Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon Stratis
Second, you have the incoming rookies that have no time to get trained - which means their rookie year they get to basically watch a robot get built, then trained in during whatever gaps they can to be able to build the following year. Sure, you might say "well, they still get 3 years of building!"... but I know schools that run 10-12 already, where no one is on the team for more than 3 years, and schools that run a JV program using FTC or another program, again limiting how long people are on the FRC team.
Third, while teams do go year-round, the lower intensity of the summer/fall allows students to pursue other interests. As much as we all love FRC, it really is important to be a well-rounded individual and the off-season gives kids that opportunity. I can't even begin to count the number of students my team would lose if they had to pick between the team and soccer, softball, volleyball, cross country, swimming... even as it is, we lose some very promising students to winter sports (we had one freshman try the team out in the fall but ultimately not join due to conflicts with competitive skiing... and she already had a patent for a device she designed to help with arthritis, and that device was going through clinical trials, too!).
Fourth, it's not all about the robot. Many teams just don't have the numbers to be able to pursue outreach while building a robot - it's one or the other. The off-season provides a time for so much outreach to happen, I would hate to give that up.
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I think you have a lot of good points here, and I'm generally a fan of the January to May competition model we've been doing. But I think implicit in these points in particular is the assumption that an FRC build season spread out over a year would remain as busy, intense, and generally the same as one condensed into six weeks, and that just can't be true.
With incoming rookies, they actually do get time to get trained with a dramatically longer build season. Untrained rookies are pushed to the side during the real build season because of the pressures of the time crunch and the need to get it right the first time. Neither of these persist with a 9 month build season. It's okay to let rookies build something very slowly or to let rookies make mistakes, especially in the first several months of build. It would actually be much easier to incorporate training for many teams that don't do anything in the pre-season.
With regards to "can only do outreach or the robot, not both", I think that too is a function of the intensity and focus required by the six week build period. Teams put their outreach on hold because of the limited time and energy they have. All of their spare effort needs to go to getting the robot done and perfect. The removal of this time crunch would not prevent these teams from doing outreach and more slowly working on the robot at the same time. The same is true for the "frc kids have lives and want to do other stuff" argument - if kids are only available sometimes during those 9 months, they can still contribute when they can and back off when they have other stuff to do. The continuous commitment isn't as required and you don't have to shut out everyone involved in winter sports.
I'm not sold on the year round model like Vex does, for many reasons, but I see some of the benefits and how a lot of the drain and pressure of the FRC season is completely artificial.