The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Brandon Holley]

My opinion falls on the side of eliminating the 6 week time constraint as being beneficial to the concept of mentor burnout. Eric's point about work expanding to fill a deadline is dead on, however a team may have an option now of not meeting EVERY single day for 6 weeks. My expectation would not be that the team stops after 6 weeks anyway, but that they spread the stress from a concentrated 6 weeks, to a less concentrated 8-9.

The way I see it, teams who build a full practice robot and work through the entire competition season, are going to no matter what, unless the rules explicitly disallow this action. These teams will have a second robot, they will have extra software development time, extra time to refine mechanisms and shake out bugs (disclaimer: we are one of these teams).

If you lift the restriction of teams having access to their robots, it will be pretty much the status quo for our team. However, for teams that do not have a practice robot they will now have the ability to tweak and tune right up to a competition. Its hard for me to see how removing the 'lock up' portion of the season as doing anything but raising the floor and allowing teams who would otherwise not have the means, access to fine tuning later in the season.


As for mentor burnout- there is no reason a team cannot artificially create a 6 week build season, either by putting a hard cap at 6 weeks, or by spreading 6 weeks worth of meetings over 8 or 9 weeks. I know for my team, having a few more weeks would definitely lighten the load earlier in the season, allow us more refinement on the design side- which means less wasted money on not fully vetted prototypes.

I do think this topic is a very good one and am very curious to hear many different sides of the argument though...

-Brando