The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[rick.oliver]

Originally Posted by Bob Steele

...

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. ...

To clarify, when I wrote "ship date to Championships" I had in mind that the ship date would be the Tuesday after the final Regional/District Championship and would apply to all teams which qualified for the Championships.

[rick.oliver]

Originally Posted by Jared341

Not the same thing. They have dedicated testing facilities, simulators, etc. The beauty of "engineering done right" is that we can do amazing things and be very confident that they will succeed the first time. But only because simulation, testing, and incremental improvement are such fundamental parts of the engineering design process.

Agreed! Could not agree more.

[Mark Sheridan]

I love the withholding allowance, its saved me a bunch of times:

766:
2005: added anti-backdrive at SVR
2006: added low goal score at Davis, improved at champs
2010: added better ball magnet at Davis
2011: add minibot at SVR

3309:
2012: changed shooter at LA, better bridge tipper at Madera
2013: added 30 point climber at LA


I did not always need to full withholding allowance but a few of these years completely changed the performance of the robot. I would be pretty disappointed if it went away.

[Nate Laverdure]

Originally Posted by EricH

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.

I had a similar idea back in 2007 (I keep things like this in my "Bad Predictions" file):

Originally Posted by Nate Laverdure

Idea: Extend the build season by a week, and then kick off the competition in phases. My sample build season schedule:
Week 0 Sat -- Release VKoP; manual sections released: Communication, Team Organization, At the Events, Robot Transportation, The Awards, The Tournament, The Robot, Kit of Parts
Week 1 Ongoing -- Several game hints are released throughout the week
Week 1 Sat -- Kickoff presentation @ Manchester NH; game simulation released; manual sections released: The Arena, The Game
Week 2 Tue -- Supplemental KoP items may now be purchased and ordered
Week 2 Sat -- Physical KoP arrives; robot components may now be fabricated
...
Week 8 Tue -- Shipping!

That thread has some other relevant thoughts in it, also. It was about creating ways to force teams to design and THEN build, which I think is very relevant to the problem of build-season burnout.

Keep going with this thread-- the discussion is very valuable.

[Madison]

After reading this thread with interest and trying and failing to discuss my own experiences and feelings about burnout several times, I've begun to think that abandoning the 6-week build period would be a worthwhile experiment.

For me and my team, it might alleviate a few problems that are a big source of my burnout at the end of a season.

-- It'd allow mentors that are unable to commit to the schedule required to be responsible for major robot components to be more helpful. This is a BIG problem for me right now; I have very few mentors on the team that are willing or able to put in the time required to be completely responsible for the successful design and manufacture of major robot systems and I end up taking on all of that myself.

-- It'd allow students that aren't able to meet with us frequently to be more involved and take on a larger burden of responsibility throughout the season. We have a pretty big problem with consistent attendance outside the core group of students and tasks often require a lot of rework because plans/ideas/problems are not communicated well by students who aren't consistently present.

-- It'd allow our sponsors to offer more to us because our tight deadlines won't put so much pressure on the day-to-day operation of the their business. Getting parts from our sponsor in a few days is impossible and getting them in a few weeks is sometimes a challenge, but if we could safely wait three or four weeks, we'd be in okay shape.

-- We'd save a ton of money. We spend about $3000 on parts per robot each season and probably $750-1000+ on expedited shipping. If we were able to work continuously on one robot in place of building a second, that'd represent significant savings to our team. For this alone, I'm on board.

-- I might get to take one day off each week to do normal person things. That's exciting.

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by Madison

-- We'd save a ton of money. We spend about $3000 on parts per robot each season and probably $750-1000+ on expedited shipping. If we were able to work continuously on one robot in place of building a second, that'd represent significant savings to our team. For this alone, I'm on board.

This is a big point for me. The amount of money spent as a collective on expedited shipping (even with gracious discounts offered by AndyMark and IFI) has got to be astronomical. This is money we are quite literally throwing away as it relates to the 6 week deadline.

I would certainly welcome the cost savings...

-Brando

[Mr. Van]

Ok- I've actually read this whole thread. I think this is what I've got:

Some mentors/coaches are saying that they are stressed because they spend too much money building a practice robot and have to rush on Thursday mornings to install their 30 lb. withholding allowance mechanism. If only they didn't have to do these things, but could continue working on the actual competition robot, their lives would be less stressful and there would be less mentor burnout.

