After reading through the other thread (linked in OP) I don't really have any new things to add, but... personally, I'd like to keep the 6 weeks + 3 days, or some variant of it.
Grades. Yeah. Mine definitely slipped during build season this year. If I had had to deal with that while missing school for competitions, I doubt they would be as good as they are, and as of now they aren't acceptable to my parents.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MathMaven
Really, whether extending the build season helps or hurts a certain team (or even individual) depends on the team (or individual) in question (see the quoted material above). I think the only fair method of determining whether a new build season length will help or hurt the FRC community is to conduct an exhaustive survey of how a longer build season would affect every team and create a new rule based on that survey’s results. I think the complexity/reward ratio for such an effort would be too high to warrant attempting it.
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Pretty close to my thoughts on the topic (there are more issues with changing a system than with the system it would be changed to), but I'm wondering if it would be different if I preferred something that wasn't status quo.
I can't speak for people other than myself, but I was definitely burned out by two days after build season, and didn't really recover until after Championships. That wasn't because of the six-week build season so much as the way we managed our time, with longer-than-expected hours during build season and then extending our build periods beyond build season. Last year, I didn't burn out, possibly because our time management was better, with more reasonable hours (eating dinner at home all but three or four nights!) and not changing the robot between every single event. This suggests to me that burnout isn't related to the time so much as the management of that time, no matter how long the build period is. With six weeks, it's limited to those six weeks, and isn't going to destroy a whole semester's worth of life. (In theory. There are going to be teams, probably including our team, that continue to work on things with the withholding allowance, but six weeks provides a natural cutoff point, where we can force our team to stop working if we need to.)
Imagining FRC without the six week build season, I don't like where I see our team. While being able to have access to the competition robot after the six week build season could have helped us this year- we redid a mechanism on our robot between every single event, and came to Championships with very different robot from the one we brought to CVR- I doubt that if we had started the season knowing that we had more time that things would have been any easier. We worked up until midnight on Tuesday February 19, and the crunch from the last few days would probably have happened at the end of the build period, whenever it was. But because of the six weeks, most of our team had a break and were able to participate in sports and other extracurricular activities and get their lives back before we fell into the craziness that is competition.