[Pauline Tasci]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

This leads us right back to the conversation that was occurring regarding burnout and what it means to "keep up." Nobody doubts that having more time means teams will have the capability of doing more with their machines. What is in doubt is the other impacts of extending the official dates of build season. At the moment the discussion is specifically focusing on what pressures teams will feel to expand their work schedule to fill that new time, and the implicit impacts of that on student and mentor burnout. That ties directly into a number of other factors that have been discussed previously in other threads (student recruitment, student grades, mentor retention, team retention, etc). That's why I challenged your evaluation of using Einstein-caliber teams.

In short, few people are disputing that more time can mean you can do more with your machine. What people are disputing is what that time costs, and whether the standards of the teams that already work that time are truly a proper metric to compare the rest of the FRC population to.

The point I am getting at is teams have way more options on how they would like to construct their own build schedule without a SBD. So many programs like VEX, FTC, FLL, sports strive from this and can add so much more to the product.
If team's want to work more they can, if team's want to slow down they can, the possibilities are endless. Having a harsh deadline (especially a short 6 weeks) makes things harder in my world for both high performing teams and low performing teams. High performing teams want to be competitive so they must build 2+ robots to be the best of the best. Low performing teams have to stop working on their robot and can't add things, test, and more.

For Code Orange, we can't have 40 kids working on one robot, so we are going to build 3 to give our kids more opportunities to chase excellence. Many teams don't have that option, but eliminating a stop build day would give more kids the chance to work on features on the robot.

I helped start 2 rookie teams this year and both wanted to be competitive to ensure their sponsors stayed interested, kids were engaged, and parents would continue their support. So they both put in time to create 2nd robots. Both teams did exceptionally well (One even was #1 seed at SDR) and supporters raved and their program grew because of it.

Imagine how many more teams would get more support if they could show a little bit of a better product!

Kids get the most inspiration by seeing their hard work pay off. I've been on those low resource teams. We just want to have a bit more of a chance. Giving us more time would of helped with that!

The strive for excellence isn't something that "burns out all kids." What burns a lot of them out is wanting to be slightly competitive without enough funds or time to make a robot that works.