2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

FIRST is about an engineering challenge, a program which allows high school students to gain actual engineering work experience and which inspires people to seek careers in STEM. This is why the Chairman's award, not winning the championship, is the most prestigious award in the competition.

When you lose sight of this, you lose sight of the entire purpose of FRC. If you honestly think that your success in the tournament better matching your robot ability should rank higher on FIRST's list of priorities than allowing teams you deem "unfit" the opportunity to attend and compete in championships, then you do not understand FIRST, and need to fix your attitude. Shame on you.

I suspect there are far more diplomatic ways to communicate your point in an eloquent and respectful manner.

I, for one, happen to agree with Jared. Many students and teams, mine included, take a great deal of pride and inspiration out of the product that we place on the field. Keep in mind that we are a multi-time chairman winner, so I think our kids 'get' what the program is about.

It is not inspiring when the primary driving force behind your Championship robot result is pure random chance. That's the most non-inspiring situation I can think of. It's tantamount to randomly picking a Chairman's winner. How truly inspiring would that be?

I fully support adopting a country wide district system. If your team is unable to attend two regionals, you can submit a hardship form to FIRST that, when accepted doubles your result in your first district. Points are distributed in the same manner they are in the Michigan System, and at the end of the year a certain number of robots at the top are invited to participate in the World Championship.

I would eliminate the purchase / wait option and (gasp) the auto-chairmans invites as well.

The only option I see to bringing the number of matches up to what they should be (12 or more) is to reduce the number of teams at the Championship. You could also start matches much earlier on Thursday: this is champs and your robot should be pretty close to dialed-in after your districts/regionals/bag windows etc.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Moriarty

Something that I do not think has been mentioned is the practice fields at regionals.

I loved the full practice field at Worlds. When my team played at our regional competition, I was disappointed by the lack of chains / box on the small practice fields. This did not give an entirely accurate simulation of gameplay on the field. In addition, I saw many frisbees fly through the goals and into the pit area, which could have potentially been dangerous.

I would not suggest a full practice field at the regionals, but a practice field that is a closer replica of the field would be great, especially for calibrating autonomous and practicing lining up shots.

I'm fairly shocked at that. It sounds like we were spoiled here in the Michigan. Our practice fields were 1/3 fields that had pyramids, goals, and were surrounded by batting-cage style hanging nets that made it safe for everyone. Perhaps First-In-Michigan builds the practice fields and moves them around with the competition fields. That would explain their relatively high-quality. They were laminated plywood bolted together, all built in a folding style so they could be packed away.

[Moriarty]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I'm fairly shocked at that. It sounds like we were spoiled here in the Michigan. Our practice fields were 1/3 fields that had pyramids, goals, and were surrounded by batting-cage style hanging nets that made it safe for everyone. Perhaps First-In-Michigan builds the practice fields and moves them around with the competition fields. That would explain their relatively high-quality. They were laminated plywood bolted together, all built in a folding style so they could be packed away.

To clarify, they did have the nets and the same 1/3 fields.

I was referring to the frisbees that flew OVER the netting, sorry for that misunderstanding.

Did the goals at FiM have the full chain and box goal? Or just the frame one? My issue was with the frame one because it did not have the boxed backing or chains. Without these, the teams could not be sure that where they were shooting from would not have frisbees bounce out.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Moriarty

To clarify, they did have the nets and the same 1/3 fields.

I was referring to the frisbees that flew OVER the netting, sorry for that misunderstanding.

Did the goals at FiM have the full chain and box goal? Or just the frame one? My issue was with the frame one because it did not have the boxed backing or chains. Without these, the teams could not be sure that where they were shooting from would not have frisbees bounce out.

No - ours were the same plywood frame with no chains.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

This is garbage.
*snip*

Please let me clear some things up.

I said that we need to make hard choices about who gets in. This does not mean that I think you must be an elite robot to be invited. If it did, well, then 341 would not have been at the Championship many of the years we have been, and we would not be the team we are today. It means exactly what I said: we have to make hard choices! The best system I have seen for making these choices is the FIM/MAR system, which uses points accumulated over the course of a season (incorporating BOTH robot performance and off-the-field accomplishments, with automatic advancement for the highest culture changing awards) to select the most deserving teams in a given year.

