[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Having a school with students that do both makes you a good person to ask... what's the difference in person-hours/meeting hours between building one VEX robot and one FRC robot? when looking at burnout, measuring the difference in terms of number of hours probably makes a decent metric to compare two programs with.

Our students spend roughly 3-4 hours per day for about a 6-week time period to build a VEX robot from scratch. Its much harder to determine subsequent designs, because after already competing at events and seeing youtube videos of other tournaments, they can get ideas of subsystems that can be replicated much easier than in FRC.
In FRC, we put in over 300+ hours for the average student in the 6+ week build season to build 1 robot.

Here's something that no one has really elaborated on yet. What about student/mentor talent?
IMO, elite teams will always be elite teams no matter what rules you change. They are good not because they build 2 robots and continually iterate as the main reason. Its plain and simple.....talent.
I was blown away to here recently that teams could put in less than 1/2 the amount of time and build world class, Einstein ready robots.
I dont think you can do that with all the resources in the world or a change in schedule, without first and foremost the talent and experience to do so.
In Jim Zondag's white paper, he specifically names some example elite teams. Change the rules and they will STILL be elite.