Regional Selection Process
 

With Bill Miller unveiling the tentative regional schedule, it got me thinking about which events 148 will attend this season. That got me thinking about what exactly makes us choose the regionals we do and I began to analyze our criteria for regional selection... which of course made me wonder, what do other teams do?

How does your team select which regionals you attend? Do you have a specific set of criteria?

Some of 148's criteria:

• Dallas is our "home regional".

• We like to stay in Texas.

• We want to travel somewhere interesting.

• We don't want to travel -- we are cheap.

• We want to play with the big dogs.

• We don't like back-to-back regionals.

• We don't like week 1 regionals.

• We like week 1 regionals.

• We don't like regionals in "party locales."

I thought this was an interesting thing to think about, so I posted more info (including some justifications for our criteria) here:
http://jvengineering.blogspot.com/20...l-choices.html

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

I was about to post on your blog that you should post this on chief because it was good advice... Clearly way ahead of me.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Not sure if I quite understand... :rolleyes:

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Rationale was given in the blog. What is there to not understand? It's not like they're contradictory statements or anything. (I suspect John really means "There is an aspect by which we like week 1 regionals" as opposed to the original one, which implied an overall liking of week one regionals, contradicting the other list item you quoted [or at least its implication])

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

We like week 1 regionals - it's a more level playing field, where nobody has one or more regionals under their belt.

We dislike week 1 regionals - the glitches try our patience, and sometimes we get more character-building than we prefer.

Our criteria are similar: Trenton is (was?) our "home" regional (and plenty of big dogs there), we want to go somewhere interesting, but not too far (airfares are expensive), Never-ever a back-to-back (more a schoolwork thing) and the kids need to remain relatively safe.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

ooh... didn't read the blog first... oops :o

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Team 79 usually goes to the Florida Regional and another regional over our spring break. This way students don't miss as much school.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

I for one am sick of week 1 regionals. We always felt we did better at our "home" regional if we did an away regional before hand. Since our home regional is almost always week 3, this means we do a week 1. We have done 5 years of this and each year, the week 1 regional seems to get more and more frustrating and less productive - character building as John would say. This might be a year we try some change and go for a "home" regional first and "away" second.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

I only competed at Week 1 regionals, but I really liked them. I agree there was occasionally "character building*", but I think its much easier to build a great Week 1 bot than a great Week 5 robot. The feel I've gotten over the past 7 (eep, I'm old!) years, is that if you can reliably score the game pieces you start with in week 1, you'll be playing on Saturday afternoon. Later on in the season, as everyone gets tuned up, you really need to be able to make a 2nd and 3rd trip to the goal. (Obviously, winning isn't everything, but it is more fun to be in the hunt!)

*To be fair though, outside of 2009's static issues, I can't remember any of the other field delays.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

1. The school board only allows us to take township buses within the state border.
2. Charter bus is expensive.
3. We don't have loads of money
4. Boilermaker Regional is the only regional in the state.
----
5. BMR FTW!

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Darn.... I thought maybe we would get to see you on the east coast :)

We are just starting the debate now as well. we know for a large part this year we will probably not consider a regional that is not within driving range.

Similar to you, NJ is home regional for us, its 5 miles from our warehouse and it would be unfair not to attend.

I would like to see NJ back at its Week 3 status but that is never going to happen again, I have come to accept that.

Lets see where we go to this year, I dont think we are gonna make it to Dallas again though :).. we had such a great time at the regional also, except for the snow in Dallas in March!!

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Gotta do the "Home" event (West MI - week 3) and try to avoid consecutive weekends. We prefer to have one event under our belt before our home event, which pushes us to a week 1 event.

I used to prefer to sit out Week 1 so we could see how the game played out & plan our hardware improvements before we had to compete. However, since the MI district format guarantees us at least 2 events, I have developed a fondness for week 1. Every team designs and builds their robots in an experience vacuum. The initial hardware and strategy is based entirely on their own imagination and planning. Nobody knows how things will work out, and everyone is in the same boat. This "newness" is soon lost as the game develops. Continuous improvement is great aspect of FRC, but it is cool to be there at the beginning.

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Good list John. Our criteria are similar (DC is our 'home'), with two more notable questions for the 2nd Regional:

• Which regional would our Sponsor(s) prefer that we go to?
• Where can we go such that the local economical and regional engineering influences are different than ours?

