[Xavbro]

So I was lucky enough to be apart of Robot in 3 Days AND the actual FRC build season and here's my take on it:

From the stand point of the FRC build season:
My team was watching all the BB/Ri3D builds and the approach they took was to "look but not watch." What I mean by that is they looked at the builds but didn't take intensive notes. The students all had something they liked from the different builds but I always asked, "what could be done to make it better?" Our team started with the choo-choo but realized that it was very limiting as opposed to a pneumatic launcher. We liked the JVN collector and stuck with it only after we explored all the possible options. Even though we had several robots done in 3 days to "copy", we didn't finish our design until almost week 3. The BB/Ri3D builds overall helped our team by cutting down a lot of prototyping that we would normally do. We could easily look at a video of a mechanism that we were considering and see if it gave us the result we wanted.

All in all, I comes down to how you let the build influence your students. You can't control how they feel about it but you can force them to think it through by making sure they cover all of their bases on why they want that design for the robot.

From the stand point of a Ri3D build:
Going in, Team O-Ryon's purpose was to build a robot that could complete the simple game objectives and at the same time, be something a rookie team or a team that was low on resources could build and still be competitive. We knew that we had a lot of people watching and that whatever we build could and would be copied. We also wanted to make it difficult for teams to just sit down and copy it bolt for bolt, screw for screw. That's why we didn't CAD it and release any CAD. We got numerous emails and messages about when were going to release CAD or if we could CAD something for them and as tempting as it was, we didn't. We answered all questions but told teams to improvise because we knew our robot wasn't the best and that teams could make something better with 6 weeks to build.

Looking back, I'm glad we did the 3 day build because we met our goal. Teams built our robot (some carbon copies) and were able to be competitive at their respective regionals, some even winning. At the same time, the veteran teams were able to take what we did and iterate and take it to the next level. That was the main goal of Ri3D when it all started last year. Not to build a robot FOR a team but to build a robot that a team could see complete the game challenge in week one and to give them a foundation to start with so that the overall competition level at all regionals could be more leveled thus getting all the students a better overall experience of FRC.