Quote:
Originally Posted by MrForbes
Interesting analysis, Jim.
Question...when you look at the teams that only play at one regional, vs two or more, how do those 1 regional teams stack up?
Again, you can build a robot in 3 days. You can also take all the time available up to competition day, and not finish a robot. I'd like to know how you could change rules in a way that would affect teams' work habits, to give a better outcome?
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This whole debate needs to shift to a discussion about how we can encourage a spirit of continuous improvement amongst all teams in the FRC.
Continuous improvement is the essence of how the top teams operate and is the essence of how Engineering works in the real world.
Teaching anything else does a dis-service to our participants.
Today, only the well resourced team can really do continuous improvement, everyone else is pretty much screwed.
From the 2nd graph in my post above:
Teams who only play one event have only a slightly lower average performance in their first event than team who plan to play 2 event (3pts avg).
I attribute this to the "give up factor". Teams who only plan to attend one event do not put much effort into trying to fix and improve their machines at the event.
Many teams in this situation know that they are not a likely contender and thus are just waiting for it to end.
We have all seen this: teams who refuse help that they clearly need.
This does not really happen when team plan to play a 2nd event: they use the time they have to keep the situation from happening a 2nd time, and as such see positive benefit in the first tournament, and a doubling of ability by the second.
The 6 week build period is a myth. It is a sales gimmick used by FIRST to try to ally fears about overwork to new joining teams.
FIRST is not a 45 day program, it never has been.
It is a 113 day program, and for many of us, it is a 365 day program.
Anyone who is even moderately serious about achieving any success in this sport must admit this and act accordingly.
If it were up to me, I would abolish all practices regarding when we can do anything. The positives far outweigh the negatives.
There are very few practices like this in any other machine sport. I participate in many things other than FRC....FIRST is the only organization who thinks it is good to take my creations away from me.
Since no one else does this, we in FRC are either smarter than everyone else, or stupider than everyone else. (You decide).
I find it paradoxical that this rule is not consistent even within the FIRST programs: Small robots are much easier to change and copy than large robots, but there are no restrictions on the FLL and FTC machines.
If restricting change to a specific time window is some sort of FIRST core principle, then why is it not universal throughout their own programs?
These machine access rules are really just an extrapolation of a rule which was arbitrarily put in place in a failed attempt to force fairness in the league over 20 years ago.
This rule instead is the reason for the greatest inequalities in the league.
Time is our most precious resource, and by severely restricting time, FIRST gives massive advantage to those with money, experience and resources, and eliminates most avenues of recovery for those without.
Since it has been in place longer than most of our members have been alive, many people believe that the "rule of 6 weeks" is some sort of fundamental principle, but it is not.
It is an obsolete rule which continues to hold us all down and most people, even the people at HQ, have long forgotten why it was put there in the first place.