There is a simple solution here: Don't build a practice robot. Don't use the 30 lb. withholding allowance.

Ah, but you want to stay competitive with those who do. There are teams willing to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of mentor-hours refining their robots with every nanosecond of time available. These teams turn out the most competitive robots, and to keep up with them, you have to do the same...

Will these teams really put in any less time or effort? Of course not. The primary difference (should we extend the official build season) is that these teams will have an easier time doing what they already do - and they will push the envelope even further.

Those of us trying to keep up with the "elite" teams will be in the exact same situation - little will change. Except that we will loose teams because we will loose mentors who can't keep up with the extended time demands.

For those teams that are struggling just to get a robot finished, I believe that teams that having difficulty building a working robot in 6.5 weeks will have difficulty building a robot in 8 or 10 or 16 weeks.

FRC is a game of mentors. The best teams have the best mentors. Period.

Many teams have teacher/mentors who MUST be at EVERY meeting or work session. They can not miss a single day because the team can not meet or work unless they are there - per school district rules. Loose those mentors, loose the team.

Lastly, the only students who have commented on this thread have pointed out that they have other demands on their time outside of FRC.

I'll say it again: FRC is a game of mentors. If you want to maintain and expand the program, you must ensure that the mentors are there - ready, willing and able to do what they do. Any expansion of the build season will lead to loosing mentors - in fact many already find the extensions that so many seem to need to "be competitive" to be so stress inducing that they are forced to make the choice between being "competitive" and mentoring at all.

Maintain the limited build season.

Remove the withholding allowance.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Mr. Van

Maintain the limited build season.

Remove the withholding allowance.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

You, sir, are my hero.

[Jim Zondag]

So, after all the back and forth in this thread, and all of the anecdotal and revisionist commentary on the history of what we do and why, I decided to do a little archeology. I went back and reviewed the actual game manuals from the early years (92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98). There is no available 94 Game Manual I could find in any of the archives.

In 92 and 93, there were no machine access restrictions at all. There was a kickoff, and there was a tournament. That was it....make a robot and show up to play.

In 95 we see the first indication of limits, as FIRST expanded to have more than one event. The rules of engagement were the same in 95 and 96. The excerpt from the 1996 manual is below:
-------------------------------------
Shipping Deadlines
To provide every team, regardless of events in which they participate, approximately the same number of design and build days, the following shipping regulations and dates apply:
New England Tournament (Manchester, NH) Competitors
1. Teams may either ship of bring their machine with them to the tournament.
2. After the tournament, all teams competing in the National Championship will have five days to make repairs and/or changes to their machines, within all rules outlined in this document
3. By end of business on Friday, April 5, machines must be picked up by a shipper for transport. This will give all New England teams five additional days to work on their machines.
National Championship participants only
1. Teams must ship their machines by end-of-business on Tuesday, April 2, 1996.
2. This will give all teams competing in only the National Championship an equal number of days to work on their machines as team competing in both events.------------------------------------

So, if you notice, this was not done to limit involvement by participants. It was done to try to equalize the number of workdays depending on if teams went to one or two events. You were allowed to work on your robot all the way upto and through the regional if you chose. Since the CMP required shipping robots to Disney, equalizing dates were imposed. Teams had 5 days to work on their robots after the first event before being required to give it up.

Actual "shipday" rules were not imposed until 1997. From the 97 manual:
----------------------------------------------------------
1. Machines MUST BE OUT OF TEAM HANDS by 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb 25, 1997. This means you many ship the robot or drive the robot to the drayage/storage facility of your first event by 5:00 p.m. on February 25.

Regional Competitors
1. After competing in a Regional, any teams competing in another event will have two days to make repairs and/or changes to their machines, within all rules outlined in this document.
2. Machines MUST ARRIVE as the next site by the next Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.
-----------------------------------------------
After talking with some oldtimers from this era, they believe that the main reason for these changes in 1997 were due to LOGISTICS concerns. When events started to be scheduled on back to back weekends in 97, FIRST had to reduce the amount of time teams had to do repairs in order to make sure the crates could get to their destination in time.

