry alive?

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I would be interested in seeing the results of the survey of time in the program vs the keep vs stop data similar to how they did team age vs the data. I wonder if it is still as evenly distributed.

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This survey was clearly rigged.

It'd be interesting to see how metrics such as OPR or BBQ influenced survey responses.

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The results seem to lean toward keeping a stop build day, but I would be curious to see the results of each survey question. Mind you, many of the questions did seem to be biased towards removing it.

Results aside, that looks like a very good turnout of responses!

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Well... the results are definitely interesting.

I'm not a statistics wizard by any measurement so I'll leave others to nitpick the results. I would love to see the data broken down by team locations as well as by team age though.

I still have my opinion that Stop Build Day should disappear like so many outdated things with FRC but for now it appears as though I'm in the minority. :cool:

EDIT: Linked report has some of the data I wanted actually. I skimmed it and missed it on first pass.

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In the linked report they broke the data into a few bins based on team age. It didn't seem to have a dramatic impact on the dataset to my eye.

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Keeping or eliminating "stop" build day was a bit simplistic.

There should have been multiple choices, ranked by preference:

• Keep things as they are
• Continue Kickoff in January but eliminate SBD
• Move Kickoff to an earlier date and keep SBD in February (longer season with a hard stop)
• Pull a VEX, and have months to work, including all the way to the event.

...etc.

But just dealing with this one questions is sure to cause them huge headaches.

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This is at the top of the report:

So a majority of responding teams (2,196) build more than one robot...

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I would call it half, not a majority.
4 teams out of 2196 isn't statistically significant.

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You can say that the plurality-winning opinion is keeping sbd, but you will also have to point out that a supermajority of respondents think there should be some kind of change to the existing rules.

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My take is most people don't want it to change much or at all (4 & 5 = 52.6%) Most people however want it to change at least a little (1-4 = 65.9%).




Edit: ugh...

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Fair point. It's still a surprising number to me. I'm glad they asked the question and we know the results.

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If I'm reading this correctly, there is a somewhat significant portion of respondents in most categories who think that stopping bag day would be "best for ensuring equity and inclusion of students and schools in the FIRST
Robotics Competition program", but for some reason don't think that it would be "Best for the FIRST Robotics Competition program".

Is the equality and inclusion of students and schools undervalued or is there some other priority?

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Even if the survey had said everyone was in favor of eliminating SBD, I wouldn't trust the results.

The survey phrasing was pretty darn awful in terms of phrasing.

It also would have been helpful to have a panel of consulting mentors or something present 3-5 options to FIRST. FIRST would critique these, then present them to the masses with some education of their details.

I bet everyone had different interpretations of what their answers mean.

Weekly unbag windows seems like a pretty darn good compromise.

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Agreed. This would be a relatively non-controversial change; one that simply gives the advantage that district teams already enjoy (especially those who attend extra events) to everybody.

Even if you have gripes with the survey methodology and put large error bars on each bar in the graph, I'd wager that ~90% of those in the "1: Eliminate Stop Build Day" camp would think this is an improvement on the status quo, and probably 1/3 to 1/2 of those in the "5: Keep Stop Build Day" category would agree. Even if the survey is biased by a factor of 2x in either direction, it adds up to consensus.

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Spin city :)

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Just you wait until I tweet at 3AM that my side won the survey.

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Alanis Morissette-style irony?

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Bigly.

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This post's accuracy is pretty darn good in terms of accuracy.

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Yugely accurate?

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This is probably the most surprising result for me. I'm curious about the distribution of on-field performance of the responding teams. Because I am biased to think that 50% of all teams do not build a second robot, I imagine this survey got significantly more responses from teams who excel at competitions. It is tough to quantify how that skew affected the results of the survey.

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Yeah Adam but just like they didn't have a baked-in focus group of teams for split postseason events they don't have a baked-in in focus group of mentors for this :(

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The wording on the survey was not great, and any detailed survey like this is obviously trying to do a more nuanced evaluation than simply "eliminate or don't eliminate." One thing that strikes me as a statistician is that there is likely more motivation on the part of those favoring getting rid of stop build day. First because the motivation level for "change" events is generally higher than for "remain the same" events. So in a survey like this, I would bet that all other things being equal, the 1s are likely overrepresented compared to the 5s relative to the entire FRC population.

