[Mark Sheridan]

Poor build quality/tolerances

This nearly crushed us this year. Nearly every problem this year was caused by this. We had all these unexpected part deflections and part interferences. It severely delayed our build schedule because we had to fix so many parts. During competition, we were constantly mending our robot trying to be proactive on repairs. It can be extremely draining. This made it a "lost" by our count because a critical design quality we seek is durability. I find years that we meet the design objective that my students found the year much more enjoyable and rewarding because they have time to learn other things instead of constantly relearning the same failure over and over again.

On the other hand, Its nice to know that this was the root cause 90 percent of our issues this year instead of having a huge collection of problems. This aligns with building within your means. I failed to realize the demographics have been changing in our team over the years. We simply no longer have enough students willing to take woodshop or a JC machine shop class. I didn't realize designs that worked one year won't necessarily work again again because the students are different. I realize I have to recognize our build means year to year better or implement training procedures to standardize our build means.

More on the definition of losing. I was kind of shocked by our OPR rank. I thought we should have been ranked much lower. This subject has been touched on before but it seems that a large pool of teams simply can't play a single aspect of the game. Its heartbreaking to see these statistics, and more so considering how close our team felt we would be if we fell behind on our repairs and missed a match or two. I guess I would say we were not winning but we were not losing either. Perhaps as a community we are losing with so many teams not able to play the game at all.