The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[dtengineering]

I was originally planning to post my expression of support for the six week build period... but Jim's well-researched posts, in particular, have caused me to re-think this. Having an extended build season with some form of milepost along the way might be a worthwhile experiment.

One thing that bothers me during tech inspection is that there are teams that clearly have not read the rule book. It would be great to announce the game, publish the rule book, and then require teams to pass on online rules test before receiving their KoP. (I wish I could remember who originally posted this suggestion... I think it is brilliant.)

I've also thought that it would be good to have a pre-build, design-only period, where teams are allowed to design, model, sketch and plan, but not actually build anything. Unfortunately, this would be difficult to define and impossible to enforce... however with a longer build period I could have told my team, "no one builds anything for the first two weeks". As it turns out, the more experienced we got at the game, the more time we spent on CAD and the less time we spent re-building... more time for design would have been nice.

It would have also been nice to have more time to spend refining the control system. We tried building practice bots, but usually by the end of build we were so burned out (and often getting things ready for our first event) that we never really used them to full potential. Perhaps we could have teams document their robot photographically, uploading the photos on a certain date, and allow no physical changes to the machine other than wiring and sensors between that date and the team's first event. (At which point they could bring in 30 pounds of withholding allowance and make physical changes at the event.) Again, it would be awkward to define, and difficult to enforce, but our programmers deserved more time with the machine. Heck, even a few more days of driver practice would have helped sometimes.

It was also difficult to find working professionals who could make the comittment to attend build sessions three or four nights each week. Without that kind of comittment, it is hard to have a real impact on robot design, especially in the first couple weeks when prototypes and models are created, evaluated, modified and replaced in very short order.

Perhaps most disappointingly, however, we were so busy building our robot that I was only able to get out to assist other local teams a few times during build season.

There are good things about the six-week window, and once we learned to build the best robot that our team could build, rather than trying (unsucessfully) to build the best robot that 1114 could build, it actually wasn't as crazy as it was our first few years. Like I say, I was originally planning to post my support for continuing the six-week limitation.

But I think the arguments put forth in this thread have convinced me that it might be worth trying something new.

Jason