Quote:
Originally posted by Andrew
I would like to see another day added to the competition...
Wed. Unpacking, Tinkering, and Inspection Day
Thur. morning: Practice
Thur. afternoon: Qualifying Matches
Fri: Qualifying Matches
Sat morn: Qualifying Matches
Sat. aft: Elimination Matches
Wednesday would be used to unpack robots, tinker, and inspect. Only three team members would be allowed in the pits. The practice field would not be available for teams to use.
On Thursday, practice could start at 8:00 am, since robots are already unpacked and inspected. Since teams would be mostly ready to go for their first practice, you will have fewer no shows and teams can get the most out of their practices.
Although I love the chaos and adrenalin of the current practice day, it would make inspection much smoother if the number of people in the pits were fewer. Also, it takes us about 2 hours to get unpacked and ready to go, even when our robot is just coming out of the box. In three years, we have yet to make our first practice (usually scheduled for 10:00 am).
I envision that 1-3 team members would go out in advance of the team to get the robot prepped. On practice day, when the full team arrives, they would know that their robot is ready to go and could make the most of the practice and competition time.
This scheme would also give us another 1/2 day of matches, without increasing the amount of time away from school for the majority of the pre-college students.
Andrew
Team 356
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I have a problem with this plan for personal reasons: with teams only having 1-3 members in the pit it causes problems for teams that had problems during the build season. Any team at the NYC regional should remember all for the problems we had due to our engineers bailing on us during the build season. Thanks to fully staffed teams like 237, 810 and 340 (not to mention many others) we were able to compete with a working robot by the end of Thursday. With the plan proposed we would only have unpacked our robot and done minor repairs, we also would have missed all of our practice matches and some qualification rounds. Therefore, we would have been victimized for an occurrence out of our control
Thankfully its going to be my team next year if the school ok's it