To be clear, I do not think we were we impacted at all by unlucky alliance pairings (heck, we had the 5th easiest schedule in Newton by OPR). There were a couple of other specific teams I had in mind when I made the second part of my statement, which I concede was not tactfully articulated. It is not FIRST's obligation that the best robot seeds #1. But, on the other hand: There is a C in FRC, and the C is the biggest reason we are as popular as we are. The C is also our best shot at actually transforming the culture on a macro scale, because the sports model is something the public actually gets.

There is a knob we need to tune. On one end, every FRC team who is able to, comes to Championships and plays a single match. On the other end, only the 24 best robots in the world show up and they play 20+ qualification matches each. All I am arguing is that 400+ teams and 8 matches is not the optimal spot on the continuum, especially for $5000 per team. I do not think you should need to be elite to come to St. Louis, but when I know for a fact that there are teams who did not make the cut who can score lots of game pieces, who have done tremendous things in their communities and schools, and have changed lives and cultures - why are there still robots that can't score a game piece at the World Championships?

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Because I do think there is a lot of value in having a small "lottery" system to allow teams who did not qualify to experience championships, and I think railing against simply with the rationale of improving the robot quality-competition seed correlation for "elite" teams is a pretty lousy way to view FRC. From a competition-logistics perspective it may indeed be necessary, but that was not how I read his given rationale.

I don't believe you can find much of a cross section with well-resourced teams who perform poorly and still go off the waitlist.

When I make the decision to stick it out somewhere on any team for a year, I sign up for the organization known as For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology's Robotics Competition. And when I work with a team, I don't throw personal wellness and rational behavior out of the window just to see them do their ok-est every year.

Coming from a team that has earned precisely 1 merit based slot in its 14 years of fielding robots in the competition, and you know what? It sucks. It really, really sucks. But there are times where this team has finished second at an event after getting absolutely steamrolled by teams, specifically 25. So what did the team do? Dedicated to improving drive train quality so they don't get kicked around anymore. It inspired them to do better. This year, the team did not make picks without knowing everything necessary to build a successful alliance, something I noticed after I went back and crunched some numbers. After the students did the same, a web-based LAN scouting application was built and tested in 2 weeks for later use and will be continually improved upon, and it's because of the example set by elite teams.

However, after 8 matches per team in Virginia, a team with zero ability to do anything was carried by teams like 422 to alliance captain, and 2 other entirely non-functioning robots ended ranked ahead of 422 that were also carried by 422, team members came up to me and said "Oh, I guess the secret is to build a robot that can't work and hope someone wins for us." I took thoughts like that very seriously, because competition in FRC is not meant to be secondary to everything else, it is supposed to matter.

We do not compete in the FIRST Robotics Flowers and Rainbows Happy Place. Woodie Flowers doesn't slink on up to the podium every year to tell me "help people off the field, and don't compete like hell on it, but make sure everyone feels like they got something out of it during matches." No. Our competition is designed to only bring out the absolute best of our teams, FIRST itself, and each person that participates in it, but it is still a competition. The more competitive FIRST has become, the stronger it becomes on an organizational level, and it is becoming clear HQ sees this school of thought panning out well on the field and in the spreadsheets.

However, when teams are moved off the waitlist who didn't try like hell and ended up winning two judged awards, or get knocked out by the champs of both of their events in quarterfinals, or something else, that's bad. When you are moving teams who can't build a functional machine off the waitlist and keep finalists who picked bad events waiting or wholly excluded, you are doing something very, very wrong. You are instilling in children that no matter how much effort they put into their build season, HQ doesn't care and would rather have any old team willing to drop $5k and registration plus the insane costs of travel and lodging. Having merit based waitlisting is something that should be instituted. It is not fair to teams who are just "elite", it is unfair to any team that has ever busted their chops and just wasn't great enough to say that one team clicked the blue box on TIMS .xxx seconds faster so they earned it.

Teams need to take ownership of their successes and failures on and off the field. By providing a waitlist with conditions that have nothing to do with either, you are infinitely diluting the importance of those successes and failures, and the students in this program are very smart and they do notice this and some of them are getting really sick of it.

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Ok, having read your post I think this is a matter of talking past each other more than anything, and nothing other than a clarifying post from Jared will resolve it.

Jared and I had a reasonably long conversation about this subject after one of our matches on Thursday. I will not speak for him, but I will share my opinion on the subject with the hope that it may help your understanding.