In the past one of the sponsors has requested a specific regional because it then allowed us to give that company's site (local to the regional) a demonstration of FIRST and our program.

Additionally, traveling to other regionals further away from us has allowed us to get out of our own locally-based paradigms of funding, design processes (i.e. software development cycles), and general style. To this day the Cheesy Poofs and Pink would be simple team numbers on CD, except we went to Las Vegas in 2007 and Florida in 2009. It also allowed us to meet up with Exploding Bacon in Florida to get to know the advantages/challenges to an NPO-based team over many days in person rather than via email. Philadelphia ('08) is laden with teams who are just as great off the field as they are on the field, and the matches were very exciting for Drexel having such a 'small' venue.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Thats pretty much exactly how we choose our 2nd regional. The other contributing factors usually are what can we do for fun when not at the regional and how well do we think we would fare against teams know to go or that are going to that regional. Going to Florida which is week 2 and having the high school spring break for our county during week 5 does kinda stink cause waiting 3 weeks in between regionals always seems like forever.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

You must not have been around for the failed Hatch experiments. Those were some bad week 1 regionals. Both times.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

I wasn't arround and now you got me curious. What were the failed Hatch experiments? (All I can think of is Orrin Hatch but I doubt you are talking about him.)

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

We just want to go to a regional, although one of our mentors moved to IL, so we may choose to go to Midwest.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

With teams like team 20 (my team and notably JVNs alma mater) and team 148 (JVNs team) qualifying for the championship automatically as original FIRST teams from 1992, it seems natural that these teams would want to compete with the best competition. We don't need to consider our chances of qualifying for the championship in choosing a regional because we get to go to St. Louis in April regardless. But do other teams take into account their chances at qualifying for the championship when choosing a regional event? If so, how much would this play into the decision making process?

I'm not saying that winning is everything but there is something to be said for the magic of the FIRST Championship. It's also something I'd like to have insight to because our team simply does not even have to consider this because there is no necessity.

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A company called Hatch got the contract to do the field software for several years. By 2006, it was obvious that something was wrong--they still couldn't do the field and scoring software right! Evidence: instead of being able to rely on the goal counters for the winner of automode, human backups were used--and it took until Championships to get a suitable delay in to allow for checking the backups. This caused at least one redo that I know about in eliminations. (I forget if they were also responsible for the Algorithm of Doom in 2007 or not.)

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

I was, but I think we got lucky at BAE and avoided most of the trouble. I remember we finished at 5PM in 2005 (Team 501 had just recieved the Chairman's award at 5:01 and the fire alarm went off), and I remember loading the truck while it was still light outside in 2006, which means we also got out by 5:30. By contrast, we left after 7:30 in 2009.

(Those were the years it was Hatch, right?)

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

05 and maybe 07 were Hatch. By 2009, 4FX had taken over the software/hardware for the field controls/scoring. The reason for a late departure in 2009 was probably teams having control system trouble...

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Here's our criteria for this year:

• We're going to two regionals.
• They have to be back-to-back - Maybe going home for two days and competing again is bad, but flying 6000 miles home then back in two weeks is just plain stupid.
• We drive from regional to regional. Less than 375 miles is doable, less than 600 miles is manageable, anything over that is stupid.
• We spend a lot on air tickets, so we have to go somewhere culturally relevant. Events in the middle of nowhere aren't really an option.
• We like tough competition.
• We're from a big city (~ 1.3 million people, 4 million metro area) and from a developing country. What most teams consider "big" or "violent" or "not suitable for students" isn't really much for us.

A personal criteria that some mentors share and that will have to be relayed to the school is that we'd like to go to Week 1-2 events this year. Being that Carnival (country pretty much stops during that time) is on Week 1, that means less work/classes lost by mentors, which surely helps. Yes, shipping the robot on Tuesday and catching a plane on Friday/Saturday will be a bit stressful, but should be a better option.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

This has a lot to do with our event choice this year. We hope this will be the first year we can go to more than our home regional, and since we didn't go to Champs last year, we're planning to use that priority to register this year. I went to Champs with my dad last year, and regional events (while still really cool) just don't compare. We have a good number of seniors this year who are pretty devoted, so we'd like to go Champs. Also, with so many graduating, this would be a good way to get younger members excited about the team and keep some members coming in. And of course we want to try to make as much of a plan of this as possible, instead of qualifying in our week 5 home regional and having to raise the money and work out the logistics in 3 weeks. Lastly, Champs is far more convenient this year: we can probably drive to St. Louis, whereas Atlanta was definitely a plane trip.

