Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Hibner
This may sound like a stupid question, but I'd like some serious responses.
What about shortening the build season to 4 or 5 weeks, with no witholding?
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Would certainly exacerbate many of the previously listed problems - paying for expedited shipping, stress on sponsors to manufacture parts in a shorter timeframe, fewer days "off" for teams.
I would love to see an effort by FIRST (or the community) to compile some data on FIRST norms, so we can get a sense of where we stand as a community on some of these big issues. I have a feeling we're overestimating the "average" FIRST team.
Build Season Schedule/Time Commitment - our team meets from 6:30-9:30PM on weekdays and ~1PM-9PM on weekends, with that schedule expanding in the final weeks. Our team policy is to take Fridays off for as long as we can, this year we took Fridays off weeks 1-4. We use RFID tags to track attendance - in the end I spent 260+ hours working in the lab, we had 12 students exceed 180 hours (~30/hrs a week). We logged a little over 5,000 "person-hours" of work from ~45 students. The numbers might be a little low if anything (students forgetting to sign out, work done at home, etc). I figure we must be on the high end of the continuum, but I honestly have no idea what the average team looks like here.
Practice Bots - we were planning on building one for the 1st time this year - eventually made the conscious choice to abandon that after taking a realistic look at our build schedule. Being in MAR, we had the benefit of unbagging windows, so it wasn't a huge issue. Maybe 5% of teams (~125) are making these?
Withholding Allowance/Competition Season - Mainly used for spare parts that we don't have time to make during build season. 3D printed some hopper inserts to solve a jamming issue before world CMP. We're usually too burned out after 6 weeks to do any major changes within the 30 lbs, so it's minor iteration of exisiting systems.
I think if the goal is to bring up the bottom end, simply extending the build season isn't going to cut it. Those teams that are disadvantaged in mentor support or resources aren't going to be able to fix those issues with more time.
A bunch of pages back everyone was talking about the 2nd event being a big equalizer for lower-tier teams. From looking at the MAR data this season (OPR), that's doesn't seem to be the case. For all MAR teams the 1st event average was 15.5, which increased to 22.9 at their 2nd event (7.4 pt average increase). Here is the average increase in OPR based on OPR after their 1st event.
Rank 01-20: 7.33 points (OPR range from 67 to 25.5)
Rank 21-40: 8.21 points (OPR range from 25.3 to 17.7)
Rank 41-60: 7.45 points (OPR range from 17.3 to 10.7)
Rank 61-109: 7.24 points (OPR range from 9.6 to -3.5)
The good but not great teams had the biggest gains - likely teams that have adequate mentorship and resources, had lots of headroom to improve, and were able to make tweaks and changes to improve their performance. Overall though, not a significant difference, and the worst teams failed to make up any ground on the rest of the field.
Taking a closer look at the teams ranked 61-109, their average OPR at their first event was 4.0, which improved to 11.25 at their second event. At that point, I don't think more time is the answer - in performance after 6 weeks of build, or after 1 week of competition and 12 hours of unbag time.