Eventually (2002) the weekend hold back period was eliminated completely, again this was mainly to avoid the logistical complexity of hundreds of teams trying to all ship from various locations and instead allowed FIRST to control all of the logistics of all of the machines from the beginning to the end of the season by shipping direct from event to event. Again, the removal of these hands on repair and improve windows had nothing to do with limiting access by team, it was for LOGISTICS.

Phase forward to today. ALL of the Logistics for ALL of the teams are now entirely up to the teams and not any centralized control. So why does FIRST still maintain these rules? Seriously, they are nothing more than an artifact of an obsoleted system. Everyone who put the original rule in place at FIRST HQ is gone, yet these rules remain. Teams now attend anywhere from 1 to 6 events per season, so equalization of access time is functionally impossible, yet these rules remain.
So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

+1

[Tetraman]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

I'd say half and half. It's not smart at all to just keep doing things because thats how they have been done, but I am still in the camp that the rules as they exist (with some tweaks) are the best way to go.

To argue for why an "open access" build is in my opinion wrong for FIRST, is because of the competition schedule. Consider that there was open access to the robot at all times. Some teams don't have their first Regional event until week 4 or 5. A good majority of teams in those week 4 or 5 regional have at least been to one other event. I would argue that the teams who have been to a previous event have a massive advantage over those who hadn't.

Teams that know how their robot plays in a game of first and can correct it over the course of 2 to 3 weeks have a gigantic advantage over those who have so many more extra weeks of build and gameplay footage but no knowledge on how their robot actually does with 5 others on the real field. I'd argue further to say that in this scenario the best teams will HAVE to make week 1 event if they want to have any sort of competitiveness for the future events.

Open build would give too much advantage to teams with the capability to travel long distances to their events or have events nearby for attending both a week 1-3 and week 4-6.

Keeping the robot out of the hands of teams during the competition season maintains that robots and teams can be as equal as they were at the end of the competition season since the beginning of it - but doesn't stop teams from fixing their problems and getting better over time. This year so many teams got better as the events went on, but it wasn't overwhelming to push out teams who hadn't got a taste of action on the field.

I think the 30lb allowance is fine. It allows for robots to evolve and can keep teams busy, if they want to be busy, during the competition events but isn't that much unfair as being able to redo half of a robot in 2-3 weeks.

[Jim Zondag]

In 2013, despite all the successes of all the teams represented on these forums, the Median OPR of the league after 1 event played was 10.3.
Over 1200 teams had a net contribution of 10 points or less per match. This level of accomplishment could be achieved in Ultimate Ascent by simply building a kit chassis with two stationary hooks on top. Since HALF of the league cannot achieve this basic level of play in their first outing, it is very hard for me to understand statements that say that we are giving teams enough time to be successful. We are not. 13% of the league has a sub-zero OPR at their first event. This means that our league is producing over 300 teams per year who NEVER EVEN SCORE AT ALL in their first event. This is a design failure of our system. (and I doubt than any of those teams are represented here).

Sure, many of these teams would still not be successful if we gave them more time, but many of them would get much better. Look at the data. After two outings the median MORE THAN DOUBLES to 24 points per team per match. This is huge. The average of the top teams does not change very much, but number of negative almost completely disappears.

What this is telling us is that with some time to work on their machines, get on a playing field, get help from other teams, and benchmark other's solutions,
HUNDREDS of teams move from a position of NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY, to a position of BEING ABLE TO POSITIVELY CONTRIBUTE to their alliance's success. However, since 1400 teams only played once this year; many, many teams never get this opportunty to improve. And because of this, many of them fail and do not return to the FRC. And this is the real problem. The most difficult place to start a FIRST team is at a school where they previously decide to quit FRC in the past. Our current system is somewhat designed to kill teams early in their life cycle.



These trends are essentially the same, year after year after year, regardless of game design. When registration closes next fall, take a look at where all of the teams who drop out of FRC fall on these charts. The key to improving the sustainablity of FRC is to get teams to a reasonable success plateau early in their team history, ideally in their first season. Then they are likely to stay. Right now the FRC system works against this goal in many ways.

