Should anything be changed?
 

hey,
Do you think that anything should be changed with the game or the way first is runned? eg. is 6 weeks enough even if the game gets more complicated? Should we have themed games like First lego league? ect.

AIM: pattmyballs (yes im serious):)

I think having a 6 week time constraint is more like a real world application. And having only 6 weeks makes it fun. I really don't think FIRST will make the games any more complicated especially if they get some kind of TV deal. People don't want to watch something that is hard to understand. If we were to go any longer, it'd be a lot harder on the engineers, teachers, and their families.

In general, I think most teams spend more and more time on FIRST during each of the six and a half weeks. I think adding to this would just cause teams to put things off more. And as a college student I need as much time as possible after the building period to catch up on schoolwork. I wouldn't complain if they made it a week longer, but I don't think their would be any significant benefit of doing so.

I think each year we lose a few engineers because they spend so much time after work to help out the project, they end up having to sacrifice time at home with the wife and kids, I personally like the first six weeks, but I would like some kind of change that allows for revisions more than the 3 days after a competition. In my world most of the times when you are rushing to meet the timeline things get shipped that are untested and less robust than they should be, therfore we make revisions and updates until we get it right. Believe me, if you build a car with serious design or build flaws we don't just say times-up can't fix em sorry, we fix it, at whatever time or money it takes. That would only help most teams out there also. Our robot this year had about as much automation as one of Chief Delphi's wheels and we still had a bunch of problems because for our resources we were rushed. If we had more time initially or at least after the deadline to make revisions we would have had more fun watching matches instead of working the whole time in the pits. You know what, making revisions after it ships would also encourage teams to have a detailed set of prints that are up to date. That is real world. If you don't know what you just shipped looks like you can't fix it.

These are my feelings, Matt

8 Weeks
 

Way back in Jan 1999 I think it was, I flew out to wonderful Manchester NH in a snowstorm. I finally got there 12 hours late after having four flights I was rescheduled on in route cancelled.

As a result I only clearly remember one thing about the event I was there for. (You've figured out what that was right?) That was during the question and answer session after the game was presented. Woodie got up and the first question was "Why don't you give us 8 or 10 weeks to build the robots?" His reply was "We wanted to have mercy!"

He went on to say that they felt that was the minimum time it could take to do a reasonable job, and that it was the maximum time they felt anybody could reasonably be expected to survive the rigorous schedule that resulted without severe damage to health and relationships, at least for the adults. I heartily agree with them. If build season was longer, we'd just work hard at it longer, so lengthening it would just extend the pain.

Engineering is the practice of exercising judgement. One of the things you need to judge is how much you can accomplish with your available resources, including time.

Just my $.02
ChrisH

I think the time schedule is just fine-
when I was in indusrty-
8-10 weeks was the run time on many of the projects that I was involvewd with (machine design and CNC of pump parts for Nichools-Portland ) Portland Maine

it was intense it was annoying but iwas also awesome to get a huge project done and assemlbeled in a short amount of time


dahl
team497