The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Bob Steele]

Originally Posted by rick.oliver

I’ve been reflecting on the many posts which infer that we must choose between FIRST FRC excellence and having a life. I think that can be said about any endeavor. Think about it, those at the “top” of any field or profession are highly committed and focused. It may appear to some of us that they don’t have a life or that perhaps their priorities are misplaced or they have extraordinary capacity.

I think it is a reasonable inference to say that those of us posting on this thread are striving to be excellent. I do not want to sacrifice quality and competitiveness in my own program and I certainly do not want FIRST to implement rules which inhibit my ability or anybody else’s ability to be as great as they want to be.

I will respect another person’s choices when it comes to their level of commitment to their program and I neither need nor want FIRST or anybody else (outside of my wife) dictating my level of commitment to our program.

I want to see FIRST FRC continuing to grow in both number of teams participating and the quality and competitiveness of their robots. I believe that the mythical 6 week build season is as much a deterrent to both of those goals as anything else. More rules which are more constraining are certainly not going to help, in my opinion, ease the burden of mentors or students. More things like Ri3D would go a long way toward accomplishing the goal of increasing competitiveness. Those things may also help ease the burden of many mentors, too.

I'll say it one more time, the only stop build date should be the ship date to Championships.

This is very well said. In my opinion, let teams be whatever they want to be. Your team should define how much they want to work and how they balance it with "burnout."

Inspiration isn't determined by the time a team spends working on a robot.
It is determined by the quality of the experience for the students and mentors.

If your team wants to work once a week and Saturdays, that is fine. If your team wants to work 3 shifts for 6 weeks... that is fine too...

I would have an issue with the stop build date being the ship date to Championships if I were a team that qualified in my only regional and it was in the first week of competition. The stop build date is when you stop building.

From my experience, it is MORE frustrating to NOT be able to change the robot via the 30 lb allowance than to allow it.

I started this before that allowance, when we had to actually ship the robot "complete". I remember going to events where a team completely rebuilt their robot in the three days of the event so they could compete better in their second event... I also saw many robots that couldn't do much at all. In my opinion the gap between great robots and poor robots was much bigger then...of course the "great" robots were not as good as the ones we have today...

We have all had sleepless nights thinking about robot and team performance. It is somehow in our nature to take this seriously.

Teams will always use whatever rules are given and work within them to do the best job that they want to do.

I think of the bag day as a point when the team "takes a breath"
Of course we all continue to iterate after that point... the 30 lb allowance allows ALL teams to have a better robot. Imagine how the robots at your events this year would have competed if there had been no 30 lb allowance.

Do you think it would have been better or worse?

The allowance is a step in between allowing teams to continue working on their complete robot or at least come up with something they can put on later.

I would be in favor of allowing teams the 24 hour period before each event to put on their 30 lbs of allowance... and then no allowance at the event...

This would prepare teams for the way that 2 day district events will be conducted and give everyone a chance to drive the robot for some practice before arriving at an event. It would also eliminate the need to worry about the allowance at events.

I would like to see some rule that allows bringing in 1 for 1 replacement pieces (to replace broken structure). This would give teams the opportunity to fix structure pieces at an event if necessary..

We all work hard... we compete hard...
I think that is the essence of why FIRST is so powerful.. the team building that goes on during the process. We stretch our minds and resources..