[mathking]

The two papers got me thinking a little bit differently than I had been about this issue. Some of those thoughts have given me enough clarity to want to post them.

The reference to the Olympics got me thinking about the ways in which FRC is like a sport. I am a track and field coach, and one of the things track coaches have learned over the past couple of decades is how too much competition can lead to poorer performance. Because it gets you thinking about how to get better in the short term rather than the long term. In track and field long term performance is almost always the key to objective success. Whether you are coaching elite athletes who have to wait two years for another World Championship or four for another Olympics, or you are coaching high school athletes who have one meet to decide their conference championship and then maybe one or two qualifying meets to their state championship. It used to be that world class athletes would run a dozen or more races in the summer leading to the Olympics, and high schoolers would race two or three times a week all spring. Now elite athletes may only run four or five races leading up to a championship, and high schoolers are much more likely to only run in one meet a week.

None of this is directly applicable to analyzing performance for FRC, but it got me thinking about another idea. Much of the debate about stop build day seems to be of the "getting rid of it will lead to better robot performance" versus "robot performance shouldn't be the metric we use to measure the success of an FRC team." I know this is an oversimplification, but bear with me. Thinking about FRC in the context of track coaching made me think "Maybe getting rid of stop build day won't actually lead to better robot performance in the long run?"

I am pretty sure that my own team would have better robot performance on the average in any given season. Largely because the three lead mentors are all teachers, and for two of us the robot is/can be something we do in class. So we would be able to keep building and adapting. I even think the students in my class would benefit from seeing other robots and copying/adapting to improve ours. I am also pretty sure that my team would be a fair amount smaller. I would actually be surprised if getting rid of stop build day didn't have a noticeable impact on the total number of students participating in FRC. As well as an impact on the number of mentors.

So we would have fewer kids spending more time making tweaks and improvements to that year's competition robot. Which means less time available for general improvement like learning new skills. In coaching that is focusing on improving your strengths rather than focusing on improving your weaknesses. This has a very seductive pull for coaches. Because it often means winning more games that season. When you take classes on coaching they caution you against it because it often means a worse experience for the athletes as well as fewer wins for them in the long run.

One of the beauties of FRC is that it only takes a few (or sometimes even one) kid developing a skill to make that skill part of a team's repertoire. We use the spring, when some of the kids are really fired up about FRC, to get the kids to stretch themselves and learn new skills. I worry that we would end up with better robots but fewer new skills.