The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[AlecS]

Originally Posted by 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.

Not to hijack the thread, but both of those items are created specifically for FRC. Hex bearings don't exist outside of those produced for FRC. While Talons have great applications outside of FRC, Talons were created to cater specifically to the FRC market. So excluding game pieces, FRC isn't really killing the worlds supply of items. As far as things produced for FRC, I'm sure suppliers are working to hard to remedy such supply problems in the future.

[nuggetsyl]

Originally Posted by AlecS

Not to hijack the thread, but both of those items are created specifically for FRC. Hex bearings don't exist outside of those produced for FRC. While Talons have great applications outside of FRC, Talons were created to cater specifically to the FRC market. So excluding game pieces, FRC isn't really killing the worlds supply of items. As far as things produced for FRC, I'm sure suppliers are working to hard to remedy such supply problems in the future.

Over the years the shortages change with the game. Some years its game peices other years its batteries another year it's motors. This year it was hex bearings and they are not exclusive to first robotics

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by AlecS

Not to hijack the thread, but both of those items are created specifically for FRC. Hex bearings don't exist outside of those produced for FRC. While Talons have great applications outside of FRC, Talons were created to cater specifically to the FRC market. So excluding game pieces, FRC isn't really killing the worlds supply of items. As far as things produced for FRC, I'm sure suppliers are working to hard to remedy such supply problems in the future.

I think what Shaun is trying to say is that oftentimes these FRC specific items(which is technically the "world's supply") get completely sold out, leaving the teams that rushed to get these items at an advantage over teams that waited a bit. The point is, with longer build season, this allows suppliers to produce more items so that teams don't have to instantly buy so many of them so early in the season.
EDIT: Shaun clarified with what I said above

However, I very much agree with what Alan Ostrow said, about how if there's an open build season, you will see much less disparity between designs. The minibot is an example, and, while I didn't personally see many Ri3D clones, I have heard that certain events had many of them. While I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, what prevents a team, competing only week 6(this example is avoiding the future implementation of district systems and is an extreme) from making no serious design progress in their robot, only to wait until week 1 of competition to see what design wins, and from there on, completely copy that design? I think that with so much time to iterate, we'd eventually see so many clones...How many teams would have had 1114/67/217 style climbs if they had a full open bag time?

[Foster]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

IMO they should announce next years game at the finals of champs. This would make first cheaper and improve the quality of robots.

VEX Mentor here. What Nuggetsy suggests won't happen. RECF does this, reveals the next game at the Worlds Championship in April. Top teams spend the next months (May, June, July) building and designing. The New Zealand teams get into the swing across their winter (June, July and August) posting ideas, reveals, match results. North America and UK students go back to School in Sept, so build starts up in Sept/Oct. Early events like the Delaware VEX competition (19 October 2013, at the DAFB, (shameless plug)) have teams arrive that have spent the summer building.

Some get crushed and do total rebuilds in the next 4 weeks to meet again in late November and December events. (Thanksgiving? Super, a 4 day build period without school!!) Crushed again they look at the Jan / Feb season events. A last try to get to Worlds!. (Holiday break? I don't think so, too much to do. ) Meanwhile our friends on a pair of small islands in the South Pacific have entered Summer, no school, and a ton of time to build.

With a last competition date of the first week in March, teams and mentors are under pressure to get those last few berths. January, February, March: Build, hours spent by mentors, parts orders, etc. go up.

Let me interrupt this to give a huge shout out to IFI / VEX Robotics and their 1/2 price shipping during FRC build season. A huge bonus for VRC teams!

Finally March comes, teams have worlds berths, a chance to relax. Not quite, need to put a ribbon on that Excellence presentation, need to make repairs to robots, maybe build a front end posted, and lets replace that drive train too. Travel plans, wrangle roberteers, parents, robots, parts, etc.

You have arrived!!! VEX WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP!!! Compete, work on the robot, compete, more work, Excellence Presentation, compete and then:

Announcement of the next years game!!!! There, that was a lot easier than being an FRC mentor!

[Cory]

Originally Posted by DevenStonow

I think that with so much time to iterate, we'd eventually see so many clones...How many teams would have had 1114/67/217 style climbs if they had a full open bag time?

