2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[RoboMom]

RE: the conferences.

I have volunteered to do a conference presentation the past two years. I am very happy they were free this year. Whether hundreds attend (Karthik) or a few dozen (mine ) each of these sessions have a lot to offer.

There was a mentor who attended my session last year. He did not have teams competing. His organization funded him to attend the conferences. All the rest of the event was gravy.

There are many schools and organizations who would allow and, gasp, even fund people to attend.

I would love to see the conferences expand and be a destination in themselves. Program books. Professionally done abstracts and bios. More days. More sessions. But I'd also love to keep them free.

I don't believe FIRST has the bandwidth to do this now, so it would take a partnership with another organization. And some funding.

This is doable.

[David8696]

Originally Posted by Gregor

Please read the first line of my signature.

My apologies. To be fair, I did use the term Championships the first time. It's my first year of FIRST, go easy on me

[nickcvet89]

There should be more gamecasts like the one's from MSC. If you haven't seen it, here is the link to the finals. I wish all regionals/regional championships had something like this.

[Moon2020]

Wow! Yes, it is doable! I hope the right people are reading these threads!

We apparently need several team database computers (for a few key Volunteers and a few self-serve computers) set up at the most strategic locations in the venues (entrance, pit admin, the two inspection stations, etc.). Maybe a few "FIRST Ambassadors" with maps to personally escort people to the locations as well, as many people were super confused in the FRC Divisions by the pit maps. I had to ask an RI to escort a very confused person to a specific team in our division.

Maybe you could use text messaging to talk to Pit Admin? We used text messaging to communicate between the Galileo field out in the Dome and the Galileo inspection station when robots were having issues on the field. It's not instantaneous, but it worked pretty well for us.

Originally Posted by RoboMom

One of my hats was as the trainer and go-to person for the St. Louis Convention temporaries, ie, the "Event Information" booth in the lobby in front of the entrance to the pits. This is year 3 for me doing this job. They were asked non-stop questions over the 4 days by teams, and the public. We had various printouts of teams but it wasn't until Sat. that I saw your master list of all the teams in pit admin, sorted by geography and thought "there it is!" We spent way too much time flipping through divisions, through programs, through assorted lists. By Friday I would have traded my vest with 13 pockets to have a computer with a searchable database. We were slammed with these inquiries about teams just because of where this booth was-I have so many stories including crying moms. And depending on whether they wanted a pit visit vs. watching the team on the field in the Dome and which section to send them to there, guided the conversation. In addition, I would love to have a little more coordination between pit admin and the event information booth. This is doable!

I hate I am posting in the "negative" thread.
Can we make a "it's doable" thread?

[Grim Tuesday]

Originally Posted by Moon2020

Wow! Yes, it is doable! I hope the right people are reading these threads!

We apparently need several team database computers (for a few key Volunteers and a few self-serve computers) set up at the most strategic locations in the venues (entrance, pit admin, the two inspection stations, etc.). Maybe a few "FIRST Ambassadors" with maps to personally escort people to the locations as well, as many people were super confused in the FRC Divisions by the pit maps. I had to ask an RI to escort a very confused person to a specific team in our division.

Maybe you could use text messaging to talk to Pit Admin? We used text messaging to communicate between the Galileo field out in the Dome and the Galileo inspection station when robots were having issues on the field. It's not instantaneous, but it worked pretty well for us.

Speaking of texting, it might be worthwhile to ask ATT to beef up reception at the dome and specifically the convention center. TMobile and Verizon both worked fine but for all my friends with ATT, message delivery time was measured in hours not seconds.

[Moon2020]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

Speaking of texting, it might be worthwhile to ask ATT to beef up reception at the dome and specifically the convention center. TMobile and Verizon both worked fine but for all my friends with ATT, message delivery time was measured in hours not seconds.

Agreed. We had about a 5 to 10 minute lag time on AT&T.

[nuttle]

> I would much rather see eight 50-team divisions, 10 qualifying matches and a quarter-final round at Einstein.

This is a hard solution to provide, but this is an attractive way forward on what seems to be the consensus biggest negative and probably the only way to even incrementally expand CMP (not that there aren't other considerations that might preclude this). One possible approach would be to run two divisions on each field, one in the mornings and one in the evenings. This would shorten the days for teams and reduce the number of people around for at least some of the time, but would require more volunteers (possibly for two shorter shifts in longer days). At the same time, everyone would still be at CMPs and there would be enough overlap that it would be one event.