From 2006 to 2010, I went with my team (at the time, 816) to the Championship via the wait list. Two of those years, we had no business being at a 'championship' since we were less than competitive. That being said, those two Championships (mainly 2006) were two of the most inspirational moments of my life. Seeing what could be done if one was willing to put their all into it was simply astounding. I am a fan of the waitlist because it gives teams this opportunity.

With that being said, the Championship is our Championship. As a group, a family, a league of competitors and as a culture, the Championship is our moment to get together and show each other and the world what we've got. There will always be unfair match ups and tough breaks just like any competition, but at some point we need to look at where we're going and make some difficult decisions.

There will be some point in the near future where FIRST and FRC reach critical mass and having a Championship like what we've got now will not be feasible or a good idea or whatever you want to call it. The situation is being addressed by both the wildcard system and the district model and both have shown promise for long term growth. They create a 'fair' way to allow teams to qualify for the Championship without doing it through one of the conventional methods.

Aside from the issue of the size of the Championship, we also need to address the question of 'what is FRC going to be' in the future. We're finally starting to break the boundaries of sports and some places are considering FRC to be equal to that of any other Varsity sport and personally, I think that's amazing. With that being said, if we keep allowing teams that don't meet some sort of minimum competitive threshold to compete at the Championship, are we really a sport?

I'm not trying to say that every team at the Championship needs to win an event, be a powerhouse or anything like that - it's not who we are. What I'd like to see is a small amount (and I mean really small) of robot related emphasis placed on any qualification method for the Championship - the easiest way to summarize it would be 'A qualifying team's machine must be able to complete the game objective'. Something as simple as scoring 3 discs in this year, or being able to hang from the 10pt bar would suffice. I know some of the qualification methods are not about the robot, which I can agree with, but if we're sending these teams to our largest most visible event, then I think that it would be in the best interest of all of us to have each team be able to at a minimum complete the game objective. *

If you can't understand what I'm trying to get across here, then that's fine. It is a bit controversial and different from the norm. Also, this is just my opinion and has nothing to do with any team so please keep that in mind.

*TLDR, there shouldn't be Machines at the CMP that cannot complete the game objective.

[EricLeifermann]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I suspect there are far more diplomatic ways to communicate your point in an eloquent and respectful manner.

I, for one, happen to agree with Jared. Many students and teams, mine included, take a great deal of pride and inspiration out of the product that we place on the field. Keep in mind that we are a multi-time chairman winner, so I think our kids 'get' what the program is about.

It is not inspiring when the primary driving force behind your Championship robot result is pure random chance. That's the most non-inspiring situation I can think of. It's tantamount to randomly picking a Chairman's winner. How truly inspiring would that be?

I fully support adopting a country wide district system. If your team is unable to attend two regionals, you can submit a hardship form to FIRST that, when accepted doubles your result in your first district. Points are distributed in the same manner they are in the Michigan System, and at the end of the year a certain number of robots at the top are invited to participate in the World Championship.

I would eliminate the purchase / wait option and (gasp) the auto-chairmans invites as well.

The only option I see to bringing the number of matches up to what they should be (12 or more) is to reduce the number of teams at the Championship. You could also start matches much earlier on Tuesday: this is champs and your robot should be pretty close to dialed-in after your districts/regionals/bag windows etc.

I agree 100%, though the argument for the chairman's auto qualifying is if you don't then how many teams are going to send their chairman's presenters to Champs just to present?

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Jared341

Please let me clear some things up.

I said that we need to make hard choices about who gets in. This does not mean that I think you must be an elite robot to be invited. If it did, well, then 341 would not have been at the Championship many of the years we have been, and we would not be the team we are today. It means exactly what I said: we have to make hard choices! The best system I have seen for making these choices is the FIM/MAR system, which uses points accumulated over the course of a season (incorporating BOTH robot performance and off-the-field accomplishments, with automatic advancement for the highest culture changing awards) to select the most deserving teams in a given year.

To be clear, I do not think we were we impacted at all by unlucky alliance pairings (heck, we had the 5th easiest schedule in Newton by OPR). There were a couple of other specific teams I had in mind when I made the second part of my statement, which I concede was not tactfully articulated. It is not FIRST's obligation that the best robot seeds #1. But, on the other hand: There is a C in FRC, and the C is the biggest reason we are as popular as we are. The C is also our best shot at actually transforming the culture on a macro scale, because the sports model is something the public actually gets.