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I'm pretty against getting rid of Stop Build Day, but like mathking says above, I would have expected a larger turnout from those in favor of getting rid of it.

Nonetheless, I answered all of the questions truthfully and some could be considered contradictory to my stance, like "managing unexpected events.. drive time... last minute needed parts." I'm not surprised to see that those indeed have a large percentage calling it a disadvantage. I wonder if we ever see the full data, how many "contradictory" answers we might possibly see.

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Here's a visual representation of some of the breakdowns they provided but didn't graph (build one/multiple robots, in regionals/districts, rookie year).

I find it very interesting (and very weird) that teams who build multiple robots are more in favor of keeping bag day.

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On the contrary, that makes sense. If you already have the resources to build a second robot, why change the rule (other than money, but you already have that), whereas teams that don't have enough resources would more likely ask for no stop build day.

TL;DR High-resource teams in general favor the status quo which is understandable.

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... or it might not. Consider people who thought it was higher than a 4, but not quite a 5. On that new scale, they'd say 9/10. But on this scale, they put 5. I know that was what happened with me at least.

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I cannot agree with you here Ed.
The middle choice, a 3 in this type of survey is typically the "I don't care either way" or "no opinion" choice.
Only 1 & 2 can be counted towards the eliminate bag day or sort of eliminate bag day attitude.

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But will you accept the results? ;)

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I guess I was thinking of it more like teams who build practice robots presumably have the time/resources to work through bag and tag (compared to some single-robot teams who may not be able to continue working even without bag day, or who will struggle to do so), and removing the bag could only help. But yeah, that makes sense too.

It is interesting to note that CD is over-representative of people on teams that build practice robots as well as those who prefer to end bag and tag.

Only if my side wins.

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If you were to estimate the results by the tone of the discussion in here, I'd put it at 90% want to eliminate Stop Build Day. My takeaway from the survey results is that those on Chief Delphi are a very vocal minority.

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Would the district team get the same six hours weekly, and also the current six hours that's simply meant to level the field for not getting the third day at the regional? Or would regional teams lose access to their robots on Thursdays?

I can see that going over like a FIRST survey.

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Already known.

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I will keep you in suspense.

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You've got the best words.

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Very true, but also consider that any petition for change will be heavily biased towards the status quo. People are always afraid of change until it happens. I would say the fact that this survey shows nearly half of respondents voting 1 or 2 is a significant result.

Also, you know, data trumps opinion, and I think there data is pretty clear that bag day is harmful.

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Taking my best hack at future predictions...

1) I suspect that the Zondag System won't be in play in 2017. That would most likely class as a "major change" at HQ.
2) After the 2017 season wraps up, HQ will look more closely.

Given that there's a fair number of folks on the Stop Building side, more than the Don't Stop Building side, I rather suspect that Stop Build will stay in place for some time yet. I realize that that's going to be unpopular with the local vocals.

But here's the thing. There seems to be a fair amount of support for Don't Stop Building--getting up towards a decent tipping point, I suspect within the next few years. I don't think this issue will go away. At a best guess, there will be a change for 2018, and I would really strongly suspect that the Zondag System will be the original basis, but there will be some major changes that teams won't like.


There is, in fact, a precedent for the Zondag System. It's the FIX-IT Window, '05-'07ish, and it allowed teams to work on robot parts to be brought to their events even when other work was technically banned (and that was enforced by the robots being in a crate out of the teams' hands). There were a number of elements that teams didn't like, for a variety of reasons. Now taking bets on that system returning, with robot access instead of legal spare parts from after build as the primary benefit.

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Out of curiosity, what makes you think there's motion on the overall attitude towards stop-build? I won't claim to know either way, but we had shipping to regionals through 2011, I think, with a slight overlap with Bag and Tag... that means there's been at least 5-6 years of wide spread bag and tag usage, and even longer of Stop Build day. I'm not aware of other surveys like this one going out to give us an idea of what the community thinks of the Stop Build deadline. I just don't see how we can infer any sort of trends from this single data point.

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Yeah I'm pretty much the greatest person ever. Only the best words for me

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I'd answer with "what makes you think there isn't motion", but obviously that isn't an answer.

