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Originally Posted by Matt Adams
What if the 6 weeks were actually 8 and no practice robot was allowed? What is the 6 was actually 16? This would eliminate the advantage of the practice robot, while still allowing students more time to build and get inspired by FIRST.
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I believe a big motivator for the 6 week build period is the burden on mentors. Many mentors have families who kindly put up with not seeing their family member much for 6 weeks. Asking those mentors to put in 8, or 10, or more weeks will decrease the number of willing mentors. Additionally, there's scheduling issues. With many weeks of regionals to fit in, and with not wanting to interfere too much with the end of the school year activities, it's just not practical to have a longer build season.
On a more general note, I'd like to add this: of course teams that can build a practice robot have an advantage over teams that can't. Is this far? Not at all. But if you say teams can't build a practice robot, does that suddenly make the competition fair? No. Teams with more resources will always have an advantage. The only way to take away this advantage would be to dictate everything: budget (TOTAL budget, not just materials for robot), suppliers, manufacturing methods, minimum number of students per adults (i.e. "You are not allowed to have more than 1 mentor for every 10 students"), etc. On my team we are lucky to have a large number of adult mentors. We have a sheer manpower advantage over teams with 1 mentor and a handful of kids, regardless of the other build rules & limitations. The flip side of that, though, is that we also have a LOT of students on our team. If we only build our competition robot, there's a practical limit on the number of kids that can be working on it at one time (there's only so many kids that can cram around a robot on a table). With a second, practice robot we can get twice as many kids up close and working on the robot. For example, sometimes we set up 2 crews - the "prime" crew which takes care of building and maintaining the competition robot (and serves as pit crew at events) and the up-and-coming crew where newer members get a chance to learn by building and maintaining the practice robot. Take away the practice robot and we will not be able to let as many kids get their hands dirty working on the robot (or each kid will get to spend less time doing it). This seems like exactly the opposite of what FIRST is trying to accomplish.
{edit} I also want to add that in high school I was on a team that, while still decently funded, did not have the same kind of resources that my current team has. We did not have nearly as much success as my current team, either. It didn't matter, though. We always had a great time and learned a lot. Losing isn't fun, of course, but we didn't really expect to win the whole thing anyway and just enjoyed the experience for all that it was. There's still things that I miss about that team; many people may not realize it but there are a few
advantages of being on a small team. There were times as a student where I was able to go off and design a small feature of the robot and build it on my own. This isn't always practical with a big team because there's just not enough features to go around. There was also a great deal less pressure to win. Successful teams seem to experience a lot more disappointment when they lose which can in turn take away some of the fun of competition if you're struggling more than normal. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that average teams end up enjoying the competition
more than successful teams because winning and losing is taken more in stride. {/edit}