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.

[JB987]

An unresolved question seems to be whether or not burn out is the result of total hours spent working on robots over +/- 4 months or compression of hours forced into a 6.5 week primary build period that for many of us includes production of a practice robot as well. Sure, some teams will work to fill any extra hours made available if more open bag time is allowed (or the bag is eliminated)...but that will be their choice. Some teams like ours (having learned the hard way in 2010) will chose a work schedule that lessens the likelihood of burnout. Nobody is forcing a team to work for X amount of hours currently or in alternative scenarios previously discussed. Each team needs to determine what works best for them as things currently stand and would need to do the same should any aforementioned possible changes occur.
I would like to see choice opportunities expanded, not limited and would like to see more robot access opportunity equivalence between district and regional bound teams as well. My inflated 2 cents... and I am not speaking on behalf of our team (not all 987 mentors are on the same page regarding this issue ).

[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..

[Jaxom]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

Probably. Our practice robot this year fired thousands of discs, suffered numerous collisions with field elements while driven by a certain other programming mentor, survived a 63" fall from the pyramid, and got all sorts of scratches on the powdercoat and polycarb. We wouldn't want to compete with a worn-out robot.

You powdercoat your practice bot?!?!?!? THAT is either "attention to detail" or "<insert sarcastic, non-PC comment here>".

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by JB987

An unresolved question seems to be whether or not burn out is the result of total hours spent working on robots over +/- 4 months or compression of hours forced into a 6.5 week primary build period that for many of us includes production of a practice robot as well.

For me, certainly the latter.

[ToddF]

This thread has been an eye opener for me on many levels. It has been a little peek into the student work ethic, mentor work ethic and resources necessary for a team to transition from "really good" to "elite".

I, frankly, don't expect the rules concerning the length of the build season to change. What has been interesting to me is how the proposed solutions to provide breathing room exclusively focus on somehow extending the end of the build season. Thinking "out of the box", what about making a few tiny rule changes that would allow teams to begin sooner, rather than ending later? Now, I can just hear the chorus of, "We can't build a robot without knowing the game rules!" But, that simply isn't true.

Let me ask some questions. Would your team design and build a drive train (including bumpers) before the game rules were released, if it were legal to start building on, say, the first weekend in December? Could you be creative enough to build one which could be adapted to the game, whatever it ended up being? Would the rewards of doing so be worth the risk that it might not be perfect for the game and it might need to be modified? What rules would need to be changed for this to be legal?

Our team had a near disaster in 2012 because we didn't have enough mechanical mentors to divide between student subteams. We didn't have a functional drivetrain until week 5.5, and it nearly killed us. After the season, we devoted the summer to looking at this problem. The solution we came up with was to develop a drivetrain made as nearly as possible with COTS components. Under the current rules, COTS components can be purchased before the season starts. Our students practiced assembling, wiring and programming the 2012 summer drivetrain so they knew exactly how to build another one when it was legal to do so. We even worked with vendors so that certain necessary components, which would have been custom, were added to their COTS product line, and thus legal to pre-buy. On kickoff day, we were ready to go, and only needed to fabricate 4 axles from hex stock and some shaft spacers. All the rest of the drivetrain parts were COTS parts which we had pre-purchased.

Now, the new size rules threw a monkey wrench into our plans, but we were expecting that SOMETHING would have to be tweaked. So, we had our competition drive train running in two weeks instead of one. No big deal. No stress. No burnout. The drivetrain was mostly assembled and wired by rookie students who learned their skills in the fall. The more experienced students were available to iterate on scoring mechanisms for nearly the entire build season. Of course we worked like crazy during the build season, but we didn't come as close to burning out as we have in years past.

So, in summary, don't expect FIRST to change the rules to make things easier on you. To protect yourselves from burnout during the build season, change how your team works. Start thinking NOW about how the team can work less hard during build season. Are you doing skills development during build season when you could be developing skills ahead of time? Are you fabricating parts during build season because you don't have time to purchase COTS parts? Are you purchasing COTS parts during build season that you could have purchased ahead of time? Is it better to have a perfect robot just barely in the bag, or is it better to have a pretty good robot with lots of time for practicing and tweaking?