You're right, I have no hard data. What I do have is that the discussions on the topic have had a nice uptick in more recent years--time was, Ship Day was an absolute. Ship, or don't compete (without a waiver). Nowadays, I'd say for the last 2-3 years especially, there's been a decided move towards "Hey, so why do we have to be totally hands-off the competition robot again?" I don't think that started before districts and their bags (and out-of bag time--yeah, I'm lookin' at you, MI!) in '09, and I'm still pretty sure that it didn't start before the regionals started using bags a couple years later. I don't think there was much of any serious discussion for a couple years even then.

So there's a bit of an uptick in the discussion activity. I would say that that means increased awareness. (HQ just sending out the survey probably meant that they'd become aware of the discussions, which means they're getting bigger, too--or else somebody asked directly.) Increased awareness will generate some discussion and some thinking. I suspect that several people will change their minds--or have changed them--during the discussions.

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Increased discussion where? I think one of the key things people should be taking away from this data is that discussions on CD do not reflect the larger FRC community.

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That is true.

The thing is that CD tends to attract the mid-to-upper tier teams. And the vocal ones. The teams that tend to be at the forefront of testing out and thinking out new ideas.* You can bet that an awful lot of teams and team members that got the survey went "Huh?" Does that mean that discussion is not increasing? NO. On CD, discussion increased--witness the 2-3 threads besides this one on the topic. As a result of the survey, I'd be willing to bet that a lot of teams are going to be wondering "what was that about?"

If enough teams ask questions, things start happening. I don't see the discussion being fully revived until May, at this point, but I do think that HQ will be processing the results, and maybe asking better questions later on in a followup. I'd give it about 4-5 years before there's some sort of tipping point. Seems like that's how long it takes to make major changes like that.

Now starting a pool on which happens first (officially): video review, ending stop build day in some form, or moving Kickoff...


Now, this post does come with a bit of a reminder:
If the top X% of teams are able to drive a solution that works for them, without consideration of the rest of the teams--teams that maybe can barely play the game, in a good year--then I do not see that solution as being a good one. With all the discussion of "stacked events", those not-so-highly-performing teams are often overlooked pretty thoroughly. 6 powerhouses and a dozen mid-upper-tier teams don't make a regional... What about the other half to two-thirds of the teams?


*Did you know? The card system wasn't developed by HQ. IRI used it for years; FIRST HQ adopted it during 2010's soccer game. Districts were developed largely by teams in MI, at least initially--and so was bag-and-tag. Just something to ponder...

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From what I've seen on here (granted it's a small and skewed sample), many of the high resource teams want to do away with it. I mean...it's pretty simple, building 2 robots is harder/more expensive than building one. We aren't a super high resource team, but we've managed to build two nearly identical robots the past couple years, and it can be really straining on time and money, but we still have the cost-benefit analysis telling us it's worth it to build two. If we got rid of the stop build day, we would benefit greatly, if not bigly.

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This exactly is the situation my team is in. My team probably would not work more without a stop build, but we would do better anyway because we wouldn't be wasting time or money on a second robot.

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My own feelings, expressed more than once here, is that I agree that there would be a higher percentage of "good" robots at competition if we got rid of stop build. There just doesn't seem to be any question, because the extra time is not going to hurt anyone on the average (sure there will be an occasional team that breaks something) because on the average more time will yield better robots. There is no down side to getting rid of stop build in terms of the quality of robots.

I also think it is pretty clear that getting rid of stop build day will lead to decreased participation. I don't buy that there are a lot of people out there who would participate but can't stand the time constraints and so they choose not to. But there will be lots of students and some mentors for whom the increased time commitment will be a deal breaker.

My team will keep doing FRC for the foreseeable future. I have at one time or another been involved in just about every big educational robotics competition in some way, and FRC is the one that generates the most interest and excitement. It is also the one that allows for the biggest team in terms of giving more kids what to do. If we got rid of stop build, however, I would have to find someone else to lead the team. And we would lose a lot of our members. So my preference is to keep stop build.

Side Note:
My ultimate (pipe??) dream would be that almost every school has a robotics team, like they have a basketball team, a soccer team, a band, a track team... FIRST could become the national organization that sets the rules, and they could host the Championship level event(s). Each state or region has its own governing body, like they do for athletics, and hosts its own tournaments. I won't lie, I would love to win an Ohio Capital Conference Robotics title before I retire. I think we have 8 teams now representing 16 high schools total, so we are getting to where that might be feasible.

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How is this different from districts?

