Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo
75-85% of these issues center on resources - whether money, mentors, head coach, build space, or (rarely) student team members, or a combination. The other 15-25% were based on interpersonal conflict.
None of 3946's crises or the threads I recall (including a wide sampling of threads from before I joined, as I like to click on highlight threads) boiled down to: While ending Bag and Tag is likely to raise the level of competition, I see no reason to think that it will improve sustainability, which was the question.
Costs - Somehow reduce the entry-level cost each year. I look forward to competing in a district format someday, but as a way of increasing what the team can do with the same amount of funding, not as a fount of sustainability.
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For the love of magic smoke the bag day argument is not just a competitiveness issue! Anyone arguing that increasing competitiveness is the main issue in terms of bag day and sustainability misses the point.
Anyone who thinks bag day doesn't effect things that contribute
directly to the sustainability of a team hasn't actually been reading.
"75-85% of these issues center on resources - whether money, mentors, head coach, build space, or (rarely) student team members, or a combination."
Okay lets see how eliminating bag day can help with what you listed...
1. Money
- Reduced shipping costs (edit: when ordering COTS parts)
- Greater ability to get parts made (edit: via outsourcing to sponsors) as opposed to purchasing everything COTS
- More time during the season to worry about other things like fundraising
2.Mentors/Head Coach
- More spare time for experienced mentors to help rookies
- A less frequent meeting schedule can give a mentor, who can only come to a fraction of a teams meetings, more of an effect on the team.*
- Less frequent meetings could give a head coach more time off or more time during the season to deal with admin duties on a week to week basis
3.Build space
- If for whatever reason you need to find build space (unsupportive school for instance) less frequent access needs and shorter necessary access times could make it easier to convince someone to let you use their space.
4.Student team members
- A student who can't currently commit much time to the build season can now show up less frequently and make it to a higher percentage of meetings.
These aren't the only things that can be improved by this (anyone who can add to it please do). This isn't the only way to accomplish this and obviously technical tutorials need to improve and time management training has to come along with it. But now with more time overall you can spend more of it learning without sacrificing the draw of the program.
Finally I totally agree that FIRST needs to make an effort with engineering associations and organizations to improve mentor recruitment (add WIT and SWE to that list). I would also like to see that sort of effort in universities.