Quote:
Originally Posted by Ed Law
IKE and I made a formal proposal to FIRST back then. They did look into it and spent many hours discussing it internally, but at the end decided against it. I never quite get an answer as to the reasons. At the time I felt it was wrong to publish the letter on CD. Since they did not adopt it, I am posting it now. I still feel strongly it is a good compromise for most people.
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FIRST did ask for the survey data I took. We tried to interview someone knowledgeable about the team for the top 25 OPRs in each division that year. I don't know if I told teams I would publicly share their data or not, so I would rather not publish the table, but we asked a handful of questions. One was: "Do you have some sort of Practice Robot?" The four divisions came in between 75% and 88% of teams from those top 25 (some divisions we only got to 20 of the 25 teams). We then asked teams to assign an estimated "percentage" that the practice was similar to the competition robot. This varied from 10% (usually a modified version of the previous year and only used for driving practice) to 100% (only 1 team claimed that). The average came in around 60% (averaging a number given to a subjective value is.... well another number...) with the usual Einstein suspects coming in between 90-99% IE very very similar. This was a fun discussion to have, and a couple teams were oddly specific (I got a 97%, a 98%, and a 95.2% from three teams I have a lot of respect for).
This survey fostered the idea as I was surprised that a couple of really good teams actually stopped build practice bots because they typically had access to 3 districts (and 3 x 6 hrs. un-bag) plus a district championship to gain experience. I am not sure that they were top 1% teams, but they were within that top 4%. 6 hrs. of unbag split into 3 x 2 hr. sessions is a decent amount of access for practice, test, and tune. I know a lot of really great teams spend way more than that, but it truly is a nice chunk of time for a team. If teams had similar chunks each week, they could do some pretty impressive stuff.
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I really pushed for this as I think FIRST misses out on the inspiration of product development/improvement. Watching the documentary on Slingshot, and all the iterations they went through, I was reminded of how little refinement we get to do.