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One thing I want to bring up, again, is if the schedule for competition can be changed so that Week 1 starts on the 46th day of build season (or as close as possible). This way, teams that want that hard deadline at six weeks can just go to a Week 1 event, and teams that don't can go to later events. Stop Build Day or not, teams work hard to be mostly done by their first event, and most teams won't completely rebuild their robot after this event (but I hope many will make improvements). This won't make build season any longer, really.

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It sounds like a more extreme version-- one where even more organizing and responsibility has been shifted to even more local planning groups.

Side note: I find it really interesting to consider architectures for FRC beyond the regionals/districts systems. I don't think districts is the end of the road if we ever truly want to get to an FRC team in every high school.

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I believe it's called VRC, or FTC.

FRC is a very massive structure; I would suspect that having an FRC team in every high school isn't ever going to happen. (FRC student, maybe. See also "community team".) But the "smaller" competitions that are more accessible can get into schools more easily.

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No, I don't believe future architectures for FRC are exactly FTC or VRC. I think there are definitely things to learn from those programs, but I don't think any architecture for FRC looks precisely like either of those programs. I suspect it may look like a hybrid of existing high school sports models and existing structures for robotics programs, provided "FRC in every high school" is a goal.

Also, by future architectures, I'm not really talking next five years, but next twenty or more. Not exactly practical, but fun to think about.

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It is similar to the district model. It's different mostly because of scale. I think that most folks are right that there will probably never be FRC in every school, just as not every school has a football team. Some districts will obviously have teams that span multiple schools. Some won't choose to have a program. But in general if FRC became accepted enough that state athletic associations were organizing tournaments, it would create an expectation that schools would field teams.

One of the things that drives me nuts about the "FRC is too expensive for schools" argument is that fielding an FRC team is not intrinsically more expensive than fielding a lot of sports teams or other activities. If a school has a band that goes to competitions the odds are that its budget dwarfs that of the FRC team. Our FRC team would be in the mid range (we have between 60 and 80 most years) of team/activity sizes at our school, and in the mid range of cost. But it is expected that the school will field a football team, a band, a soccer team and track team. So they do it. I want to get FRC there. As I have said, I have been involved in form or another in most competitive robotics programs at one time or another. In my experience FRC is the one that generates the most excitement. It is the one that best scales up for larger teams. (For example, we have FTC. Two teams. If we didn't have FRC and most of the kids who did FRC decided to do FTC, we would need 7 - 10 teams. And it would not be cheaper than FRC.) And I think I will stop here because I don't want to pull the thread too far sideways.

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Not entirely sure why FIRST insists on doing these surveys in this style. Do the survey where votes are 1 per team. If FRC wants to be a "sport" it needs to adopt a sport's style approach to voting on the rules. Team owners only.

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Part of the problem is that if they want volunteers' input, they can't do 1/team.

The other part is that they may be trying to decipher if there's a disconnect between students and mentors.

And there's also the "I mentor multiple teams" option, as some mentors have 2 or 3 teams.


And you also have the problem of how many people actually TAKE the surveys! This one's actually relatively high participation: 9K people (not all of whom finished), 2100+ teams (offhand, that's about 2/3 of active teams).

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Also, the "owners only" is the model for pro sports rules. It is not the model for high school sports. In HS sports there is generally a national federation that establishes the general "game rules" and a state association may make some minor changes. Any changes or adaptations of those rules tends to only be done after they survey coaches, administrators and players.

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High school sports is a bad example. There are actual divisions in high school sports to separate teams with more resources. But even then within the same division schools with more students dont have more voting power....

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I don't know if you noticed, but there is a section of the report that includes the team responses. It's near the end; the data buckets are a bit different than normal due to the methodology.

So they're using the House elections to do the Senate's voting...

[FRC Blog] Stop Build Day Survey Results
 

We were talking about how rules were set, not how competition was divided up. In HS sports the rules are not set by schools at all. There is no voting. Like there is no voting here. A governing body sets them. Changes are generally considered by surveying coaches. Or coaches, administrators and athletes.

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I see it more of a question of limiting reactants. If your limiting reactant is resources than stop build day is disadvantageous, because you aren't working on the second robot. So it helps well-established teams, but it appears less well-funded teams like it. And I personally like it. And a longer build season would not help and only stretch the gap between teams.
I Have two suggestions:

Increase the out-of-bag time to 12 hours. Out-of-bag time is not like normal build time because there is so much extra time to get things and is more even than just letting the second robot builders practice.