There is a knob we need to tune. On one end, every FRC team who is able to, comes to Championships and plays a single match. On the other end, only the 24 best robots in the world show up and they play 20+ qualification matches each. All I am arguing is that 400+ teams and 8 matches is not the optimal spot on the continuum, especially for $5000 per team. I do not think you should need to be elite to come to St. Louis, but when I know for a fact that there are teams who did not make the cut who can score lots of game pieces, who have done tremendous things in their communities and schools, and have changed lives and cultures - why are there still robots that can't score a game piece at the World Championships?

Jared, I'm with you on this one.

5000 for 8 matches and coming from Hawaii especially, is NOT acceptable.
If this means adding an extra day, or less teams competing, so be it.
If it means I have to win at events and not get the HOF exemption, then so be it. If my robot is poor, I won't subject our team to getting blown out.
If it means that if RCA's win, they compete only with the Other RCA's in a judges room, then so be it.
This is a competition event!
Champs is a big deal. Excuses that I can't get off work another day is a personal problem. For an event as inspiring as this, and a once in a lifetime opportunity for kids, you make the necessary sacrifices to make it happen.
It's my job to use it to inspire kids all of the other zillion of hours I put in to take care of the learning part!

[jdaming]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I, for one, happen to agree with Jared. Many students and teams, mine included, take a great deal of pride and inspiration out of the product that we place on the field. Keep in mind that we are a multi-time chairman winner, so I think our kids 'get' what the program is about.

It is not inspiring when the primary driving force behind your Championship robot result is pure random chance. That's the most non-inspiring situation I can think of. It's tantamount to randomly picking a Chairman's winner. How truly inspiring would that be?

I think we all agree that would not be inspiring, but that wasn't the case even this year. The number of matches only affects the seeding which is a big deal but doesn't make the final outcome completely random (hence we had a VERY competitive Einstein).

Secondly, that comparison is not accurate. I won't even go into why it is so far off base I think that is obvious.

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I would eliminate the purchase / wait option and (gasp) the auto-chairmans invites as well.

I must have misunderstood this? Are you going to stop inviting Rookies too? FIRST has proven that the competition can be competitive and allow "less than championship quality" robots in at the same time. The MAIN problem here is with the number of matches not the "quality" of the play.

Originally Posted by Tom Line

The only option I see to bringing the number of matches up to what they should be (12 or more)

Good Luck! I think it is far too restrictive and exclusive to get 12 or more matches with the current championship setup. You are talking about cutting 1/3 or more of the teams that is quite drastic.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I'm fairly shocked at that. It sounds like we were spoiled here in the Michigan. Our practice fields were 1/3 fields that had pyramids, goals, and were surrounded by batting-cage style hanging nets that made it safe for everyone. Perhaps First-In-Michigan builds the practice fields and moves them around with the competition fields. That would explain their relatively high-quality. They were laminated plywood bolted together, all built in a folding style so they could be packed away.

Practice fields, IIRC, are built and maintained by regional committees. FiM used their practice fields over a dozen times while DC would only use theirs once, so building them better makes sense; people will actually get stuff out of them...

Point 1 for districts. For those of you keeping score at home, that's:
Districts: 5469
Traditional Events: 1 (because they tried)

[tkell274]

I really liked this game but there were a few things that needed to be changed.

The Game:
The endgame needed to be worth more. FIRST needs to work on balancing out teleop and the endgame.
Also the real time scoring needs a huge improvement for next year.

Districts:
I know that the New England area will be moving to a district system next year and I would love to see it put in place in more places. The system allows for more events and more chances to go to a big event like the region championship with a better chance for worlds.

Championships:
There either needs to be less teams or more divisions at worlds. I know that adding more divisions would be very hard because of space and logistics but there needs to be more than eight matches for all the teams. I have seen some people talking about extending the championships to starting with practice on wednesday and I do not agree with that. We need to keep in mind that FRC is high school students and, although they are all motivated and intelligent, they cannot be missing that much school. Finally I would like to see Einsteins placement moved so that more people can watch it without having to be stuck at the top of the stadium.

P.S.
this might be a little off topic but I saw someone talking about how they don't like jags and won't be using them next year. I just wanted to say that my team has been using jags with the can system for years now and we love it.

