[RRLedford]

The 6-week bag deadline is unfair in the degree that it more detrimentally affects different kinds of teams.

Ours is a small private school team that has few students overall and even those with the most dedication to the program have trouble putting in a lot of time per week. We also have conflicts with other extra curricular activities, some of which are mandatory.

We often have a vacation week in the middle of the six week window, with almost no build time taking place, from many students out of town.

We have a finals week with only one session at best.

With a small team size and this much total time conflict it becomes almost impossible to complete our build. These time bites simply represent too big of a % of the total 6-week time window to ever get caught up.

We are always finishing our build in the pits, and never having any practice or troubleshooting/optimizing time before our first match. We rarely make any practice matches. We barely get to the practice field.

If we had 9 weeks or more, losing a week or two would not be such a total total progress killer. Even when we build a practice bot, we barely finish it a day or two before competition, and this makes that effort almost just an expensive and frustrating exercise in futility.

We also typically find that our design concepts are really excellent, but having our builds barely get finished by the end of Thursday at competition, and having no practice and tuning time, means we are struggling to barely reach a competition ready level while being in the middle of competing, which does really not allow for the best results with any design, no mater how good it may be.

We typically see how easily we could have done so much better but for lack of a week or so of more time for practicing and optimizing.
We always resolve to work more efficiently, and finish earlier next year, but it just never seems to happen.

Team members get frustrated seeing this pattern repeat for 2-3 years. It takes a lot of the fun out of the program for them too.

A big part of engineering design involves testing, iterative refinement and improvement, and I believe that small teams like ours are consistently being cheated from experiencing this aspect of engineering learning, from having such a compressed 6-week build window constraint laid on us.

For bigger teams with larger groups of mentors, I can see the 6-week build being pore realistic and more fair, but for the smaller teams with few mentors it is extremely difficult to handle.

-Dick Ledford