pic: REX (Team 4334 - Alberta Tech Alliance)

[Nick Lawrence]

Originally Posted by BackInCalgary

I was in Calgary this summer and worked a bit with 4334 planning the new Calgary/West Canada Regional (I can't remember the official name, but check it out, it'll be awesome), mostly I helped with finding ways to get new students/teams involved. Unfortunately, this little thing was nowhere to be found...

I liked the strategy, especially since they are set up to transition out of their "support" role with the experience they gained in their rookie year, which will be very fun to see (they had just one student with FRC experience for their rookie season by my unofficial count). There will also be an influx of rookies sharing resources next season, so there could be some new competition dynamics in Canada. Remember the Niagra Triplets? There's like, 15 this time.

That would be...

... interesting.

www.yeahbutton.com

-Nick

[Gray Adams]

I don't know about you guys, but I would be pretty disappointed to show up to a regional and see 30 basic, support level robots and 20 robots that try to play the full game. It's the ideas that I see in every robot that makes it so much fun to go to competition. Winning is great and all, but how much does it really matter?

You only have a maximum of 4 years on a team, less if you join later. Especially for teams with a longer history, it's incredibly difficult to sit down and say you're not capable of building a robot to play the tougher elements of the game and you'll work up to it over a few years. The seniors will especially have trouble digesting this. It's easy for a rookie or 2nd year team to do it, but when you're a team that's been flirting with success but also encountering failure, it's hard.

Bomb Squad didn't go for a wheeled shooter even though they thought it would be better (maybe not better, can't remember what they said), they wanted the catapult because it was different (if any of that is inaccurate, I apologize). But that's the fun of this "sport". You can be inspired by some incredible ideas on robots that you thought were to crazy to work. It's so much fun to walk into the arena and see all the ideas your team went through, plus some that you never even considered. They're obviously not all going to win, and many probably will not even do well. But is that a reason to discourage teams from being ambitious and striving to have a robot that isn't a "safe" bet to build?

Even if you don't win any matches but your design is more or less validated by extremely similar elite robots, that doesn't mean you failed or should have set lower goals. Now, I'm not saying go crazy and try to build a robot that looks like this, but I think the teams that want to tap every available resource, evaluate their potential, and then push for just a little more than that, despite the inherent risk of failure, shouldn't be told building a simple support is better.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Gray Adams

I don't know about you guys, but I would be pretty disappointed to show up to a regional and see 30 basic, support level robots and 20 robots that try to play the full game. It's the ideas that I see in every robot that makes it so much fun to go to competition. Winning is great and all, but how much does it really matter?

Would you rather see those same robots accomplish nothing on the field?

Making picklist at events is rough, it pretty quickly hits a point where robots are really barely able to do anything.

This is an unfortunate fact; these teams aren't all made of dumb, lazy, unmotivated people, but the robots just don't perform. It makes you wonder whether or not their build strategy is flawed.

[Gray Adams]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Would you rather see those same robots accomplish nothing on the field?

Making picklist at events is rough, it pretty quickly hits a point where robots are really barely able to do anything.

This is an unfortunate fact; these teams aren't all made of dumb, lazy, unmotivated people, but the robots just don't perform. It makes you wonder whether or not their build strategy is flawed.

The Apollo 1 crew was killed in the cabin while still on the ground. You could say the mission failed where it counted and it was a complete failure, no? I certainly wouldn't say that everything else behind that mission was flawed though.

[philso]

All teams should stretch to do something they have not done before, regardless of what they have done in the past. That is how teams like 118 never fail to impress with their technical prowess (even when their solution is ruled illegal). The goals need to take into account the resources available and the abilities of the team members. The value in "failure" is the opportunity to learn from the mistakes and improve one's decision making process. However, to learn from those mistakes, one must posess enough background knowlege to determine what went wrong. When one grossly over-reaches and fails, one may as well conclude that it was due to someone using "the dark arts" against them.

The team I was working with this past season is one where they would have been better off with more "modest" goals. They had limited resources and few team members committed to doing the work (2 out of 15). At the two regionals they attended, they spent much of their time lurching around the field, trying to drive straight. Eventually, they got good enough at driving that when they were asked to play defence against 67 in their last match at Archimedes to hopefully help 973 advance to the elimnation rounds.

They needed to focus on understanding how to do some of the basics such as drive train design and control and how to use some basic sensors. Fortunately, we were able to convince the the team that they should not try to design and build a turret. The team members who lacked of focus and commitment used rather haphazard design processes and did not learn how to analyze a problem make proper design decisions. The team's chances of learning from their mistakes are further diminished since a large percentage of the team, including their one programmer, has graduated. They are probably best to keep their goals modest for the forseeable future.