Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam Freeman
But, there are other "open season" robotics competition out there that are relatively comparable to FRC. Aren't both FTC and VEX, open season competitions? What happens in these types of competitions? Are the mentors burned out? Are they filling every hour of every day working on their machines? Are these even comparable to FRC mentors and robots?
|
From my experience of working with a FTC team & FRC team for the past two seasons, here are some facts about the teams:
1. The FTC Team met less frequently than the FRC team
2. As FTC is smaller, there was a significantly better attendance rate at the FTC meetings than at FRC meetings.
3. FTC in Illinois (and our team) starts competitions in Nov, so our team has a 6-8 week build season, generally 7 weeks with start-up time etc.
4. Between our Qualifier and the State Championship, activity for the FTC team is very heavy, as the kids get more interested and want to change more things.
5. For both FTC and FRC, activity picks up quite a bit towards the end of build season. We've only gotten better in FTC this year (our second year), and have put together a timeline (which wasn't followed) in FRC.
My observations/conclusions:
- Because of 3, and also because it's the same group of kids on FTC and FRC. I would say it's possible to do a comparison. It is altogether two different competitions which does change things but still.
- An explanation to number 5, I believe that going through the stringent deadline has forced us to try and get more organized and slap together timelines. It requires our students to be more diligent and focused. Without such a strict deadline, I already envision the "You guys should get this done" "But we have so much time". Resulting to things being postponed and extending the commitment of mentors AND students.
- As 4 shows, since we didn't bag our robot for FTC we continued to make improvements and continue to work on the robot. The students we work with are super interested, if we don't give them a "no, we're done" then they'll push to continue working on it.
- With 4, our FTC team could have done a lot of outreach, fundraising etc events, but it's hard to pull the students away from the robot and have them focus on those things that are actually important to the sustainability of our team. Our FRC team is different, as after the stop deadline, we still have quite a few meetings, but switch to a focus on outreach, and competition ready items, which also typically brings in a couple of new mentors. We simply use their motivation and re-task them, and year after year they better understand the need for all this not robot related stuff we do.
In my opinion, having a deadline helps to not kill our mentors AND students (everyone needs to see families and sleep). It allows our team to focus on other fundamental aspects of our team. The deadline also creates a hard deadline, and as is we have trouble with organization, with our artificial deadlines. I believe that deadline makes them realize that our team will become way more efficient if we plan and think things through ahead of time (ie. Design week, Build week, meeting schedules).
While expanding the season, may allow teams to build better robots, are better robots more important than important skills such as time management, proper communication and organization that students NOT mentors are inspired to pursue after seeing the success of better teams?