Quote:
|
Someone didn't like the "rookies get more time" rule suggestion
|
I personally don't really want a rule change in favour of weaker teams. As someone else said, it does kind of cheapen the victory a la "I'm the best of the worst!". However, of all the playing-field-leveling suggestions in the thread, I like that one the best because it is much easier to implement and enforce than divisions based on money, mentors, or success. Plus it DOES apply equally to all teams: all teams are rookies at some point.
Quote:
|
The resources are out there. The biggest difference between an average team and one of the powerhouse teams is desire. When the average team is complaining about how unfair it is that powerhouse teams have all these resources, the powerhouse teams are working hard to get these resources. When the average team is taking sunday off, or going home at 5 pm, the powerhouse team is working 7 days a week, and going home at 10 pm.
|
In my time at 1141, we would often have a schedule something like this:
7am - school opens, work at machine shop until 8:30
8:30am-2:30pm - school (during lunch and breaks work on the robot)
2:30am-5:00pm - robotics
5:00pm-7:00pm - go home for dinner/homework
7:00pm-whenever the janitors kicked us out (usually midnight)- robotics
Weekends would often run from 9am to midnight on both days. 1141 has desire flowing out the wazoo. The problem is that there are plenty of teams that have just as much desire, but something extra.
It can't simply be desire, there is something else (I really don't know what) seperating the best from the rest, and I think it would be good for FIRST to figure out exactly what that is. I'm not convinced it is simply money, because money doesn't buy good designs. It (probably) isn't the students, since on average, you'll have the same batch of students at every school.
The main thing I think FIRST could help with is figuring out why there is a gap between consistently mid-pack teams like 1141 and consistently successful teams like their anagram 1114. What are the practices of highly succesful teams? How is it that 1114/1503/1680 can so consistently come up with very highly effective robots year after year? Do they practice the design period ahead of time with previous year's games? Are they infused with tons of high-quality engineers that help with the design greatly? Are the designs of the same quality, but simply executed better*? Are they simply larger and can thus pull off more grandiose designs? Do they attract a different slice of the student population?
*As an aside, my current team (1281) had a laugh while looking at team #25's robot at nationals. It was fundamentally identical to ours (high hopper, gravity feed to low shooter, fast 6 wheel drive), but each part of it was executed just that little bit better. Their hopper was rigid and so had fewer jams. Their shooter imparted more speed to the balls and was more accurate. It probably wasn't just luck that they designed it that way, they probably had their meetings and design process structured in such a way that only the best implementations of each feature was used.
I think the best thing FIRST could do would be a bit of research into what the spark is in consistently succesful teams. How do they do it over and over again? If they distributed a best-practices design and organization manual with the KOP, I think it would help the mid-pack and rookie teams tremendously. And I mean a really in-depth manual. Maybe they could put it on a DVD and include video of a design meeting at both student-run and mentor-run teams. 1281's design process is a bunch of people in a room talking until we kind of come to an agreement. There is obviously a better way to do this, since we had a few design showstoppers actually come up in meetings and get dismissed out of hand, only to rear their heads again in competition. I can probably think of tens of other ways to go about the design process, but I don't know if any of them would actually work.
I'm sure there are team organization and design whitepapers on CD, but something official straight from FIRST would be much more credible to rookie teams that are new to the competition.