The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Jon Stratis]

Personally, I know I'm burned out as it is. 6 weeks of build, followed by being LRI at two regionals, volunteering at champs, and now getting ready to be LRI at States is a lot of time and effort, and other areas of my life suffer as a result. Is it worth it? Yes, obviously yes or I wouldn't do it (that said, I'm doing what I can to make sure we have enough LRI's to cover all the events next year so I'm responsible for only 1).

So, what if we get rid of Bag and Tag? Well, then the season would last 4.5 months. On top of all of the normal team meetings (you're deluding yourself if you think teams would meet fewer hours per week!), I would have the time I spend getting ready for each competition (volunteers, especially key volunteers, spend a surprising amount of time getting things ready just so they run smoothly for you and your team!) coming into play during the last half of the season. That's a lot of work, and a lot of time.

I believe one of the things holding MN back from going to districts is the time commitment. Coming off a 6-week build season, I know I can't commit to spending the next 6 weeks doing district competitions (With Jeff Pahl moving to Wisconsin, we only have two LRI's currently in the state, so I would have to work half the events), and the same goes for most of our volunteers. That would only get worse if we did away with the Stop Build day.

Further, I think the limited time allowed on the robot is actually one of the best things about FIRST. With unlimited time, anyone can build a competitive robot. Doing so in a short timeframe is the challenge. If anything, I would like to see us do away with/modify the withholding allowance. Limit it to true spare parts, and require that the entire robot be bagged - you can't keep working on 1/4 of your robot after Stop Build day. There's a team I know of that brought in a new shooter for every event this year. The drive base stayed the same, but essentially it was like they competed with a different robot at each event (and rumor has it they might bring in yet another shooter for States!).

As many people more important than me have said, this is a robotics competition that isn't about the robot. And yet asking for more time to build seems to go against that concept.

[Cory]

It's already a 16 week build season, even if people want to pretend that it's only 6.

If you want to be great (or even really good) it's almost impossible to work only 6 weeks and then stop. We took maybe 5 days off total between kickoff and championships. Our technical mentors all put in over 50 hours/week every single week from kickoff to championships. It's hardly something to be proud of and we can't possibly sustain another year like this again, but that's what it took for us to get the 2013 robot to where it ended up.

If we didn't have to build two robots and only had to perfect one robot we would put in less time on the whole.

If you think the six weeks is saving you from yourselves I don't think it is. You've made the decision (either financial or personal to your team) not to build a practice bot. Presumably if we went to an "open" competition you could continue to make the same decision and bag the robot after six weeks, lock it in a mentor's garage, etc.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Adam Freeman

Honestly, I can't really explain it outside of mentor experience. We have an incredible Chief Engineer (Jim Meyer - 13 years in FIRST), who I would argue is the best in all of FIRST.

Many teams have asked how we do it....and we've tried to adapt the principles of many other great teams (148, 1114, etc...).

It's definitely not CAD experience. We do 95% of all our work in 2D AutoCAD.

I doubt it's project management, we rarely finish on time.
Since I've joined the team:

-2005: Competition robot did not drive on carpet until first competition.
-2006: Robot was a disaster. Did not have Jim full time this year.
-2007: Robot was finished 2 weeks early. Good robot. Could have done more, but was weary after 2006.
-2008: Complete design change on the arm prior to first competition.
-2009: Complete re-design during un-bag time before first competition.
-2010: Robot was done early. Added ball-magnet before first competition. Added climber throughout competition season.
-2011: Robot was finished early. Mini-bot development and deployment was finished week of first competition. Terrible code issued at first competition.
-2012: Best machine we have ever built. Robot was done early. No major issues throughout competition season.
-2013: Robot not finished when bagged. Major work to get functional before first competition. Climber developed and added throughout competition season.

So my guess would be mentor experience, attitude, and students. We expect that we will be able to create a World Class competition robot. We instill that expectation in our students. We devote as much time as possible (as mentioned before), given work and family requirements.

The other thing we have is almost instant access to parts and materials. We are very fortunate to have a build facility that we can make virtually any part that we would design for our robot. That allows us the opportunity to make design changes quickly.

I'm not sure I would recommend our design process or project management style to anyone else. It works for us....and we're willing to share it, but I don't think it is the "best" process bt any measure.

Thanks for sharing.
Other than you and Dave, I have never met your other engineers such as Jim who I'd like to meet one day on how you folks build great robots year after year.
I wanted to comment on the bolded paragraph above.
You bring up a good point, which almost never is talked about on CD.
Great elite teams can adjust and make changes quickly IMO.

I think for a small rural school like ours, we have quite a bit of machinery that ranks with the best of them. With 9 mills/lathes, enough space for 4 teams to comfortably build their robots, newly acquired waterjet, etc. we have way more equipment than experts and personnel to run them.
We are way too slow in our design and build process where we try to make up for it by spending a large no. of hours/day during build season.
Amplify that with the cost of travel and spending countless hours raising funds, takes time away from prototyping and other offseason projects.
If our team could ever get more people to help, then perhaps we can take more design chances during crunch time and not burn anybody out.