This year we chose to do the latter, and from a robot design and build perspective, we were successful. Unfortunately, we forgot one little detail. Having time to practice does you little good if you don't have a place to practice. We are currently working to fix that problem, but that's the topic of another thread...

[DampRobot]

This thread seems to involve three separate questions:

• Would expanding the build season add or reduce the number of hours a team works?
• Is the 30 lb witholding alowance too much, and if so, how is it best reduced?
• Does robot work always expand to fill all available time?

I'm not ready to add my own opinion quite yet, but would like to remind posters that they are likely above average in the FRC community and that the majority of teams do not build a practice bot.

[JB987]

Originally Posted by DampRobot

This thread seems to involve three separate questions:

• Would expanding the build season add or reduce the number of hours a team works?
• Is the 30 lb witholding alowance too much, and if so, how is it best reduced?
• Does robot work always expand to fill all available time?

I'm not ready to add my own opinion quite yet, but would like to remind posters that they are likely above average in the FRC community and that the majority of teams do not build a practice bot.

1. If greater pre event access to robots was allowed you may not need much withholding
2.Possibly add hours, unlikely to reduce hours worked and for some, total hours may stay the same but spread out
3. It doesn't for my team anymore

[EricH]

Originally Posted by ToddF

Let me ask some questions. Would your team design and build a drive train (including bumpers) before the game rules were released, if it were legal to start building on, say, the first weekend in December? Could you be creative enough to build one which could be adapted to the game, whatever it ended up being? Would the rewards of doing so be worth the risk that it might not be perfect for the game and it might need to be modified? What rules would need to be changed for this to be legal?

I don't know. However, I do think they would seriously consider doing something like that.

Now, that said, the #1 risk is that the size changes and the team has a welded frame (or other very-hard-to-reconfigure frame). BAR NONE. Can moving stuff around be done to make it work? Sure. But for 90% of the teams that don't use the Kitbot or 80-20, and most that do, that size change will really make life miserable. I'm pretty confident that most teams would either adapt their drivetrain to the game, or play the game in a unique way.

So, let's assume that on 12/1/2013, FRC says "OK, folks, your base size for the year is a 160" frame perimeter, bumpers are between 2 and 10 inches, and you can start work NOW. The rest of the rules will be at your regularly scheduled Kickoff. Good Luck!" For the sake of example, I'll assume that the Kitbot/PDV option is applied such that the team will receive the Kitbot early in December, say as close as possible to 12/1.

If that was the situation, I think there could be massive, massive playability benefits for teams that opted to take a calculated risk. As follows:
1) Rookies could have a drivetrain, with several hours of practice, well before Kickoff, giving them time to troubleshoot potential problems beforehand (familiarity).
2) In addition, all teams opting to take the risk would be able to focus much more on object manipulation. More objects manipulated=more exciting game, which can lead to a whole trail of benefits that should be fairly obvious if you've spent more than a couple of years around FRC or CD.
3) If the only thing you have to do with the drivetrain/frame design is to tweak it, see #2. It may be much easier to tweak than to start from scratch.

However, the massive risk is that you get something like this year, where the variable robot shapes to contend with the pyramid and the loading zones wreaked havoc on many possible drivetrain/frame combinations that could have been worked out ahead of time. Or the assumed-legal motors were not legal after all.

OTOH... Using the real-life mirror, often you may have to adapt a "stock" design to fit a specific need. Under deadline. With limited budget/materials on hand. Hmmm... Sounds just about perfect for this little addition.

I like that warped thought. *wonders if Frank et al are looking at this thread and getting ideas*

[ehfeinberg]

Originally Posted by ToddF

This thread has been an eye opener for me on many levels. It has been a little peek into the student work ethic, mentor work ethic

Originally Posted by DampRobot

This thread seems to involve three separate questions:

• Would expanding the build season add or reduce the number of hours a team works?
• Is the 30 lb witholding alowance too much, and if so, how is it best reduced?
• Does robot work always expand to fill all available time?

I'm not ready to add my own opinion quite yet, but would like to remind posters that they are likely above average in the FRC community and that the majority of teams do not build a practice bot.

