Should FRC Account for School Size?

[holygrail]

As FRC grows and potentially becomes more and more like other major school activities like sports, it makes me wonder whether FRC should account for school size. College and high school sports have divisions so schools compete with other schools with similar resources. Big schools compete with big schools and small schools against small schools.

Some teams in our area pull from 2 or more large high schools and some large schools have high tech facilities covering thousands of square feet with state-of-the-art equipment. Other schools have high school populations less than 500 (or even home school teams and 4-H clubs) and very limited resources. I’ve always been impressed with the ability of the small schools to remain competitive with larger schools with more resources, but as challenges become more difficult and the number of teams competing grows, it seems that the “resource gap” may become harder and harder to bridge.

For the record, I think that there are good arguments on both sides of the issue, but it just makes for interesting discussion.

[Peter Matteson]

In a word, no.

Budget, technical support, and resource availability are far more important as differentiators than school size.

If I have a Vocational high school with 250 students verses a large inner city high school with 2500 students who would you expect to better succeed?

[ehochstein]

There are two schools in the district I mentor, one team (3081) has an absolutely huge engineering/technology program with 3 teachers. The other team (2470) has one teacher for auto, engineering, metals and woods classes. Not to mention the shop size for 2470 is much smaller. Even though both schools have the same number of students attending, one FRC team has a much higher chance of succeeding due to the school's resources.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by holygrail

I’ve always been impressed with the ability of the small schools to remain competitive with larger schools with more resources, but as challenges become more difficult and the number of teams competing grows, it seems that the “resource gap” may become harder and harder to bridge.

This is dealt with in game design, as much as possible.

It's been a long time since the FRC Game Design forum was openly used by the GDC members to collect game ideas, but http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...59&postcount=1 gives a pretty standard opener for the overall design (specific elements got their own threads). Particularly note the first two ground rules, quoted here:

- The game should provide a sufficiently difficult challenge that it will stress the abilities of the students and engineers on the teams to design and build a solution.

- The game should allow active participation by teams with widely-varying levels of resources.

Another of the ground rules indicated that ingenuity of design was preferred over advanced fabrication methods.

That said, you aren't going to be able to account for team resources (school size, shops, funding) in any way, shape or form that satisfies everybody. Whether it's limited parts sets, multiple leagues/divisions, or no second robot, someone's going to be unhappy. This may be part of why VRC and FTC are gaining popularity, as you can be competitive in those without a large group, or a large budget, or a large shop. OTOH, if you're a "low-resource" team in FRC, you can still be very competitive, especially if you're smart about it.

[DonRotolo]

No. Size isn't a sufficient factor. Then once you consider all the factors, it gets too complicated.

[ablatner]

I don't think school size is a big deal. My team comprises 3 different schools averaging 2000 students each, and I would consider us moderately successful. However, our team still only has 45 members on the official roster, with no more than 30 fully active members.

Meanwhile, other teams such as 254 and 1717 come from single, much smaller schools on the order of a few hundred students each. Currently, they have much larger programs than we do with a fraction of the students.

[Joon Park]

I definitely agree with most of the responses above that size is not the factor. But sooner or later, divisioning may become more necessary as the size of FRC grows. I know more regions are planning on switching to district formats, which just seems to complement that. Not sure how it would serve for logistics or publicity purposes, but the teams and participants may get more out of it in terms of competitiveness and reward.

[FrankJ]

So how would this work? Divide the field into classes? Separate events? Have something like FTC? Require each alliance have one robot from each class?

Would you limit limit budgets in the lower classes? What the sponsors can provide? Handicap in some way the higher performing teams?

[rachelholladay]

I too must chime in with yet another "Nah...". I don't think its in FIRST's nature to discriminate how you compete against, particularly when resources are a larger determining factor than school size. Plus, what about the teams that aren't associated with a school? (Space Cookies 1868 are always the ones that come to mind)

Aside from all that, I think the organization of it would be a nightmare. Our home regional is the Bayou, which is fairly small and local. If we broke up by team size then there wouldn't be enough teams of the same size to support a regional and many would have to end up traveling (when they normally wouldn't).