It is really hard to justify a ranking system where wins and losses are not the top-line criteria, but maybe there is a way to reflect strength of schedule somewhere in the rankings. Individual team offence/defense can't be kept like the score, but maybe some scouting stats could be considered.

[DampRobot]

Originally Posted by nuttle

It is really hard to justify a ranking system where wins and losses are not the top-line criteria, but maybe there is a way to reflect strength of schedule somewhere in the rankings. Individual team offence/defense can't be kept like the score, but maybe some scouting stats could be considered.

At this point someone says that OPR should be used as the criteria for seeding. And then someone else points out how bad of an idea it is.

[Grim Tuesday]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

At this point someone says that OPR should be used as the criteria for seeding. And then someone else points out how bad of an idea it is.

As much as people hate it, OPR in 2013 would probably have provided better seeding than W/L/T. Unfortunately, there is never any way to correlate it to actual on field performance in eliminations vs W/L/T since eliminations are intrinsically linked to the seedings defined by W/L/T.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by nuttle

> I would much rather see eight 50-team divisions, 10 qualifying matches and a quarter-final round at Einstein.

This is a hard solution to provide, but this is an attractive way forward on what seems to be the consensus biggest negative and probably the only way to even incrementally expand CMP (not that there aren't other considerations that might preclude this). One possible approach would be to run two divisions on each field, one in the mornings and one in the evenings. This would shorten the days for teams and reduce the number of people around for at least some of the time, but would require more volunteers (possibly for two shorter shifts in longer days). At the same time, everyone would still be at CMPs and there would be enough overlap that it would be one event.

I'd lean toward the opposite: 4 100-team divisions, each with two fields, preferably on the dome floor (space permitting). As long as we're satisfied enough teams are playing in the eliminations, it avoids an extra (Einstein quarterfinal) round of playoffs.

There would be a need for more volunteers, and of course more field sets would have to be used for competition matches.

[DanielCH]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

I'd lean toward the opposite: 4 100-team divisions, each with two fields, preferably on the dome floor (space permitting). As long as we're satisfied enough teams are playing in the eliminations, it avoids an extra (Einstein quarterfinal) round of playoffs.

There would be a need for more volunteers, and of course more field sets would have to be used for competition matches.

Two fields per division? Scouting your division would be doubly difficult.

[hiyou102]

I think a solution to getting more space would be splitting up FRC, FTC, and FLL champs. This would allow more teams from FTC and FLL to to go and allow for more FRC divisions. They could still be in the same venue, just separated by a day or twoo.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by DanielCH

Two fields per division? Scouting your division would be doubly difficult.

In its existing floor plan configuration it may be difficult, but theoretically you could place them next to each other and play a match on one while the other one goes through reset.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

In its existing floor plan configuration it may be difficult, but theoretically you could place them next to each other and play a match on one while the other one goes through reset.

That's the ideal. It may be possible with staggered fields, or fields placed two deep or pointed toward the centre of the dome. Some of those arrangements pose problems for viewing, but it's probably manageable if there exists enough space. (Does anyone have 2013's dimensioned floor plan handy?)

You could always share three fields among two divisions if you had to. (In the old days of the FRC championship, you played on both Einstein and Newton during the qualifying round.)

If the extra fields for each division ended up in the pits, then yes, it could be a pain to scout (and verging on impossible for smaller teams).

[bduddy]

How about a compromise? 6 fields, one division each; with ~70 teams each, there should be more than enough time for 10 matches or more. How do you deal with 6 alliances on Einstein, you ask? A round robin! I think that would be awesome, getting to see matches between so many amazing alliances. You could decide the winner straight off the round robin, or take the top 2 for a final best-of-3 (maybe if one of the finalists has a better W/L it gets to start with a win?) Yes, obviously this would take more time with the current format, but you could probably slice an hour or so off the divisions and still have 10 matches, not to mention all the time currently wasted before and during Einstein...

I can't take full credit for it, as it was discussed in TBA chat... still think it would be really cool, and I think it's pretty clear that there is room for 2 more fields.