Summer Events?

[Camren]

One problem I am sure a lot of students encounter during competition season is missing school on competition dates. Not every year are we fortunate enough to have events during breaks or even on the weekend. This year I had to miss school 2 days for are regional and 3 days for nationals and I'm sure the majority of teams miss more because they go to more events then just 2. So sure this may seem like just a personal problem and some schools don't even have a summer break so this might not even help a few teams but even I'm asking the question anyways.

Question: Do you believe that FIRST events should take place over summer months.

[Peyton Yeung]

Not really. Many of our students and mentors take vacation time during the summer. Our attendance falls in the summer.

[Billfred]

They already do--just outside of the main FRC structure. IRI, Texas Robot Round-Up, Ozark Mountain Brawl, and many more all take place during the summer months.

[MARS_James]

Offseason Events do happen over the summer and we have historically had members show up to those that couldn't make it over the school year.

With people going on vacations, or in our case some of our leading students go visit the parent they don't live with during the year, it would be a challenge to hold events especially with a six week build season then 7 or so weeks of events that would mean Championships would take place sometime between late July or early August the earliest which would make most places scorching hot

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by Camren

Question: Do you believe that FIRST events should take place over summer months.

For official events, no. Simply because many teams that have their build space in schools have difficulty gaining access to their space during the summer months.

Off-seasons, as has been said, already exist.

[connor.worley]

No, it would be too hard to find students. This year we were only able to take five students to IRI because others were busy or traveling.

[EricH]

This was brought up some years back. There are a number of good reasons not to have official FIRST events in the summer. (For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, that is.)

1) School access--or lack thereof. Gotta have permission and keys and all that to get in, which can be harder to get during summer.
2) Scattered team members. Assuming that the build season isn't in summer as well, you've got to come up with enough team members due to summer activities, including vacations.
3) Crowded venues. Not that this would necessarily be an issue, but a lot of conferences and athletic events tend to take place in summer. This makes venues harder to come by, or more expensive if you can get them, due to supply and demand.

But, if you really want a summer FRC season, there's an easy solution. I think the Brazilians, Chileans, or Aussies would probably love having an experienced FIRSTer on their teams... They already build and compete in summer.