[mathking]

It is an interesting idea Sean. I actually thought about it while involved in several of the long "eliminate stop build day" discussions. I have a couple of thoughts. My first is that in my experience January is actually generally a good time for the build season to start, as least if you are going to have any kind of limited time frame. I think that you would make a lot of parents really unhappy if build season were extended over the break. Not to mention the spouses and other family members of a lot of mentors. That would probably not be a consideration if there were something more like year round building.

I also think that January tends to be one of the lowest stress times of the year. Admittedly for some schools exams happen in the first or second week of January, so for them the stress level is high then drops way down. We used to be like this, and it usually was the case that the first week of build was exam week. But as soon as building really ramped up we were starting a new term and work loads were lower.

I think my first reaction is pretty much the same as my reaction to getting rid of stop build day. Our team would adapt and continue to compete. We would lose a lot of team members, and have a much smaller team, and not have as many mentors. We have lots of kids who run cross country, are in the band, run track, play lacrosse, do the spring musical, etc... Those kids give up their lives to robotics in the winter, but a lot of them would not give up everything else in order to just do robotics. We would lose some mentors (probably me included) to the increased time commitment. We actually do things pretty much year round, like most teams. But if we were building the competition robot year round it would mean a different kind of commitment. There would no doubt be some kids who would willingly do robotics practice every day. They would probably produce some really cool devices and robots. But this would be more/better stuff produced by fewer people. And frankly a lot of them the ones who least need the inspiration in order to pursue STEM careers.

I can also see some real positives for some teams. If you have a small team at a big school, you are more likely to have kids who are not as involved in other stuff. You can probably be a lot more relaxed about building the robot. Although I think that over time a "keeping up with the Joneses" effect would push teams into ever more work. Even so you would give teams some incentive to really push the envelope because the consequences of failure are much less harsh when you have more time to bounce back.

As with the discussion on getting rid of Stop Build Day, I still kind of think that most of the positives can be achieved by practice and aren't necessarily lost because you keep the limited season.