[gblake]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

Gentlemen! Congratulations on a fantastic thread so far. ...

TL,DR: Teams that struggle to build a sound robot will be best helped by practice before the build season, and the ability to reuse what they accomplish, not a by longer build season for all of FRC.

I'm at the LOL stage. Not the beating my head on a wall stage, and certainly not the thunderous applause stage.

Every argument you (PT) listed has a decent counterargument, and every one of those counterarguments has a decent counter-counterargument,. A few from one side or another have been left out, but most are here somewhere.

What comes to mind most often for me over the last couple of days are these thoughts:

• That someone in FIRST didn't set the 44 day limit because of shipping deadlines. That would only be possibly true if the build start date were a law of the universe. It's not. So, does it make sense to drop that line of reasoning? From day one FIRST could have kicked off each season in the Summer/Fall, if they wanted to, and could have created a 6 month build season.
• That while the length of the build season is creating a lot of virtual smoke and thunder now, some time in the future I'm confident that robot weight limits, or the number and types of allowed motors, or the rule(s) about restarting from scratch each season, or mandatory bumpers, or ... will be the bete noire and cause celebre. ALL of those cause struggling teams to struggle more when building an FRC robot. ALL of those are arbitrary decisions someone took when they were explicitly deciding what challenges/constraints the FRC annual challenge would entail. But! They were/are arbitrary only in the sense that they involve some judgment/wisdom. I'm 100% sure that their current settings were not chosen capriciously. FRC isn't about building the best robot that can play each game. A part of FRC is about the learning experience of satisfying lots of constraints to build a compromised robot that can do well at the game. Time is simply one of those constraints. This (and the previous bullet) is my observation for Ryan D. and others who rail against the imposition of a time constraint.
  
• That helping struggling teams have a successful build will be best done by helping them practice the construction, programming, and project management before the build season. I say this in the sense of helping them learn to fish, instead of giving them a fish. I suggest adding an inexpensive, Fall, annual, robot-building & project management curriculum, and KOP/BOM, and letting the simple robots built during the Fall compete unmodified (maybe allow some modest changes) in the Winter/Spring (think of plowie in Dave's animations). There will be plenty of devils in the details, including avoiding letting too much of the game cat out of the bag, but the intent behind the current 44-day time constraint will be preserved (won't be circumvented further) in a useful sense; and struggling teams will have a valuable safety net. Siri asked earlier what my idea it's. This is it.

Blake

PS: My suggested Fall curriculum would contain a double-dose of mentor training to dislodge the instinct that "It is about the robot/banner"; and to help them learn how to inspire students to try STEM activities and careers without falling into the trap of letting their team's year in FRC be overly influenced by the few hours they spend at a tournament.

PPS: Did anyone notice what I tried to do in that 3rd bullet? I suggested giving struggling teams a much longer build season, and a way to increase the strength of their team's foundations; without giving non-struggling teams a free pass to over-invest (any more than they might now) in the robot-building part of FRC.