The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[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).