[Steve W]

Andrew you have some good points. One question that I have is how do you regulate the 3 day prior to comp build time? What is to stop a team from designing, building and testing an apparatus for 3 weeks prior to competition? I understand sportsmanship and gracious professionalism but we have a problem now with teams pushing the envelope. If you are going to allow precomp build then wouldn't it be better to have no time factor so that everyone would have the same ability. I am TOTALLY against this idea myself as 6 weeks is suppose to be our limit.

To bring it to the real world scenario. If I have to design and build a car, do I build it and send to production.Then after it is on the market decide that I can make improvements to the transmission, radio, brakes and seats?

I like the challenge of 6 weeks. I respect deadlines. I have these on me all the time at work. These are real world issues. Sure we could all improve on our designs, build better robots and tweak all aspects of our robots. Would 8 weeks or 15 weeks or ...... be better? I go to a lot of regionals and see a lot of robots. There are some that are in dire need of help. There are others that dominate. This will not change. What does change is the approach of students and mentors as they gain experience. The second year is nowhere like the first. They know what to expect and work toward that goal. If I were to add any time it might be to rookies and give them 1 extra week. The veteran teams could then give of themselves to help the rookies before the rookie ship day. This might be a positive when it comes to the competition as the rookie bots will be that much better.