The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Tetraman]

Originally Posted by Siri

Will "everyone" really try to go full out for 4 months? Why? There are much, much better ways to "keep up with the Jones'" that don't risk harming our end goal.

Teams/mentors/students currently burn themselves out going full out for 6.5 weeks to keep up the the jones... so Yes. Yes there will be teams that do this. Yes there will be teams with students and mentors who give up day and night to build a competitive robot over 4 months.

Originally Posted by Siri

... I don't think I buy the argument that competition will force teams to burn themselves out, if only because it should be a foreseeable situation (is it not? why not?) and has a negative impact on competitiveness.

Why not? Because it's apparently a problem now at 6 weeks of time. Why would it be 'solved' if we go to 8 weeks, or 12 weeks?

So X number of teams/mentors/students have the wrong idea about meeting times and schedules? Yes, yes they do, my own included. Is that a problem for those individual teams to solve, or a problem for FIRST to solve? I don't know, but it needs to be solved, and an extension of time to build will only increase the problem.