Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Sheridan
I noticed more and more top tier teams that cut down on their meeting times or always manged their time well enough to not meet 7 days a week. Next year, I am having Code Orange reduce from 7 days a week to 4 days a week. I noticed this year, our productivity nose dived after meeting continuously for 20 days, thus i think we will be a lot more productive long term by taking days off.
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Interesting. We're hoping to take a different approach to revamp our schedule. We're looking to bring FRC inside the school day, 1:30-3:00pm Monday through Friday year round. Fewer hours per day, more days. This will get us about double the Fall training hours that we have had previously, and maybe half the build hours. We may add some Friday nights and Saturdays into the schedule as well for build season.
We're going to be shifting our focus from building great robots to building great people who are highly skilled and very educated. And if we still happen to get good robots out if the process, cool, but if we don't, we've achieved a better outcome than just the robot.
To win at FIRST (trophy and banner wise) takes either an enormous amount of time in which you do nothing else or you have to get lucky,which we never seem to do. To win as a team takes only a set of goals and a plan to achieve them, and a schedule that YOU set. I'm almost done trying to win at FIRST, and I'm ready to go for more personal and home-grown "wins". I want to get back to learning things and making cool things with students because WE want to, not because FIRST required us to or because we're trying to outdo those best teams that we maybe never will.
FIRST Robotics is a program who caters to those who are quick and sharp. It's not for every student, and in some ways, is not a great way to educate students, due to the intense competition and schedule. Other programs and projects can achieve some very excellent educational outcomes on much more reasonable schedules.
The amount of time FIRST teams spend and the level of competition these days is way beyond what it ever was when I was in high school. Back then, your average team had a reasonable shot at winning. Nowadays, you're average team doesn't stand a chance in my mind. It's become a competition of who can spend more hours.