[Siri]

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.

Having been on this team as a student, I can say absolutely yes. We really weren't aiming too high, and we weren't procrastinating (any more than we do now). We just had no idea what we were doing. We had no reference for what too complicated or poor design was. We didn't shortchange our drivetrain; we just thought 2wd would be a good idea. We figured it out belatedly, but that regional was not so inspirational. Another year we didn't try to do multiple tasks or end effectors; we just really thought an 80/20 arm that weighed more than the robot base was a really good plan. We actually realized that error later in build season and slap-dashed an alternative thing on before ship. Should we have realized sooner? Duh (I say now from my high horse). And we learned that lesson for next year. But having it sit in the crate that year really sucked. We did so terribly at that event and it was so uninspirational and damaging to the team that people literally started fighting and I sobbed and tried to quit (I was like 14). Fortunately, that year we actually had two events, and we wised up and reached out and borrowed another simple (but much better) end effector design from someone, and...well it still wasn't such a great experience because our drivetrain was also pretty terrible and we didn't have the opportunity to fix other issues we'd found, but I definitely would've preferred to substitute it for our first event. And if we'd been able to get hands-on time and fix more stuff? I don't know how well we would've done, but man, that would've been a really great learning and inspirational experience for me.

It's hard for me to explain in retrospect how ridiculously clueless we were. It wasn't time or task management. Our teachers were pretty good with that (as much as when we did better, at least). It wasn't that we refused modest goals. We just didn't know how to convert modest strategic goals into modest engineering goals. We didn't understand how difficult things actually were. We downright couldn't visualize simple engineering solutions and distinguish them from complex ones. We didn't think we were shortchanging anything; we thought it'd work. And we really didn't understand that whole 'incremental testing, fail early fail often' thing. This isn't the same as procrastination; it's just that we were 15 years old and we thought we were right.

Would making build season last until our first event have helped that? I guess some teams would spread out their mistakes and not catch any more. We checked and caught some of our blunders back in those days, though, and I suspect we'd've caught more as we went. I won't claim a proportional increase, but more. Would we have ended up relatively better as the entire league moved? I'm guessing not. But I'd probably have cried less. And would some more teams than do now get free time from RIs to do pre-event inspection, get other teams to visit and play with? I'd bet some would. All of them? No. But some more is better.

And the real crux for me is being out of bag between events. I see this potential all the time inspecting for districts. It's not that every team who's non-functional on the field has some big mechanical contraption they wasted all their time on. I've inspected a lot of very modest bots that just don't understand that whole good electrical practices thing. They don't assemble the kitbot right. They don't understand chain tensioning or basic mechanical construction. Maybe they want to be creative, even a little bit, and screw up that whole center of gravity issue. Maybe they tried for the low goal but couldn't visualize a simple solution. Should we as a league be able to fix this all in six weeks? Should they all have made mistakes that are fixable in 6 hours of unbag time? Or should we all be on our game enough to spare time for teams like this in six weeks instead of in the multiple weeks they spend staring at their robot in a bag? Okay, sure. But that's not their fault.