Some of the people on this post say they may quit if the rules were changed, however we already have a system which actively kills teams by the hundreds each year. Which is worse?

[s_forbes]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

... HUNDREDS of teams move from a position of NOT BEING ABLE TO PLAY, to a position of BEING ABLE TO POSITIVELY CONTRIBUTE to their alliance's success. However, since 1400 teams only played once this year; many, many teams never get this opportunty to improve.

I think this may be a misleading graphical representation of the time input vs performance for the reason you stated here. I'd suspect many teams that put in the effort to raise the funds to attend two regionals also put in more effort to build a robot that performs well. Their performance isn't based on playing time at regional events, there's just a correlation between the effort spent building a high performance robot and the effort spent raising funds for multiple regionals. I do agree that robot performance increases if a team has the opportunity to attend multiple regionals, however, and also agree with the point you're making.

With the way our team operates during the build season, I would prefer to have no bag day. We build a practice robot to get more tweaking time in, and in doing so we waste a lot of man-hours and resources just to build the second robot. With no bag day, and no need for a practice robot, we would be expending fewer resources to get the same performance out of our competition robot (which would allow us to take more days off during build season).

With the amount we spent doing fast R&D and building a practice robot to work around the bag deadline, we could have potentially gone to another regional instead (if it was priced similar to district events).

[Tristan Lall]

A couple of methodological points, just to be rigorous about this:

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Over 1200 teams had a net contribution of 10 points or less per match.
[...]
13% of the league has a sub-zero OPR at their first event. This means that our league is producing over 300 teams per year who NEVER EVEN SCORE AT ALL in their first event.

How are fouls being accounted for, if at all? As negative points? Could a portion of those 300 therefore be scoring fewer points than they receive in fouls? (This is of course still awful, but it doesn't mean they didn't score.)

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Sure, many of these teams would still not be successful if we gave them more time, but many of them would get much better. Look at the data. After two outings the median MORE THAN DOUBLES to 24 points per team per match. This is huge. The average of the top teams does not change very much, but number of negative almost completely disappears.

Isn't that confounded by the likelihood that many of the worst teams only participate in one event (and thus their badness isn't reflected in the event 2 statistics)?

To measure the actual improvement, we'd want to separate out the event 1 performance of teams that participate in 2 or more events, and compare that to those teams' 2nd events. (And even after doing that, you wouldn't expect this 2-or-more-week group to be representative of the 1-week teams, because attendance at a second event—especially outside of district play—is probably strongly correlated with greater resources and organization.)

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Our current system is somewhat designed to kill teams early in their life cycle.

I think "designed" is probably too strong a characterization. It's nevertheless completely fair to say that the system is pretty good at it.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

I think this may be a misleading graphical representation of the time input vs performance for the reason you stated here. I'd suspect many teams that put in the effort to raise the funds to attend two regionals also put in more effort to build a robot that performs well. Their performance isn't based on playing time at regional events, there's just a correlation between the effort spent building a high performance robot and the effort spent raising funds for multiple regionals. I do agree that robot performance increases if a team has the opportunity to attend multiple regionals, however, and also agree with the point you're making.

Jim, can you do the same thing comparing 1st and 2nd event just Michigan and MAR teams? I have to imagine it shows the same trend.

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

So ask yourself, are we really doing something smart with the machine access rules, or is all of this just a collection of old rules, imposed for obsolete reasons which have been forgotten?

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Some of the people on this post say they may quit if the rules were changed, however we already have a system which actively kills teams by the hundreds each year. Which is worse?

And if we do it for a season and it does really end the world as we know it... who says we can't go back?

Originally Posted by Tetraman

Open build would give too much advantage to teams with the capability to travel long distances to their events or have events nearby for attending both a week 1-3 and week 4-6.

I absolutely disagree. Closed build season gives the 2 event team at least 8 matches on the real field, plus a few practice matches, PLUS 3 days to work on their robot for their event registration. Meanwhile a team that is not competing does not get to practice, AND gets no time to work on their robot. Multi-event teams HAVE a huge advantage as is. Instead of leaving 1 event teams to be sitting ducks, moving to an open build season at least lets them learn, make changes, and most importantly practice like multi-event teams.