It would be impossible (or very close to impossible) to perform a hang like 1114 and 67 without designing your robot to do it from the start. Doesn't matter how much time you'd have to copy it, you'd still have to build an entirely new robot.

[nuggetsyl]

Even if a team coppied a design, the real question would be did they learn something? Reverse engineering is not always that simple.

[sgreco]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

Even if a team coppied a design, the real question would be did they learn something? Reverse engineering is not always that simple.

It's possible to do this now even with the with-holding allowance. You don't need to take your robot home in order to do it. In 2011, my old team (2079) built an elevator that didn't run smoothly and we had trouble calibrating it. We took the 35 pound with-holding allowance (I think it was 35) and built a completely new 4-bar linkage manipulator lightly based off of the design from 148 that we were heavily inspired by (our linkage used box tubing, but the dynamics of the system were similar). I still question myself as to whether this was the right thing to do, but we learned a lot along the way, and it made our competitive season more successful.

Long story short, even if you can't take your robot home, it's still possible to make drastic iterations that can be influenced by successes of other teams.

[scottandme]

Originally Posted by Cory

It would be impossible (or very close to impossible) to perform a hang like 1114 and 67 without designing your robot to do it from the start. Doesn't matter ho much time you'd have to copy it, you'd still have to build an entirely new robot.

1114 showed their working climb at a week 2 competition. Assuming you are qualified for CMP, that gives you 5 weeks before you have to crate and ship your robot to St. Louis. Only a week less than the "official" build season, and you already have concept and design proven. The 30 point climber is obviously a very complex example, but this would apply to every novel/successful design feature shown early in the season.

As noted, this already happens at varying scales - look at 2010 "ball-magnets", 2011 minibots, 2012 stinger/balancing aids, etc. 2168, 1218, and 103 all rebuilt their 2013 robots to a significant degree after their first event.

I could see this having the same effect as the wildcard rules. Why compete weeks 1/2/3 if you have no shot at a wildcard? Why compete week 1/2/3 if you have a unique and successful robot with features that others will then duplicate, negating your competitive edge? How many 469 clones would there have been in 2010?

341 rolled out of the gate in 2012 with a dominant robot that was made out of extruded aluminum. It was genius in game analysis and strategy, not mechanical design: most mid-tier teams with good controls mentors would have been able to build a reasonable facsimile without too much struggle. Would that be a good thing for FRC? I see the merit in going through iteration, redesign, etc, as crucial engineering fundamentals, but at some point wouldn't we see significant design convergence? Didn't 341 earn the right to plow through the competition?

Watching 341 last year motivated our team to take a much deeper look at the way we approach game analysis and robot design. Along with increase in-house manufacturing capability, we were able to build a relatively simple robot in 2013 that was highly effective, and very much inspired by the way 341 addressed the 2012 game. I don't think we learn those same lessons in 2013 if we're able to play knock-off in 2012.

[Mark Sheridan]

For me what burns me out is having to work during the week days. I have to fight traffic to get to my team and can spend up to an hour on the road. During a weekend, I get to my team's place in about 15 minutes.

I think given my circumstances, I would favor eliminating the 6 week build. I would much rather concentrate my time commitments to the weekend.

Also, our team is still struggling to get our practice bot and competition bot to behave the same. For the competition, robot, we sure could have used 20 minute on an official field or equivalent. For example, in LV we could not climb on one of the corners of the pyramid because a larger weld on a corner. We only practiced developed our climber on our pyramid which had smaller welds. Had we realized this sooner we would have made designee changes to fix this.

I figure a lot of teams would improve if they got to take their robots to a official field or equivalent and spend a couple hours honing their bot. Squeezing time in to do this on week 6 is not practical for many teams I know. Being able to do this on a week 7 or 8 would be huge.

Since I don't think this will change, we are going to keep on adding student and mentors to complete more tasks in parallel.

[Wayne TenBrink]

Ike was on to something when he asked about what it would take for teams to forego building a practice bot (which seems to be behind a lot of burnout).