Took 172 posts for a student to weigh in on the issue. Tells you something...

See what you don't understand about us students is that we don't know when to stop. By the time build season is over, I find that a large majority of the students are burnt out and need to take a break from robotics. I know a lot of people who towards the end of build season already start to fall ill and fall behind on school. Making build season longer would just hurt these students even more.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by ehfeinberg

Took 172 posts for a student to weigh in on the issue. Tells you something...

See what you don't understand about us students is that we don't know when to stop. By the time build season is over, I find that a large majority of the students are burnt out and need to take a break from robotics. I know a lot of people who towards the end of build season already start to fall ill and fall behind on school. Making build season longer would just hurt these students even more.

I agree with this-- I'm an AP student that loves to take challenging classes (mostly because I just love learning about things), but even with my desire to do well in school, it's often difficult for me to balance the two-- and I do try. The problem is, of course, that building robots is so fun, and school can be, well, not.

As a student, I would have a good deal of difficulty restraining or spacing myself when it comes to a longer build season-- even when I'm not in the shop, it takes my mind off of whatever I'm doing that isn't robotics. More time would just burn me out more-- I don't get sick during build season, but I often get sick right after it because the adrenaline wears out.

In theory, I love the idea of a longer build season, but in practice, it would distract me far too much from my studies (and please, although I am a student and I'm complaining about focus issues, it isn't from a lack of effort on my part that I get distracted by robots; I'd much rather be able to focus on what I'm currently working on, but it's quite difficult, and that's coming from someone that balances far more honors/AP classes than I probably should).

That being said, I won't be too upset when districts finally makes its way to Minnesota-- I don't believe that longer build season and district system have to go hand in hand, or even that a longer build season necessarily follows the district system.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Tetraman

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.

So how do we fix it? I think we're on the same page that the burnout itself is the problem (despite disagreeing on whether a longer season would increase or decrease it).

Why is it that some of our own are working themselves to the point of diminishing returns, and how can we avoid/help this? For those of us that have started to avoid this, how and why? (For myself--I used to make myself sick in build, almost put myself in the hospital once--I think I just slowly learned that missing one night now is better than 4 later, or than screwing up something that costs 6.)

For myself, I don't agree with your final statement about a longer season making it worse--if the season is significantly longer. A week longer and I agree, I'd probably burn myself out the first year from not pacing correctly. But twice as long? If I look at our VEX teams or other analogs, I just don't see it happening. They tend to spread out and take it easier--sometimes too easy! So the end cram might be rougher the first year, but the season average less stressful. I don't have a method of proving it either way, though, so I suppose that pushes for the status quo until further evidence emerges.

---
As for how to deal with deadlines, I'd say learning how to deal with long deadlines is just as important as learning short ones--both being critical.

Students: yeah, I didn't know how to stop as a student either (see above)--that's what mentors are for. "Go sit down, call your mom, go home, and go to sleep." And to be fair, given the types of people that register on CD, it's no surprise there are more former students than current ones--you spend a lot longer as the former.

[pfreivald]

We mentors already give up a significant portion of our lives--indeed, many prospective mentors (and/or their spouses) consider it an unreasonable portion of our lives to the point that they are unwilling to participate in FIRST--so that our kids will be as successful as they are willing to work to be.

Extending the build season will result in our having to give up even more of our lives, even if it means that we work less nights per week during that time. Indeed, this is true even if we put in less total hours over those weeks.

The thing is, we mentors do other things. (I, for example, have a wife and pets I like to spend time with. I keep bees. I'm on a school board. My lawn does not mow itself, and my house will not fix itself. I write books (and have a contract to fulfill before the end of summer). I edit books (for actual money). Some mentors coach sports and direct plays and run marathons and draw comics and flip houses and fix old cars...) These other activities, like FIRST, often require significant sustained effort over a period of time in order to do them properly, and they already interfere with one another to a significant degree. (For example, if I try to do FIRST and finish a novel in the same three month time period, I will never do any work around the house or spend any time whatsoever with The Redhead(tm) or my pets--which is of course unacceptable.)

