[GaryVoshol]

With no BUMPERS last year and a high number of rookie teams in the last two years, about half the team members out there have never worked with BUMPERS before. This year's juniors and seniors probably weren't team leaders 2 and 3 years ago and don't have much experience with BUMPERS either. I think that's why we are seeing more questions this year.

I think FIRST could help this by making a couple simple changes in the manual. I've pushed for years for them to add the word "tightly" to the line about wrapping a string around your ROBOT to show where the FRAME PERIMETER is. Something new would be for a blue box to say, "This means each side of the ROBOT goes from outside corner to outside corner, regardless if there is a gap in that side." Q&A is beginning to stress that the FRAME PERIMETER is a convex polygon by definition; now put that definition into the manual.