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Originally Posted by Bongle
With a bit steeper gradient (first year: 8 weeks, 2nd year: 7 weeks, 3rd+ years: 6 weeks), this is the best idea I've heard in the thread so far. It is concise, it is definite, it is enforceable, and it gives help in an area that rookie teams probably struggle the most with: time. I don't think you'd get too many people whining about "that rookie team dominating because they got all the extra build time", because everyone would know that next year that team will have less time. Further, it isn't easy to manipulate this system. With cash or mentor divisions, you might have teams under-reporting cash spent or mentors used just so they get into a less competitive division. On the other hand, it is impossible for a team to claim they've only been competing for one year so that they get more time.
It's so easy to waste time on a rookie team just trying to figure stuff out. If you've got a first-year programmer with no instructions other than the internet, it isn't unusual to waste an entire night doing something that would take a 2nd or 3rd year programmer 5 minutes to do.
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Different rules for different teams is
never a good idea.
Yes, rookie teams may have a hard time getting going their first year, but by allowing them extra time to build their robot you're just sugar-coating reality. This would be comparable to over-protective parents who never let their kids more than ten feet out of their sight. We can't shield teams from reality and never let them fail or experience the "real FIRST".
The only way to truly learn life lessons is through hard work, and for many people that means working especially hard to get the robot done in time. If that means putting in several all-nighters, then so be it. Is the chance of failure very real? One-hundred percent YES. But that is life.
As Walt Disney once said,
"I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you're young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it, I’ve never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid. I’ve never had the feeling I couldn’t walk out and get a job doing something."
The only time a team truly fails in FIRST is when they stop trying. Otherwise, I'd say keep the same six-week build season, keep the same rules for all teams, and keep the same randomized divisions. Reasons for justifying different divisions in FIRST based off "this is the way its played in other sports" has no sound reasoning for FIRST. Baseball and boating competitions are about one thing: winning. In FIRST, that "one thing that matters" is not winning, but it is the I in FIRST,
inspiration. How a team inspires its students - either by winning, trying as hard as they could, or any other means, is moot, as long as the end product is inspiration.