I would like to see an expanded version of what we already have with the district system (FiM & MAR). I like the 6 week build season, but I would also like to see greater robot access during the competition season. The district model makes it possible to do both, while reducing stress on mentors, etc.

I would like to see a 10-12 hour "practice window" in the week preceeding each of the teams' scheduled competitions (up from 6 for FiM), and a 6-8 hour "fix it" window in the week following the competition. Non-district teams attending only one event could opt to use their "fix it" window prior to their event. I would keep the withholding allowance.

The out-of-bag time would be in lieu of the Thursday "practice day" at the competition. As an FiM team, I know that having the robot out of the bag in our own shop is always more useful than another day at the venue, and reducing the days off work to attend an event is a huge anti-burnout blessing.

PS: I think 6 weeks is a reasonal amount of time to brainstorm, prototype, build, test, drive, and tweak a competitive. Independent of the mentor burnout issue, I think it is good for teams enter the competition season with a machine that is their own "solution" to the "problem" the GDC gave them - a solution that they developed without the benefit of seeing how others play the game.

[Zuelu562]

Speaking to mentor burnout, 3623 is a relatively small team with slightly more mentors than students (the amount of mentors that worked on the robot is equal to the amount of students). Our schedule was "be there when you can, we'll be here Mon-Fri, 5:30-7:30, Saturday 9-3". One of our mechanical mentors could be there most of the week, but not weekends. The other mechanical mentor could only make Saturdays. Myself, the other electrical/programming mentor and another mentor could be there most days (I had to start missing Tuesdays due to my class schedule).

We were pretty toast after Bag. We were there for a total of 50-something hours that last weekend, and we bagged up a driving, scoring and hanging robot. We've determined that the schedule we used was really rough, and since we plan to expand the amount of students and mentors we have, we wanted to change our approach.

We're going to be implementing subteams, Mechanical, Programming/Electrical, and Spirit/Nontechnical. Certain subteams meet certain days of the week (Mechanical meets Mon and Wed, Programming meets Tues and Thurs, Spirit meets Friday), and everyone meets on Saturday. Students can ask a mentor to come in on an off-day for their subteam if they want to work on something and they can get to the club.

We chose this approach for several reasons. Some of our students can't get to the Boys and Girls Club on certain days, so this allows students to fulfill their "attendance" requirement while not being able to devote a full week, and allows those with vehicles or able to come to the club every day of the week to give what they want to. This also allows our mentors to not have to come in every day, but get very specific work done, and also gives us room to expand our schedule as necessary.

As a 6-year FIRSTer who has never won a regional or been to championships, I'm in favor of the 6 week deadline. It's a point of pride of the program, even if it's an illusion for some teams. We still work on parts, code, finishing things up like that, but I have never in my 6 years of FIRST took an entirely new mechanism to an event and installed it. The 6-week deadline may go truly the way of the dodo if/when the district system continues to proliferate, and I've started to question it since all events (sans-champs) went to Bag&Tag.

For now, let it live. Give teams direction, and the teams who want to do everything possible will do everything possible to get better.

[Tetraman]

So much for the "Everything being possible in 6 weeks" speech.

This is actually something that has come up in 174's recent Mentor/Adviser meetings. I find this thread one of the best discussions in a long time, but I agree to the CD bias.

I'm in the camp of requiring the 6 week cutoff. If you want to extend build season, I'd only make it 7 weeks. Anything more than 7 weeks is too much time.

If you want additional build time, then here is my idea: The game is released as normal, and from that day we get all six or seven weeks. The "last day of build season" is actually thursday of the Week 1 regional/district events. Teams are still allowed to build all throughout the competition season until a "bag and tag day" when teams must bag and tag their robot. The following week would be the State/Region championships, and then the Championship. The idea is that there would be a "final build day" which would be before the championships.

[Chief Hedgehog]

I don't think this discussion going anywhere. I think we have a great system thus far. But let's expand on two options:

Option 1
For those opting for a more 'equal footing' for all teams I would suggest this:
1. Pre-determined build time (whether it be 6 weeks or 9 weeks).
2. Bag and Tag until your first Regional/District.
3. Inspect and weigh robot at registration; no allowance for additions there forth.
4. Compete with the robot as is.
5. Your first regional/district is your Championship Qualifier. Bar None.

