The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Ed Law]

Originally Posted by IKE

I would argue that you need a "Stop Build Day" for a reason slightly different han what most are calling for. I have been involved in a lot of project related actitivites, and a lot of project related teams. Almost to a rule, there is a "last minute push" on the projects to meet deadlines. Sometimes the project is small, and the last minute push is a long day of effort. Sometimes an all-nighter. Sometimes a hard week. Sometimes a long tiring month.
Currently Build season is a 6 week push, and at the end of 6 weeks, msot teams have a fairly reasonable prototype that generally has some functionality. Giving them additional access points and time will imrpove the quality useability of that prototype, to an extent. If the access is too universal, and if the access is too open, then there will be a shift towards teams "changing the due date". While many argue this would be better, I actually think for a large portion of teams, this would be significantly worse.

I would personally keep the deadline as is, and do a "hands off week". Hug you family, feed the dog, ... hands off the robot in the bag. If you make a practice bot, go crazy, but for everyone else, get some rest.

I would then allow for 6 hours each week of unbag time weeks 1-7. This time can be used for practice, test and tune, fix what got broekn in the finals at the last event.. Whatever you choose. It is just that the robot can only be out of the bag 6 hours (or 4 or 78 or 12 or...), and no blocks shorter than 1 hour. FiM uses 2 hours, and it is a bit of a pain. 1 hour minimum would be more flexible and allow for practice.

In short, keep the "Stop Build", but allow for more test and tune windows. Test and tune windows should make it very hard to decide whether or not to do a practice bot. I personally believe 6 hours each week would be right around the level necessary to make it a hard decision.

I really like this idea. However I don't think it should become a hard decision whether to build a practice robot or not. It should be a easy decision for most teams but for the super competitive people, they will decide to build one anyway. I would like to modify a little. After the stop build date, have the one week of hand off time for everybody on the competition robot. Then if a team has no event in a given week, they will be given 9 hours in one hour increment. If a team has an event to attend, they will be given 6 hours because they will be able to access their robot during competition. This will even the playing field a little for teams who does not have the resources to attend multiple events and registered for a late week event. If I have 9 hours a week, I will not build a practice robot which as I said before will allow me to reduce the number of meetings from 5 to 4 per week. Putting some limit will prevent people from building a brand new robot for championship after watching week 1 or 2 events. There should still be a 30 pound limit or higher to prevent completely new robot.

Let me expand on the reason behind this proposal.
1) There is no change in the deadline, 6 1/2 weeks. FIRST can continue to advertise that this is a 6 1/2 week program. People who like a deadline because it is how it works in the real world and they want students to learn that will get what they want.
2) One week of hands off time will force everybody to take a break from the competition robot and rest. This will also allow international and teams that have to ship their robot to register for a week 1 event with no disadvantage. Supercompetitive teams and individuals can continue to work on their practice robots. Some teams can concentrate on their awards submission and preparation during this week.
3) 9 hours of access in weeks that teams do not have events will give them enough time to not have to build a practice robot. This saves time and money and makes some people happy. This gives teams more time during build season. Some will choose to meet less and some will choose to do more with that extra time. It also allows room to use those extra time to catch up due to snow days for some unfortunate people. This 9 hours access time will also help rookie teams and less resourceful teams to get help from other veteran teams to get their robot to work as it was designed to. This will raise the bottom like Jim said earlier.
4) 6 hours of access in weeks that teams have events is the same as what we do in Michigan and MAR. It works well and reduce stress because it is more efficient use of time when you are at your own shop and practice facility. This increases the number of teams ready for inspection on the first day.
5) Keeping withholding allowance and maximum access time per week will prevent teams to copy other designs and build a completely new robot. That will alleviate some people's concern.
6) For those people who do not want an extended build season. They can register for a week 1 or 2 event and finish their season early. If they qualify for world championship, it is up to them whether they want to continue to improve their robot or not. If they want to improve their robot, they can only work 9 hours a week on the robot. That will keep them from working on the robot nonstop for those who do not have self control. If they don't qualify which most teams don't, their season will be over and they can go back to doing other things.

Feel free to propose anything and modify these if this proposal does not make you happy. If you are neutral about it, please support it so other people can be happy, okay?