[gblake]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

The thing is, it takes teams a while to learn this lesson (if ever). No amount of external mentoring, help, etc... will cause the shift until the leadership of the team is ready for it.

Once bag day happens, there is no time machine to go back.

However, if after competing once (at a low level) they see teams they can copy some details from (and perhaps receive from advice from others), they can take their robot that isn't scoring points at all and have it contribute at their second event.

I'm absolutely certain that kids prefer scoring points to not scoring points, and ideally greater inspiration will follow.

Potentially that greater inspiration will lead to them wanting a better plan for season, to get done sooner, to realize those benefits etc... but we can't just state from our high horse that kids should just do it right the first time.

We don't need to get rid of the bag, we just need to allow unbagging windows for all teams all weeks.

A semi-nitpick is that I think the process I'm hypothesizing for a struggling/rebuilding team will produce a robot that will score points (FIRST designs the games that way); and what is often equally important, it will be rugged and dependable, and will score those points reliably/consistently.

For that reason the teams with the simpler bots might be envious of the (successful) more sophisticated bots, but they shouldn't be uninspired - In a rebuilding/struggling period, they did what they set out to do, and did it well. They stopped struggling (in the robot-building part of being a team). Next year they can be a little more ambitious.

More to your point, if, in addition to the 45 days they give teams before the teams initial competitions, FIRST HQ decides to offer all teams (or maybe just the recovering teams???) a few hours of use-what-you-learned time AFTER each competition a team attends, I think that would be consistent (consistent enough) with what I am urging. I wouldn't lose any sleep over that.

However, to minimize (legit?) wingeing by teams whose initial/only competition includes opponents who have already competed once, the extra time might need to be something teams can use whenever they like, but not be big enough (seductive enough) to significantly exacerbate poor management (wishful thinking) during the original 45 days.