Option 2
For those opting for no bag and tag:
1. Release next years game at the conclusion of Championships
2. All teams have equal amount of time to design and build.
3. Can qualify at any number of regionals, no need for wildcards.
4. This allows for nearly 10 months of build time.

From what I understand, FIRST is not about equality or fairness, it is about honing talent, gathering resources, and meeting deadlines. As a secondary teacher, I can attest to the sad reality that our students know nothing about hard deadlines. If FIRST is to make a ruling between the two aforementioned systems (because if we keep arguing, we will end up on one of the two sides), I am for the strict deadline.

I love the current system where a team still has the opportunity to create a bot that is unique but still has the ability to adopt and adapt. If FRC chooses one of the two aforementioned options, we are going to end up with robots that are either inconsistent (option 1), or are all the same (option 2).

Have at my arguments, I am also a wrestling and soccer coach and have thus thickened my skin.

Good Luck!

[Chief Hedgehog]

Originally Posted by 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.

I am sorry, but I disagree. In a supply versus demand market, it is the supply side that dictates the market price. Given a 10 month window, this is a very limited time frame for most manufacturers.

If FIRST increases the time frame, and RI3D as well as successful teams continue post their robots accomplishments on the intertubes, more teams will be demanding the same products that are being used by the successful team's robot. Therefore, more demand will be put on the devices needed to perform to that level.

An elongated build season means we will have clones and the teams with the best manufacturing resources will have the edge always. I do not wish to compete in an event where all robots are the replicas of RI3D or of 1114. I want my students to compete with a robot that they designed to the best of their abilities and resources.

I am sorry if I misinterpreted your message nuggetsyl.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog

Option 1
For those opting for a more 'equal footing' for all teams I would suggest this:
[snip]
5. Your first regional/district is your Championship Qualifier. Bar None.

Option 2
For those opting for no bag and tag:
[snip]
3. Can qualify at any number of regionals, no need for wildcards.

I REALLY want to pick on these two items right here.

For Option 1, you don't go far enough. No way, no how. If you want an equal footing, you need no more than one or two consecutive weeks of competition. (More than that and teams have time to plan strategy if not new parts that they might not have on their robot and realize they need.) You also need zero raw materials allowed into the event for repairs (they might be used for upgrades that were previously planned out on a practice robot). And those competitions come within a week of the bag day so that teams don't have time to get a practice robot running and get drive time. I'm not going to suggest a maximum budget, as suggested in another thread.

I will also say that FLL does it that way at their lower competition levels--first event of a given level is the one that counts for the next level up, which is the one that may feed the World Festival if you go in the right year. Guess what's just a little bit frustrating? (OTOH, as I recall, there's another level farther down that has no bearing on whether or not you qualify to go higher.)

Just to nitpick Option 2, I don't think you quite understand the wildcard system. Any given team can currently qualify at any number of events (provided they attend and compete there, and provided that they aren't in MI or MAR which have their own version). The wildcard system provides for filling slots left by teams that qualify again by a particular method at later events. One team can't fill more than one slot.

My other objections to Option 2 have already been expressed, both by myself and by others.


I actually think that the strict deadline is the way to go; however, I also see the proposed option as being limiting to Inspiration--and no sports model ends the season at one event. So...

Option #3:
-Hard bag deadline, 6 weeks+3 days (the way it is now). If the robot is not in the bag, the team is given a penalty ranging from loss of out-of-bag time to being disqualified from events. Discovery of such a fact after events are over results in carryover of the penalty to the next year.
-Out-of-bag time: 10 hours during the week before the event, including Saturdays. No more than 2x out of the bag, which must be sealed until the event after 10 hours or the second time the robot goes back in.
-Half-day of practice at regionals, mainly to check field connection, followed immediately by qual matches.
-Bag up robot after event if not done with season.
-Unlimited raw materials, batteries, bumpers, control system; 15 lb of spare and upgrade parts.

I think this is the best balance of inspiration and deadline and opportunity to qualify to advance.