[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by Madison

Are folks advocating an extended build season (e.g. 9 weeks) or the elimination of a stop-build deadline altogether?

If the latter, what would you recommend to minimize the advantage a team competing late in the season has over someone who, perhaps necessarily, competes in week 1? Would you attempt to minimize the advantage at all?

We meet 3 times a week during build; twice during the work week and on Saturdays. Later in the season, we meet more frequently as required. I'm pretty well ready to die after 6 weeks now; I can see how making the time allowed longer could help, but I also see where it wouldn't make much difference and the pain would only be prolonged.

It's more the latter.

I'm not sure there would be an advantage to competing later in the season. It seems like the level of competition later in the season would increase much higher than an early competition (we see similar now)... that it may or may not be a benefit to compete later. It may be in a teams best interest to register for an early regional and get a robot completed quickly, so they can get a win against a slightly lower level of competition. Then continue to develop their machine as time goes on for additional competitions later in the season.

We have a similar design/build schedule. We are not working every day all 6 weeks. We work Tuesday / Thursday 4:15-7:30pm and Satuday 8am-4pm for the majority of the build season. When we need to work more later in the season, we do...or even after.

So yes, I could easily justify to our sponsor (although we don't need too) that we would "only" be working 36 out of 54 available days.

-Adam