[josmee443]

The 6 week cap definitely puts a great deal of pressure on teams, since it is such a short amount of time to build a great, efficient working robot. But, I think it is helpful in some ways. It teaches members that there are certain deadlines, whether they are short or long, that must be met. And, this is quite true in real life. Essentially, I think it teaches us to make a well organized, balanced schedule to plan out how to go about building a good robot. Really, in a way, it sorts out the teams that are really dedicated to doing well during competition. Typically, the best teams are the ones with the best planning. Ultimately, it prepares us to deal with the sometimes ludicrous deadlines that are sent our way in college, and after college.

[Chief Hedgehog]

Forgive me as this is my first post - and seeing how we bungled out first season, this may be bumpy.

As a rookie team, I see the benefits of a determined build season. We started our team with a relatively large group of mentors (12). Each and every mentor was worth their weight in gold. However, since this was a venture that was new to the mentors and the companies that they work for, we quickly realized that we were taxing our local sponsors and their talent (our mentors). If we had pushed beyond a 6 week build season, I am not sure if our sponsors would have allowed more time.

Becker is a small community and sports are not just activities, but act as entertainment for the locals. Most of my 24 robotics athletes are also competing in winter and Spring sports (When we have a spring). However, we were not able to utilize the time between our NorthStar Regional and FRC Championships because my team was either finishing their winter sports of Basketball, Wrestling, Hockey or getting primed for Tennis, LaCrosse, Baseball, etc. All 6 of my senior boys are also involved in our Tennis Team which has made it to state that last 4 years. They will most likely do so this year.

We did very well for our first year by building a Robot very different from most (Many from Galileo may remember seeing our C.I.S. 4607 Banners hanging from our shot blocker). We concentrated on defense and climbing for ten. This did well for us as we were awarded the Rookie All-Star and also won the regional in large part to the Iron Lions (967) and the Fighting Calculators (2175).

For us rookie teams not knowing what to expect, a determined 6 week build season is great. I am not sure if I could have held my team together much longer...

[RRLedford]

The 6-week bag deadline is unfair in the degree that it more detrimentally affects different kinds of teams.

Ours is a small private school team that has few students overall and even those with the most dedication to the program have trouble putting in a lot of time per week. We also have conflicts with other extra curricular activities, some of which are mandatory.

We often have a vacation week in the middle of the six week window, with almost no build time taking place, from many students out of town.

We have a finals week with only one session at best.

With a small team size and this much total time conflict it becomes almost impossible to complete our build. These time bites simply represent too big of a % of the total 6-week time window to ever get caught up.

We are always finishing our build in the pits, and never having any practice or troubleshooting/optimizing time before our first match. We rarely make any practice matches. We barely get to the practice field.

If we had 9 weeks or more, losing a week or two would not be such a total total progress killer. Even when we build a practice bot, we barely finish it a day or two before competition, and this makes that effort almost just an expensive and frustrating exercise in futility.

We also typically find that our design concepts are really excellent, but having our builds barely get finished by the end of Thursday at competition, and having no practice and tuning time, means we are struggling to barely reach a competition ready level while being in the middle of competing, which does really not allow for the best results with any design, no mater how good it may be.

We typically see how easily we could have done so much better but for lack of a week or so of more time for practicing and optimizing.
We always resolve to work more efficiently, and finish earlier next year, but it just never seems to happen.

Team members get frustrated seeing this pattern repeat for 2-3 years. It takes a lot of the fun out of the program for them too.

A big part of engineering design involves testing, iterative refinement and improvement, and I believe that small teams like ours are consistently being cheated from experiencing this aspect of engineering learning, from having such a compressed 6-week build window constraint laid on us.

For bigger teams with larger groups of mentors, I can see the 6-week build being pore realistic and more fair, but for the smaller teams with few mentors it is extremely difficult to handle.

-Dick Ledford

[OZ_341]

I have not decided how I feel about completely abandoning the 6 week build concept and I do certainly agree with many of the points that Jared made earlier. But I also have some concerns that would make me hesitate.

Most of my concern surrounds the loss of creativity and the heavy-handed benchmarking that will occur.
At the FTC level there is a great deal of "benchmarking" that happens due the the competition structure and the ease of rebuilding. There are still many imaginative teams, but there are also teams which heavily copy from successful designs.

