[archiver]

Posted by Nate Smith at 03/20/2001 9:53 PM EST


Other on team #66, Frostbite, from Willow Run High School and GM Powertrain.


In Reply to: Re: Trying not to seed.... (same wish)haha
Posted by nick237 on 03/20/2001 8:10 PM EST:



: Ken. you must be assuming some one in FIRST cares what you or any one else has to say.
: If I had a wish I would wish that they at "FIRST" would listen to the "COMMON FOLKS" and work with some of the great ideas that have been seen on this site.
: nick237

I was talking to some of the people from FIRST today at the setup for Great Lakes...none of them have even had the time to check this site lately. The only people still in Manchester are the Accounting staff, and everybody else is following this schedule: get to a site on Tuesday, set up, run the event, pack up Saturday night, fly home Sunday, take a couple days to recoup, relax, and get ready for the next event, repeat, etc... Just look at all the work that you do on your team to prepare to go to ONE regional...FIRST has a small staff and 13 regionals to not only compete in, but set up, organize, etc, etc.... During most of the year, they do follow this site, and take suggestions based on it, but this time of year, posting something here is not the best way to get an idea to them. If you want to get an idea to them, talk to somebody at the event(which I did today, but more on that in a minute), or organize a petition and have ONE person e-mail it to FIRST(I don't think they'd really appreciate e-mails from all of us who post here on a regular basis.)

And I brought up the idea that has been discussed here about increasing teams in the elimination matches for each division in Disney to some of the FIRST staff during dinner tonight. It turns out that the idea of making each division a "regional" and then having the winners from each advance was discussed at some point among the FIRST staff, but they were leaning against it for time issues. Yes, it may seem based on the events thus far that most elim matches will run in a shorter time than the full 2:00, but remember that they have to consider a worse-case scenario, which is every match running a full 2:00 minutes. So, let's say with setup time, 5 min a match...currently, it works out like this:

4 divisions x 6 matches per division = 24 matches
+ 4 alliance champs into a "regional" = 18 matches
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42 matches
Now, figure each division is on its own field, so just say figure for 6 matches:
= 24 matches
24 matches x 5 minutes = 2 hours

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If they increase the # of teams in the elim matches, it works out to this:
4 divisions x 18 matches per division = 72 matches
4 alliance champs compete = 18 matches

figure for the separate fields:
36 matches x 5 minutes = 3 hours

Without having an exact agenda for nationals yet, I can't say how this fits into the master schedule, but the time that we sit around waiting for awards is not wasted time entirely....Disney and FIRST need time to get all the awards figured out, and the field on the Einstein stage torn down and set up for awards(I remember seeing Disney staff out there with a platform lift adjusting things in the rafters between finals and awards...) So they can't necessarily eat into that time for another set of matches. Just a few things to keep in mind...there's a lot more to consider than just getting more teams into finals...

Nate