The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Don Wright]

I've been basically away from FIRST the past two seasons (I moved to Austria) but I feel strongly about this topic.

We need to get rid of the 6 week deadline. I think this was there when there was a time we all had to ship our robots to the competition. Now, it only serves the purpose of a media point "The kids built this in 6 weeks" (which we all know really isn't true when you include improvements over the season).

To add what was more elegantly put by Adam...another thing that would be missed without bag time would be "fix-it windows". I know we would spend several hours the night before just planning these times so we can get everything we needed done in the time window. This was time we could have spent working on the robot (and caused more "burnout").

I don't agree with Eric's argument because the teams that want to continue to improve the entire season are already doing this...it's just in an inefficient way (two robots...although we would probably still build two robots because our practice bots get beat to heck...)...