Obviously, this is contingent on raising enough cash to register for more than one event. If we can, we plan to also register for the new Lake Superior regional in Duluth (week 2), since it's close by and might get paid for by NASA.

This event schedule would somewhat ideal. We would have a week 2 away regional to right away test and compete with our new 'bot, then 3 weeks to implement changes for week 5 at home, where we might qualify, then another 4 weeks to Champs. 2 or 3 events, we'd get to Champs with a good amount of experience with our machine, and some touchups besides.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

shucks! only west coast regional before Hawai‘i is San Diego. :ahh: we'll have to wait and see if we can travel further???

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Here's Shaker's process.

First, we go to the WPI Regional. It's as close to a home regional as we have and we had a great time last year. We really like the small event size, the fact that it's on a college campus (students can see the campus and potentially tour if need be) and that the field has some strong teams in it (last year included 20, 190, 230, 2079, 3280).

However, we have enough flexibility that we can strongly consider eschewing the WPI regional. Back when we thought we'd have a budget this year :rolleyes: one consideration was attending both Waterloo and GTR, using the days in between to tour college campuses, visit science museums, and generally be educational. Unfortunately we found this wasn't really feasible this year, but it's on my list of regional paths I want to take.

For our second regional, we pick anything we can drive to from Shaker High on Thursday at 3 AM. Connecticut, Finger Lakes, Boston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Long Island are the main choices here.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

In addition to the issues EricH brought up, at least one event in the first week of 2005 had incorrect rankings (see this thread for more info), and in 2006 matches had to be restarted when teams scored too many balls in autonomous. I still remember when we paired up with 1625 for the eliminations and we each scored all 10 of our balls in autonomous, only to have the foghorn sound. Multiple times.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Sounds like Trenton/NYC would be a perfect fit.

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I think a little love for FLR in Rochester, NY is needed.

We like outside teams!

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Good event, but hours away from the next, so I doubt it would be accommodating for 383.

Shaker enjoyed going but the drive relative to WPI, Boston, and Trenton makes it not our first choice, and being only 1 week before WPI makes it taxing on everyone (except me who would have spring break for both!)

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

What I remember most about Hatch was the 2nd week regionals being as bad or worse then the 1st week because one thing would be fixed and 2 things broken. The Arizona regional (referenced in that thread) was week 2. The FLR regional was 1st week and had no rankings for most of the event.

Not that any of this Hatch discussion is relevant to choosing a regional for 2011.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Its too bad that for some teams, the home regional is the Most expensive, from a robot shipment expense standpoint.
I'm sure its a factor for those that do multiple regionals in a season.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Not Week 1 & Week 2, but consider Week 3-Chesapeake in Baltimore and Week 4-Washington DC. Lots of sightseeing opportunities in both locations. If you will have a vehicle and therefore can drive to the venues, you can save $$ on hotels by staying just outside of the city. (For example, lots of cheaper hotels near BWI airport, about 5 miles from Baltimore.)

Baltimore and DC are only about 35 miles apart.

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

Some things to think about were outlined in the FIRST Senior Mentor call* held on 9/9/10 by Nate Knauss with Frank Merrick: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr....aspx?id=10124


We also have a NEMO white paper on this topic: http://www.firstnemo.org/resources.htm

* Very few people seem to be tuning into our calls. The schedule is sent out to team contacts in advance; if you have suggestions for topics you'd like to learn more about, contact your local Senior Mentor or Regional Director (or drop me a message).

Re: Regional Selection Process
 

On behalf of the Chesapeake Regional Planning Committee, we hope you will consider coming to our event in Baltimore on March 17-19. We are the week before the DC Regional, and less than an hour away by car or train. It would our pleasure to have your team join us. A number of our local teams do both events and we will do our best to simplify the transport of robots from one to the other. If you have any questions about the area or our event, please let me know. We hope to see you in March!