Re: Practice Time
 

It's almost impossible to exactly plan practice time(s), and is just as hard to accurately count how much time you have practiced in the past. The key is to just have as much practice as possible, and though you shouldn't rush building your robot, don't dilly-dally either. We have 45 days in the build season, so use your time wisely. Learn the challenge, strategize and plan what you want to try to build, spend time building, and spend equally as much trying your machine out and practice using it. Knowing how to properly use and control your robot is just as important as constructing it.

Exactly; just because you put in x-hours of practice time, that is not going to automatically place you on Einstein. That would make it too easy, and take away all the fun and excitement ;).

Re: Practice Time
 

Our team only meets about 120 hour total through out the entire season. I imagine you guys have a lot of drive team only meeting?

Re: Practice Time
 

You want a specific number, you say.

I will tell you that back when I was on 330, we had the following on various years, in various forms:

Lots and lots of practice field time at events (I wasn't exactly keeping track--but IIRC, the practice field and filler line were utilized heavily while we had batteries to spare.)

Lots and lots and lots and lots of practice time at our home facility with robot #2 (built first), starting around Week 4--we had to replace treads on the wheels more than once, found out about a side-loading weakness in a particular AM wheel design the hard way (it's since been fixed), and quite a few battery cycles. As I understand it, later practice sessions started with most of the batteries full, took a break when all the batteries were empty (and charging), and then put another round of practice in until the batteries needed charging again. I wouldn't say that happened every night... but several nights a week, before and between competitions. This started in 2007. (Count hours? Nope, I don't think they did. Takes too much time away from practicing!)

You want a specific amount of time, you get a stopwatch and start as soon as driver practice starts using something like the above. Stop when it ends. Record the time. Wash, rinse, repeat... and add up the time at the end of the season. (OK, maybe note when events happened...)

That's how you get a specific number. Then you can plan accordingly in following years.;)

Re: Practice Time
 

The way our team does it is we have two robots done within two to three weeks. Then the remaining time is all improvements and programming. Lots and lots of programming just for the ease of the driver, so a driver who has programming experience would make a great driver.

Re: Practice Time
 

Practice is not a number. It's a practice.

Re: Practice Time
 

This ^

Re: Practice Time
 

No driver in FRC has ever practiced too much. Unless it interferes with school, life, etc.

Re: Practice Time
 

Your chances of getting 100 hours of practice in prior to ship are zero. In 11 years I've never been involved with a build that ended with the robot having been fully operational for more than 5-7 days. If you practiced for 8 hours a day for 14 days you would barely break 100 hours and there's no way you could practice 8 hours a day.

I can tell you that overall drive time for our drivers is probably more than 100 hours. No way to put an exact number on it though.

Re: Practice Time
 

In 2009, when our robot was done at the beginning of week 4, we logged an estimated 50hrs of practice. I would show up to school at 5pm or so, and drive it until ~10pm. This really showed when we went to our First event.

2009 was an Anomaly though, usually we're 'finished' somewhere in week 5 - so we'll practice for about a week along with system debugging.

In any case, you can never practice too much like Mr. Picone said in a post above.

An interesting thing to look at along with the amount of time practiced is the quality of the practice. Driving by yourself on an empty field will probably get you comfortable with the robot - but throwing another robot or five into the mix will get you comfortable with the game.

Re: Practice Time
 

Practice time is more than just about making drivers better it's also about making your robot better.

Time on your bot will show it's weaknesses and allow you to fix things and make improvements before you ever go to a regional. Spending Thursday and Fridays at regionals fixing your robot won't make you a picker or get you picked on Saturday.

Having a practice robot last year helped point out a major flaw that would have been difficult to fix and would have crippled us at our first regional.

Break/fix time is extremely valuable.

Re: Practice Time
 

Great point made