[Brandon_L]

To everyone complaining about time between einstein matches being used for awards, may I point out that Einstein is still a FRC field, which requires near 10 minute match cycles. Along with the 6 min minimum for back to back matches, and the timeouts, I think how they handle awards between matches is rather time efficient. Sometimes the awards run a little longer than a 10 min match reset, but overall it works out better.

May not be fun for spectators, but I'd rather watch awards then people resetting a field. Also works out for sponsors watching who would have no idea what's going on in the ~10 min gaps between matches.

2c

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

However, when teams are moved off the waitlist who didn't try like hell and ended up winning two judged awards, or get knocked out by the champs of both of their events in quarterfinals, or something else, that's bad. When you are moving teams who can't build a functional machine off the waitlist and keep finalists who picked bad events waiting or wholly excluded, you are doing something very, very wrong. You are instilling in children that no matter how much effort they put into their build season, HQ doesn't care and would rather have any old team willing to drop $5k and registration plus the insane costs of travel and lodging. Having merit based waitlisting is something that should be instituted. It is not fair to teams who are just "elite", it is unfair to any team that has ever busted their chops and just wasn't great enough to say that one team clicked the blue box on TIMS .xxx seconds faster so they earned it.

This strikes me as a kind of optimization problem. Given the current composition of the Championship, can it be demonstrated that the value of admitting an additional merit-qualified team in lieu of a waitlisted team will be positive?¹ And how does this relationship change as you tweak the proportions and quantities of qualified teams? Is this relationship different for teams that only won judged awards versus the ones with more competitive robots?

I suspect that to answer that, we'll need to discuss the purpose of the Championship, and the criteria used to judge merit and calculate value.

¹ Or, given the distribution of likely outcomes, at least a positive expected value and a low likelihood of drastically negative values.

[MrJohnston]

A couple of thoughts...

1) Championship Caliber vs. Wait List:
I suspect that part of the reason we accept robots from a waitlist to fill out the fields is financial. It costs a significant amount of money to rent out a facility such as the Edwards Jones Dome for a week and those wait-listed teams really help the bottom line. I have experience running select baseball tournaments. If I were to rent and prepare a facility for a 24 team tournament, but only got 16 teams, I'd be in a mess financially. However, were I to fill the tournament with 24, I'd make a pretty profit. Thought FIRST is not a for-profit organization, the concept is the same. The last thing we want is for them to be forced to raise the price on everybody in the event that the tournament does not fill.

However, I agree that, in this case, it causes some challenges. Eight qualification matches is not nearly enough to allow teams to adequately separate themselves and puts them all much more at the mercy of schedule pairings. I would much rather see eight 50-team divisions, 10 qualifying matches and a quarter-final round at Einstein.

Further, I would not want to dissuade teams from coming who qualified with less competitive robots. If we have enough qualifying rounds, those who have truly great robots would rise to the top and those who don't would fall out of contention. A team with a weaker robot what really wants to compete either 1) will be inspired by all the great robotics around them to learn and be come better or 2) will learn real fast that they didn't belong in the first place and will see what great teams are really capable of accomplishing.


2) Competition vs. Gracious Professionalism
This is such a hard balance sometimes. Yes, this was the World Champsionships, which, by definition, is very competitive. We were all there to win. However, what sets FIRST aside is that Gracious Professionalism is the core value and being graciously professional is more important than winning a trophy. Sometimes, in our desires to excel, we forget this. Some things I witnessed personally, that I would rather see go differently:

* One team, when approached about alliances, blasting another's mentor and effectively demanding that the first not choose them.

* A team continuing to practice on the practice field and looking nothing short of awesome, but looking like garbage on the real field. Later, this team is seen talking to a top alliance about being a third pick.

* Teams being upset when being selected by the "wrong" team for alliance selections.

* Teams "showcasing" specific skills during the last qualification rounds in hopes of improving their chances at being selected - at the cost of the match and their alliance partners' chances. (Consider a team that loses the #8 seed because of such a loss, then never gets chosen for eliminations!)

* Teams in the stands yelling obscenities about referee's calls - and not being calmed by mentors.

* Teams saving seats when specifically asked not to. I saw several instances when kids could not watch their own robot compete because the they were not permitted to stand in teh aisles to watch matches and the 100 (or more!) empty seats were all being "saved" by other teams.