Quote:
Originally Posted by mathking
That would be us. For the last few years (either six or eight depending on how close a copy you want) we have built a practice robot that is a pretty close copy of the competition robot. Not always exactly the same but very, very close. I have expressed it before, but my reason for wanting to keep stop build day is that we will lose team members (both students and mentors) if we do not. We practice with the second robot, and a few students work on tweaking devices sometimes. But we spend less than 20% as much time and have less than 20% as many students involved in the practice at any one time as we do during the build season. That is a sustainable level of activity for us after stop build day. Over half our team members do a spring sport or are in the spring musical, and we would lose some of them, and some mentors, if we changed.
As I said before, I have no doubt that on the average the robots would be better if there were no stop build day. At least in the short term. There is no reason that adding more time to work on the robot would make robots worse (excepting every once in a while where there is a catastrophic accident) and reasons that at least some robots would be better. Using the same logic I do not doubt there would not be as many participants in FRC, because I don't believe there are lots of people out there not participating because of the limited build season. So for me it is a question of better robots for fewer kids or not quite as good robots for more kids.
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Thanks for the input; I understand this perspective on how the soft deadline helps limit the flow of work after the deadline.
My follow up is, if we kept the bag system, and added access windows, what do you feel would be the right amount of time to allow, such that teams like yours did not have to build a second robot, but the system of a soft deadline and more limited after-build work is preserved? I feel this kind of compromise is a step forward that more people can agree on than just ripping off the Band-Aid of Stop Build Day right away, and this is where people should focus their efforts on finding common ground.
My gut says... 10 hours a week without competition, 2 hours a week with competition, in addition to any unbag windows provided to District teams already. But maybe that's too much?