Quote:
Originally Posted by Pault
Or... we could just push the championships back into May. Why not?
|
In states like Michigan where public schools are by law required to start after Labor Day (meaning they finish in mid June), that's reasonable. I think it's somewhat common for seniors to get out early (correct me if I'm wrong), however. For my school (and as a private school, we started in mid to late August) that meant that seniors finals happened in mid May. Say what you will about seniors giving up and not caring about anything at that point, but it would be painfully difficult for any senior to crack a book of any kind at champs from what I've heard. And what if finals fell on the week after worlds? having worlds at the end of April is about as far back as it could be pushed for seniors who get out in May, in my opinion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Pardus
It is very safe to say that more Regional-Region and District events will be added in the coming years. FiM now has 12 District events scheduled for the 2014 season, while PNW has 10. Once FiM, PNW or another Region reaches the need for 13 or more District events within its Region; I think more competition weeks will be needed, since it will be very hard for a Region to manage 3 District events on a single weekend. If the 6.5-week Build Season is to be maintained, it will mean a December Kick-off and Start Date for future Build Seasons. It also means you are going to have a Build Season that will overlap most High School Winter Breaks (may not be a good idea) or have to enforce an arbitrary Stop-build period over the Holiday Season.
|
I would kill for the chance to work on the challenge over winter break. Again, this is a goofy side effect of the school I went to, but we have always had kickoff, followed by first semester finals starting the monday/tuesday after kickoff. 2013 was a fluke in that we had a whole week between kickoff and finals, but no matter how you look at it, the stress of finals combined with the start of building a robot takes a toll on a team. If we had our Christmas/New Year's break to work on our robot, that would be a massive, fantastic boon. It's always difficult to wrangle students during breaks, but since teams have established patterns of extremely long days on weekends when students have homework and everything else pulling at their time, I don't think it's unreasonable.