Thread: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
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Unread 26-05-2016, 21:42
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Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux View Post
We're trying to talk about how to keep FRC teams and make them sustainable, correct? How does bag & tag help in that goal? Blaming the teams 100% instead of thinking about maybe how we could make things a little easier on them isn't all that helpful.

After seeing hundreds of teams over the years field robot that struggle to move and don't play the game at all, I'd argue that they didn't have plenty of time.

Of course all of your points are a factor - time management being a huge one. We need to find a way to help teams to manage their time better.

If FIRST could do one thing that wouldn't impact them at all financially or logistically and would help a significant number of teams, it would be to end bag & tag.

...
No one blamed a team. There is a difference between separating root causes from less important variables, and assigning blame. Let's not think in terms of blame.

About the other points, there are a zillion things that FIRST could do to help struggling teams field a useful robot without altering the current length (44 days) of the initial build period - things that would help the struggling teams without tempting the healthy teams to expend even more resources on their robots.

One example would be to annually publish a how-to manual for building, and programming a simple, useful robot (plus control station), if that would be consistent with the purpose of building robots in the first place. However, my natural next thought is that any healthy team could do this already.

Or a healthy team could simply build a kit bot for themselves in the first 48 hours after the game is announced, and could then spend the rest of the build season helping N struggling teams instead of trying to win a blue banner for themselves. Imagine how well that would be received by the Chairman's Award judges ... That would be extreme, but it's a thought experiment that shines a light on the "Healthy teams need more time to help struggling teams" argument.

I understand the no bag & tag arguments, but I remain unconvinced that struggling teams' root causes will be affected.

Blake
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Last edited by gblake : 26-05-2016 at 21:45.
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