Let drivers practice as long as no mechanical changes are made this would include fixing it. If this decreases the value of a second robot your closing the gap between teams. Unforeseen consequences aside.

Keep the stop build day.

Side note: My feeling about the Un-even stop build time was that on average it helped with the gap. Given that on average east coast has more money than west. Also I loved ending at midnight.

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Though this number does seem high, we should keep in mind that the question was worded such that the second "robot" did not have to be equivalent to your bagged robot, just that it allow testing of some aspect of your robot while it was bagged.

By that stance if you build a kit-bot on wheels to test programming or a spare arm and use that to test shooting angles, those both count as "second robots" per that question

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You're right, but at the same time, any team building a non-bagged robot is continuing work after Stop Build Day. So every one of these teams is at the very least spending man-hours on a project (and probably money) in order to allow post-bag development of their robot. The bag is such a significant constraint that half of 2/3rds of FRC actively works around it, and is already not observing the "six week build season".

I'm curious to hear from teams that build significant or full practice robots that wish to keep bag day. That's probably where I'll learn the most about this perspective.

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That would be us. For the last few years (either six or eight depending on how close a copy you want) we have built a practice robot that is a pretty close copy of the competition robot. Not always exactly the same but very, very close. I have expressed it before, but my reason for wanting to keep stop build day is that we will lose team members (both students and mentors) if we do not. We practice with the second robot, and a few students work on tweaking devices sometimes. But we spend less than 20% as much time and have less than 20% as many students involved in the practice at any one time as we do during the build season. That is a sustainable level of activity for us after stop build day. Over half our team members do a spring sport or are in the spring musical, and we would lose some of them, and some mentors, if we changed.

As I said before, I have no doubt that on the average the robots would be better if there were no stop build day. At least in the short term. There is no reason that adding more time to work on the robot would make robots worse (excepting every once in a while where there is a catastrophic accident) and reasons that at least some robots would be better. Using the same logic I do not doubt there would not be as many participants in FRC, because I don't believe there are lots of people out there not participating because of the limited build season. So for me it is a question of better robots for fewer kids or not quite as good robots for more kids.

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Thanks for the input; I understand this perspective on how the soft deadline helps limit the flow of work after the deadline.

My follow up is, if we kept the bag system, and added access windows, what do you feel would be the right amount of time to allow, such that teams like yours did not have to build a second robot, but the system of a soft deadline and more limited after-build work is preserved? I feel this kind of compromise is a step forward that more people can agree on than just ripping off the Band-Aid of Stop Build Day right away, and this is where people should focus their efforts on finding common ground.

My gut says... 10 hours a week without competition, 2 hours a week with competition, in addition to any unbag windows provided to District teams already. But maybe that's too much?

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The way that question about 2nd robots was worded doesn't equate with teams necessarily working on them past bag day.
Teams simply strapping a prototype arm to last year's robot during week 2 would be answering "yes" to that question.

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In both examples I gave, the primary purpose of building this "second robot" might not be to allow post bag development. In the case of the kit-bot to text programming my team does that to allow the programmers more than a few days with a drive-able robot to test autonomous code. In the case of a spare arm, it is exactly that, a spare.

I am not saying that teams might not use them to for post bag development but with the way the question was worded we can not infer that that is the purpose of these "second robots".

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Ohh, I get it, the NASA method. Build the robot, put it in the rocket, fire it off to another planet, and then work on coding a close facsimile before it lands.

Meh. Build season is a myth! Pop the bag! :D

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I think 10 hours might be a bit much, but in principle adding some limited time each week with robot access is a good compromise. It would limit the workflow and not require the kind of time commitment the build season entails. I might instead offer some total number of hours over the time period. But I think you have hit the nail on the head with finding middle ground. (One big advantage of an unbagging period might be an increase in the number of robots that are operational for practice rounds.)

Just to be clear, I am not advocating for an un-bagging period as way to ease into getting rid of Stop Build Day. I think it is a reasonable middle ground instead of getting rid of it. I still think that if we get rid of Stop Build Day we will reduce the number of students who participate. (As a side note, we will also reduce the chances for those who opt to stay with FRC to do other things.) I think reducing the participation rate is a bad idea.

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And that would be on top of the later practice match schedule that already increased practice match participation a couple of years ago.