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by Joon Park

... sooner or later, divisioning may become more necessary as the size of FRC grows. ...

Originally Posted by FrankJ

So how would this work? Divide the field into classes? ... Handicap in some way the higher performing teams?

The experiment with tier-based qualifying schedules in 2007, now infamously recalled as the "algorithm of death", clearly showed how NOT to accomplish this.

I am not convinced that FRC will ever really need to divide teams into tiers. As EricH pointed out above, one of the game design objectives is to allow participation by teams with widely-varying levels of resources.

My experience has been that the resources (money, space, mentors, ...) a given team can muster sometimes vary widely from year to year. There can be many reasons for this. As others have said, school size is not among the more significant reasons.

[JosephC]

In short, no. When you rank a team in a lower division than a different team; your basically telling the lower division team they don't have just a good a chance as the higher ranking team. This doesn't fit within the mission of FIRST at all.

Team's can be just as successful as any other team regardless of their resources. It's all about how you design your robot, not how you make it. 4334, regardless of their school size and resources, built an incredible robot out of almost nothing.

[Nemo]

If FRC got so huge that you could afford to divide the individual regions into divisions and still have enough teams to fill up the local events at each level, then I suppose you could have a tiered system that simply didn't have any specific criteria for dividing the teams. You'd just put the teams with the best historical track records into the top division, and the other teams would need to prove themselves over time to be selected to move into the top division. The top division could initially be populated with teams according to some algorithm taking into account past competition performances and awards, leaving some space for adding new teams in the future.

But that would have some disadvantages, such as not allowing newer teams to bump elbows with the really awesome veteran teams.

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by Nemo

If FRC got so huge that you could afford to divide the individual regions into divisions and still have enough teams to fill up the local events at each level, then I suppose you could have a tiered system that simply didn't have any specific criteria for dividing the teams. You'd just put the teams with the best historical track records into the top division, and the other teams would need to prove themselves over time to be selected to move into the top division. The top division could initially be populated with teams according to some algorithm taking into account past competition performances and awards, leaving some space for adding new teams in the future.

But that would have some disadvantages, such as not allowing newer teams to bump elbows with the really awesome veteran teams.

Everything else made me say "No." This idea made me think. The way I see it, it seems analogous to a Promotion and Relegation system used prominently in European football (soccer) leagues. I still don't like it much, because I would rather see a large team population dealt with the district way, to keep everything reasonably organized.

Also, who's to say big schools do better? There's all these other awkward stepping stones like multi-school and non-school teams, team age, and team success. My team has been around for 15 years, but only the last three have we been a school-associated team. The school we work in has about 1200 students, but we also recruit from another school (in a different district). Our history has also been incredibly varied. If you base the split on this year's performance, we were mediocre (missed MSC) and also good (Division Finalists). If you look at the last three years, we didn't go to Championships one year, and our robot didn't move the other. The year before that we were on Einstein. In short: Few teams are consistent enough performers to eve make a tiered system effective, let alone ethical.

And one more thing: Remember the I in FIRST.

[daniel_dsouza]

I can safely say that size isn't the best factor you could use to determine competitiveness.

For example, Corona del Sol (my school) has a population of about 3400 and growing. We have been a team since '07, but we aren't what this thread would consider successful. We have to pull students from another school just to have enough kids to build the robot!

If you want another factor, in addition to ones suggested within this thread (mentors, budget, resources, experience), consider team spacing/influence. There are 2 other schools within several miles of Corona that have FRC teams. We compete for sponsors, funds, and students. Compared to a team (maybe 20mi away) that draws students from 5 schools, the reason for our lower scores becomes apparent.

[JohnBoucher]

No. This is a game of the mind. Size does not matter. If anything is a factor, it's experience.