[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by jman4747

You seem to be just barely missing the main point. "extending the build season gives you more options for scheduling parts build and delivery." Change that to, "extending the build season gives you more options for scheduling everything about how you run your team between Jan and April"

Forgive the bluntness, but nope.

Eliminating (or delaying) a bag & tag deadline will not give you any more scheduling options for anything which does not involve building a robot, because you have all those options already.

"This would be true if the only reason a student can't attend is an absolute lack of hours in the week to spend on the team." And? That's one more sub group of students that can attend that couldn't. Meanwhile the examples you mentioned aren't even hurt by the change. Explain how that is not a net gain.

The examples I mentioned can definitely suffer if the robot build takes longer. Don't you notice an obvious increase in "catching up" with schoolwork, chores, social events, etc. once the robot is in the bag? That's not likely to change just because the team meetings are an hour shorter. If the problem is time management in general, adding time is not a useful solution.

"I can see where the 54 comes from..."
Yes I spelled it out. I'll do it farther.

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I think I might have been confused by a missing "not" (or at least a missing "'t" on the word "can") in your original post, and I know I was confused by failing to grasp that the 3 hour meetings were being changed to 2 hour meetings.

I mostly understand what you're saying now. I don't accept the outcome, because there are many unaddressed factors, but I do accept the math of what you do address.

You seem to think I think that everyone will benefit significantly and that for this idea to be valid everyone needs to. Of course everyone won't take advantage of it properly but their are people who will and if that ends up saving that team it was worth it.

I have seen many teams. I have seen how a lot of them work, and I have seen how a lot of them struggle. I can point to none of them as being able to benefit from applying their present build effort over a longer time.

If getting rid of bag & tag will help a team become more sustainable, it's going to be because they can spend more time on the robot, period. You have described well how to reduce the number of hours spent per week, but you have not shown any evidence that the number of hours spent per week is a problem.