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Unread 05-05-2013, 18:11
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thefro526 thefro526 is offline
Mentor for Hire.
AKA: Dustin Benedict
no team (EWCP, MAR, FRC 708)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Rookie Year: 2005
Location: New Jersey
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

Everything I'm about to say has probably been said already (a little late to the party, I know) but I figured I'd toss some of this out there and see what happens.

I'm one of those people that would love to see an essentially open build season, with the only 'end' being the final event with your robot. After the last couple of seasons, I'm truly starting to believe that one of the biggest reasons for mentor burnout and a lot of the stress that comes with being an FRC Participant (students and mentors) is the '6 week' build season - which, in reality, is a constraint that is 'self' imposed. If we were to remove the end of build season, I think the following things would happen.

1) Students would have the opportunity to be more involved.

2) Teams would have an easier time approaching, retaining, and effectively utilizing mentors.

3) Teams would have an easier time approaching, retaining and effectively utilizing material* sponsors. (*Material Sponsors being those who give something, whether that be machining, parts, shirts, decals, etc.)

4) Teams would spend less time in meetings per week. (If they make that choice.)

5) Teams would be able to more effectively utilize Thursday (Or Friday Morning) as a practice day instead of a 'finish the robot day'.

6) The overall level of competition will go up.

Why do I think these things?

1) Most teams that I know of and have worked with that are based out of schools meet at least 3 weekdays and one day on the weekend. Depending on the school and the students, this is a lot of time for someone to spend on an extra curricular activity, especially because many of those nights during the week and days on the weekend are 'late' days. When I was a student in HS, I was fortunate enough to go to a school that had a series of activity buses for those students who stayed late to do a variety of things. The big problem with these was that they were based around the practice schedules of the sports teams which we often worked right past. If you wanted to be really involved and get a lot of work done, this often meant that you were getting a ride home from your parents at 7pm, 8pm, 9pm or whenever. That's A LOT to ask for, especially 3-4 days a week for 6 weeks. Some kids weren't fortunate enough to have parents that could/would come pick them up on these nights so they only stayed until the bus, and after a while would be upset as most of the work would happen between 6pm or so and 9pm.

2) Finding mentors is tough. I've met a ton of people who would be awesome mentors and a lot of them are turned off at the time commitment required. Those who aren't instantly turned off usually seem to fade away after the first few weeks. Some of this is due to an underestimation of what 3-4 nights a week actually is, some of it is because of prior obligations, and some of it is due to one of the necessary evils of being on an FRC team and that is 'Work must go on'. I've seen people pitch AWESOME ideas and then not show up for a week or more so the idea is never pursued. They often come back in after missing a series of meetings and are upset that the idea was ditched in favor of another one - and that's usually their last meeting.

3) On the same train of thought as #2, approaching sponsors is hard enough. Once you throw in the delivery schedules necessitated by build season, it's nearly impossible sometimes. From my experience, the longest realistic turnaround for most goods during build season is 1 week. Most of the machine shops I've worked with work on 4 week, 6 week, 8 week and longer deadlines, so they're often booked solid for months on end. Trying to 'sneak' parts through the machines can get really old after a while, especially if the shops underestimate how busy they actually are. There's nothing worse than hearing the 'it looks like they'll be run tomorrow' line everyday for a week.

4) This helps to summarize #1, #2 and #3 - If the only deadline of build season is the date of your first competition, you can schedule your time accordingly. Right now, it seems like the minimum amount of time that a team can meet is somewhere around 3-4 days a week and one day on the weekend for the 6 week duration of build. If build is effectively lengthened to a minimum of 8 weeks for those competing in week #1, then in theory, a team could meet less frequently, let's say 2 days a week and one weekend day and still get the same amount of work done. This eased schedule can also be passed onto sponsors making parts, and vendors supplying parts, etc, etc - not to mention that it's a lot easier for a student to make 2 late night meetings a week instead of 3/4...

5) If teams have access to their robots all the way up until their competitions, then there's less of a reason to not be done. With the way things are now with traditional events, if you want to modify something on your competition machine and not have it effect your qualifying performance it must be done on Thursday - which means that you're losing valuable practice time, and depending on how involved the modifications are, you could be losing ALL of your practice time. If you look at teams in the district system that are allowed 6hrs unbag time before their event, you'll see that teams are rarely 'finishing' modifications (or their robot) when they should be practicing - unless they need to do something to pass inspection or some other unforeseen circumstance...

6) If you allow teams access to their robots for the duration of the season, they're going to have more time to practice and run the machine. There's a sizable majority of FRC teams that ship their robots with fewer than 3-4hrs of run time on them, most of which is spent driving around on some sort of field 'approximation' that doesn't necessarily help them learn what's going on with their machine. Imagine that with an 'open' build season, and more teams keeping their machines in their possession, you'll now have a reason for teams/groups of teams to find/make better practice facilities, have scrimmages/pickup matches during off weeks and use a more traditional (sports-like) practice model. Being able to do things like this would have a HUGE effect on 'real' performance. There's also the bonus of lower end teams finally being able to 'tune' their machines.

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There are some problems to the open build season idea, specifically that teams may rip off other designs and/or pick events later in the season specifically to have more time to practice and finish their machines... I fail to see the problem with this though, since it's no different than how FRC is right now, with the exception that only teams that are 'well off' can really rip off another design or utilize an extra week or three to practice.

For what it's worth, in both 2011 and 2013, I have been on teams that made the decision to have a build season that would 'last as long as it took'. In 2011, with 816, we finished our minibot deployment and a few other machine tweaks the morning of our first event, and replaced our claw/arm/minibot deployment on the Thursday morning of our second. Then in 2013, with 341, we revised our intake and added a pneumatic 10pt climber in between our week 1 and week 3 events, built a custom arm gearbox and did some frisbee path tweaks in between our week 3 and week 6 events and built a new shooter in between our week 6 event and the Championship.

The sort of continuous improvement that I've been a part of in previous seasons is something that as of right now, can only be done by extremely dedicated teams with the right resources to do so. We didn't have a full practice robot this year, or when I was on 816, so there's a HUGE amount of time spent playing a 'Zero Failure' game if the robot needs to be modified since the parts cannot be properly tested prior to being put on the machine. If we had access to our machine during the planning and design phases of these modifications, I can assure you that the process would have been much less stressful and time consuming.

I guess the TLDR to my whole post is that having a ship day, or bag day only serves to hurt teams with fewer resources and make it extremely hard for teams that are currently 'good' to stay good. Teams on the bottom don't necessarily have the resources to ever get their machines to become top level performers and teams on the top have to essentially have an open build season within the rules to stay competitive since that's become the status quo.
__________________
-Dustin Benedict
2005-2012 - Student & Mentor FRC 816
2012-2014 - Technical Mentor, 2014 Drive Coach FRC 341
Current - Mentor FRC 2729, FRC 708
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