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Originally Posted by Andy Baker
Over the years, I have wavered on this issue. However, I strongly feel that the positives outweigh the negatives now. With the added importance of software development and the increase of teams who build a second robot every year, we might as well just keep the robots with us to the events.
Andy B.
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Originally, my thoughts were that I liked this idea. I figured that since the well to do teams already are ahead, giving them extra time is probably giving them a relatively small increased advantage, whereas giving struggling teams more time would probably make them much more competitive.
After further thought, however, I think I was wrong originally. Right now, it's the great teams that are using their time wisely. This is why they do so well. Many of the teams who don't do so well are probably not using their time as efficiently as possible. By giving them more time, I don't think this changes at all. It would just let the elite teams develop more of a gap between the lower teams.
I likened this to a post I made before where I opined that no matter what the FIRST defined weight limit for the robot is, be it 100 lbs, 120 lbs, 130 lbs, 200 lbs, many teams are still going to find ways to not make it inside that weight without drilling/cutting up their bots.
No matter how much time teams are given to complete their robots, teams are still going to show up behind the game. I also think this would put a large strain on teams who barely have the membership and mentor support to put together a robot as is. To ask them to spend 25-50% more time on the robot would be quite a task.
Karthik also brought up a good point during a discussion on the matter--mentor burnout. We all know that mentors are putting in tons of hours to help, on top of having day jobs (or class, in the case of the college mentors). I think giving extra time would just be more time that these people continue to go all out. It's how we are in FIRST. Nobody is going to slow their pace and take it easy since there's an extra 3-4 weeks.
If there was no ship, FIRST becomes a committment that spans over a quarter of class, and nearly a whole semester, counting competition. I think teachers and schools already think that six weeks is enough. a full quarter and a half of unabated robot activity would be unacceptable in many of their eyes.
I think creating something in six weeks is much more impressive, and much more challenging. FIRST teams have come up with some truly magnificent designs in a very short timespan. Given more time, more creative designs would probably appear. I think it's much more impressive and inspiring to view masterpieces that are perfectly suited to play a given game in six weeks, than to see the same robots that have been tweaked a bit more, but took 2.5 months to create. Having these top few to look up to makes everyone want to aspire to greater heights. Seeing a whole horde of them due to having extra time wouldn't impress me nearly as much.
I think there are some clear positives involved. Even though I see the gap widening between the "haves" and "have-nots", overally level of competition would probably go up. Whether or not it would increase enough to make the extra time worth it is debatable. Overall, I'm not entirely sold on some of the major issues as seen above.