This means that they are not activities that can be reasonably accomplished at the same time as FIRST build season, even if the hours-per-week requirement of build season is relaxed.

People keep posting about burnout, as if what's happening is that mentors are literally collapsing from exhaustion, forcing their too-understanding spouses to drag their dessicated, dehydrated, swarf-and-pizza-grease-covered bodies home to rehabilitate in time for the next season. This is not the case (most of the time; for most of us). What's happening is that we're reaching our personal limits of what we're willing to sacrifice for our FIRST kids.

I already dislike the impact that the withholding allowance has had on my life--I wish it were smaller or nonexistent--but at least it puts a practical limit on the number of things we can iterate. Eliminating bag and tag opens up iteration to every mechanism, every bit of functionality; and anyone claiming that this will result in less "mentor burnout" is kidding themselves.

I want to be an "elite" team. I want The Grapes of Wrath to inspire that same level of jaw-dropping awe/abject terror on the playing field that OP and Simbotics and Miss Daisy and the Poofs and all the other truly incredible teams do. I sacrifice a great deal to try to make that happen...

I don't know. Maybe some of you are smarter than I am. Maybe you're more dedicated. Maybe you're better organized, need less sleep, have no pets or children, hate your wife and don't want to see her unless you have to, and maybe you have no interests whatsoever other than FIRST. But all of that is irrelevant as to whether or not any given mentor has reached their limit on what they're willing to sacrifice to field a competitive robot.

Just please, stop pretending that extending the build season will result in less sacrifice. It won't.

[Abhishek R]

To me, the idea here is that in 6 weeks, teams build a robot that is supposed to be ready for competition. The thing is, when you go to a regional, you see many robots which are just almost at the competitive level, who, given a little more time, would have had things in better shape.

Some of these teams only attend one regional, so by extending the build season, they get a better shot at making that regional more worthwhile. But suppose the team decided that now that they have more time, that they can take maybe one day off each week. Would the robot not be at the same level it would've been at before?

Yes, it does require discipline and planning to use time effectively. But teams are constantly trying to get better, and they would likely use this time to step their competitiveness up another notch. So I think that teams would use all the time they are given to make the most of their advantage.

[DampRobot]

While a lot of good points in this discussion were brought up, I'd like to remind everyone that possibly none of the suggestions here will be acted on. FIRST moves slow, and tends not to change the things that work well, albeit it not perfectly. A "6" week build season is not going to change. Withholding allowances might, and I could believe unlock periods before regionals as they do at district events. But I very seriously doubt there will be any form of open build season in the near future.

Yes, I know, six weeks burns people out (it burnt out me too). But I don't really believe that the problem is that build season is too short, or that bag day is too soon, or 30 lbs is too much. Allowing people to work longer will make many of them work longer; I'm convinced of that. Those that want to stay competitive at all costs will work every second that is provided and more, and those that just want to have fun will only meet a few times a week. Most will find some happy medium, as they do in the current system.

Also, 6 weeks is just one of those things that makes modern FRC what it is, just like 120 lbs, 60" tall (to start), 27' by 54" fields and 3v3 alliances. It's so much a part of the FRC system that it isn't going to change. And certainly not with the level of disagreement in the community that is expressed on this thread.

So what can Manchester do to, reasonably? One is make the withholding allowance smaller or larger. They might actually do this, but I still think 30 is a good number. It lets you iterate a subsystem, but not really change your robots overall function (what we did at SVR is an exception). Competition would feel a lot more futile if there was no withholding allowance. If you got something wrong, like a gear ratio for example, there would be no recovery. And that would make competitions and FRC in general a lot less fun and inspirational.

They also might allow everyone in FRC a certain amount of in-shop unbag time. I'd actually support this. It would essentially do what the first half of Thursday at competition is, but allow teams to utilize the time a lot more effectively. I don't really think it would change the nature of the game too much either. Maybe 6 hours or so, as it has been proposed in this thread, and as they do it at districts?

Overall, I'm not expecting much to change next year. But I've been wrong before. Mentors and students alike will always find ways to push themselves beyond their limits given the current scale of FRC (a build season longer than a week and shorter than six months). Ultimately, the decision about how much and how long to work is for an individual to decide.