Sure this happens in FRC, but there are limits to how much benchmarking you can implement. If FRC opens up completely, teams that have high speed manufacturing talents and the manpower can wait until the "smart teams" figure out the game and do a complete redesign based on the most successful robot systems.
I watched this happen in 2008, when Team 121 came out with an awesome design and reveal video at the end of week 3. It was a great machine. Countless struggling teams immediately dropped their design plans and adopted the "Tusk and Roller" pickup system. Sure those teams probably had a better year on the field, but those kids lost the opportunity to go on a journey of discovery.
In 2008 our ball pick-up design was not going well and there was tremendous pressure from a large faction of our kids to just give up on our design and adopt what Team 121 was doing. We certainly had the time and the talent. But even though I loved that design, I refused to allow it. I made them stick with their plans, improve their design, and go on that journey of discovery. It was a HARD year, and it was certainly not the best machine in FIRST that year, but it did win the Philly Regional, and more importantly those kids learned something that year about believing in yourself and having confidence in your ideas.
If we change to a completely open system there will still be plenty of creative teams, but being successful will no longer mandate imagination, simply having manufacturing muscle and manpower will be enough. My fear is that it won't be all that different than school life, where many talented kids wait for the "smarter kids" to figure things out and then simply collect the fruits of their labor.

I know this happens now in FRC to a certain extent, but it will bring this practice to a whole new level. As I said, I have not decided how I feel about this proposal, but it is one of my concerns.

[Wendy Holladay]

3 short points.

1. the biggest obstacle to building a practice robot can be electrical, many teams cannot afford the extra h/w. but this seems like the norm, just to be even a little competitive.

2. the years 1912 did the best, the week long Mardi Gras school holiday fell during build. that tells me an 8 week session would help a lot.

3. PLEASE REMOVE the 30 lb withholding. that made our some mentors think they could just keep on going and usually for our team, that just made a bad robot worse. and we have built a lot of bad robots.

[rick.oliver]

The 6 week build season may be a reality for some, many or even a majority of teams; I don't know. For the eleven season that I have been involved in FIRST FRC, the 6 week build season has clearly been a myth for some number of teams. And in the past few years, the two teams which I have mentored are included.

I agree that allowing access to the competition machine during the competition season will provide the opportunity for more folks to choose to extend the intensity of the build season without spending the additional finances required to effectively build a practice robot. I don't know how many folks would make that choice, but it is a personal choice and I do not feel compelled to decide for anybody but myself.

I am 85% confident that our team would make use of the time and be more competitive sooner as a result.

My position is that the current system makes a mockery of the idea that all of this great design, fabrication, iteration, optimization and improvement occurs in six weeks. It is laughable and I find it completely intellectually dishonest.

If FIRST wants to continue to perpetuate the myth, I will continue to follow the rules and strive to increase the number of sponsors, mentors and additional processes and resources required to continually improve our team's on-field product, because that is my area of focus on the team and because the students have much more fun, are much more engaged and appear much more inspired by a much more competitive machine.

I like that we have the opportunity to improve as the season progresses and I think there is tremendous value in exposing students to the process of continual improvement. I would not want to see the system altered to eliminate this aspect of the process.

What I would appreciate is the ability to more cost effectively and productively take advantage of the full 13 or so weeks between Kick Off and the Championships ship date.

Like I posted previously, the only stop build date should be the date Fed Ex picks up the crate to take the machine to Championships.

[Negative 9]

Perhaps we need longer than six weeks, but I don't know how I feel about the removal of a universal stop build date.

Any game with a chokehold strategy or something close would become excessively dull after the one team that figures it out competes in their first competition.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Negative 9

Perhaps we need longer than six weeks, but I don't know how I feel about the removal of a universal stop build date.

Any game with a chokehold strategy or something close would become excessively dull after the one team that figures it out competes in their first competition.

Why? How would this be any different than any other year?

[Negative 9]

Originally Posted by Cory

Why? How would this be any different than any other year?

Well, it would still be rather dull either way. I just think it would be a bit more dull to see the same robots over and over again after some team reveals their chokehold strategy at a week 2 event.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Negative 9

Well, it would still be rather dull either way. I just think it would be a bit more dull to see the same robots over and over again after some team reveals their chokehold strategy at a week 2 event.

I don't believe that there will ever be a chokehold strategy that could be copied and implemented by anyone other than elite teams, who are not very likely to scrap their robots midseason.

[nuggetsyl]

Here is one huge factor that people are overlooking. First is killing the worlds supply in several items. Hex bearings anyone? Talons is another great example. Also who wants to do the math on overnight shipping first teams spend? IMO they should announce next years game at the finals of champs. This would make first cheaper and improve the quality of robots.


P.S. thanks 254 for the hex bearing. Even though we bought 20 of them we were still 1 short of what we needed.

[PayneTrain]

Regardless of what could happen in the future, I know for a fact that teams that already work to be elite work the entirety from kickoff through their last in season event, and other teams work at varying amounts down to just the build season and time at their events, and I don't think it will change. I don't think the ceiling would grow as much as the floor will rise, which is a great thing for FIRST.