FTC and FRC question

[magnets]

I disagree that FTC is the absolute best way to prepare, but it still helps students learn about working in a team and designing a robot.

In my opinion, the best way to prepare is to build a simple robot, like a box on wheels using parts from older robots. You learn about machining, programming, and electronics, as well as FRC specific robot design.

[Rosiebotboss]

The single best thing a team can do to prepare its students for FRC is to start them in FLL and build a "farm system."

[jijiglobe]

So our FRC team started a smaller FTC team to practice during the pre build season. The idea was to give new team members something to do and to help them learn some engineering. It was a catastrophic failure. The team's faculty supervisor couldn't put in as many hours as the FRC build season (this is to be expected) and the FTC robot was unfinished when the FRC build started. A group of team members decided to leave FRC to join FTC. Our team prioritizes FRC so FTC is always allocated a miniscule budget and everyone ends up the worse. I'm sure some teams with a larger budget and a little more time might be able to pull it off.

[Pault]

I disagree. While there are definitely some benefits to FTC during the preseason, there are much better, more applicable things that your team could be doing with its time. The best thing that you can do during the preseason by far is build a practice robot. Everything that you learn will directly carry over to the build season. Also, it allows you to gauge your team capabilities. (For example, if your team has a weak CADing division, you should avoid complex mechanisms, or if your team struggles with machining, you should try to use as many COTS parts as possible).

The last, and coolest, benefit of a practice robot is that you get to test out new things. If your interested in mecanum or octocanum or butterfly drive or swerve, you can put it on your practice robot. If you have some crazy, out of the box idea that's never been done in FRC, you can go ahead and use it on a practice robot. Doing this kind of stuff for the first time on a competition robot is usually a horrible idea and will often end badly, but doing it on a practice robot allows you to see if it will work and get experience doing it so that you can then redo it on a competition robot confidently.

[CENTURION]

I mentor both FRC and FTC. I've never liked looking at FTC as "Intro to FRC" or "FRC lite", I think it's a good program on it's own, especially for students who participate in lots of other extra-curriculars, and don't have the free time it takes to commit to FRC.

BadgerBOTS, our organization and corporation (with the same name as the FRC team that spawned it), has five FTC teams running under it, completely separate from the FRC team. These teams are made up of students from area high schools who generally don't have time for FRC, or who just wanted to do their own thing.

That all said, I don't think FTC is the best thing FRC students can do to prepare for the FRC season. In fact, I think it's a pretty bad thing to do to prepare.

First off, the FRC and FTC seasons overlap.

This means one of two things: You work with FRC-level dedication and speed to finish an FTC robot before the FRC build season starts, and essentially double the amount of stress and time you have to put into that part of the year. Keep in mind that your mentors (who often have busy lives of their own and barely enough time for FRC as it is) will have to do the same. Definitely an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" scenario when that season changeover hits.

Also, depending on when your regional FTC competition is, you may have to take time out of your FRC build season to go compete. Yeah, it's only a couple days, but just like FRC regionals, the students and mentors involved will be quite exhausted by the end.

Or, you spend less time during the FTC season (though keep in mind that it is still a pretty hefty amount of time) to have your FTC bot mostly finished when FRC starts, and then try to work on both simultaneously. And there's just about no scenario where I can see both of them succeeding. The FRC season is crazy enough as it is.

Our FRC team prepares for it's season by working on various off-season projects. This year, we've been building a dedicated "DemoBot" to be taken to schools, conventions, businesses, community events, and general outreach events.

Originally Posted by jijiglobe

So our FRC team started a smaller FTC team to practice during the pre build season. The idea was to give new team members something to do and to help them learn some engineering. It was a catastrophic failure. The team's faculty supervisor couldn't put in as many hours as the FRC build season (this is to be expected) and the FTC robot was unfinished when the FRC build started. A group of team members decided to leave FRC to join FTC. Our team prioritizes FRC so FTC is always allocated a miniscule budget and everyone ends up the worse. I'm sure some teams with a larger budget and a little more time might be able to pull it off.

I think your funding issue stems from the fact that you expect both teams to pull from the same budget. If you have students who have moved completely to FTC, then I think it's time that you start treating the FTC team as a separate entity, responsible for it's own fundraising, and recruiting it's own mentors. That's how we handle it anyway. That said, we're a pretty large organization, between FRC, FTC, FLL, farm teams, summer camps, and other classes, we work with several hundred students a year.

[nathan_hui]

I would argue that it depends on the background of the team. FTC is a great way to get started in competitive robotics. It provides a less stressful version of FRC with significantly lower complexity and associated costs, while permitting a similar team structure and organization, albeit at a smaller scale. However, FTC needs to be operated properly in order to be a proper stepping stone to FRC. FTC needs to emphasize disciplined design, teamwork, and organization in order to be an effective stepping stone for FRC. One of the biggest problems with FTC is that because it is so simple, hacked solutions actually work. That generally doesn't hold for FRC due to the complexity of the challenge and the involved systems. Teamwork is essential, even though FTC is small. A sufficiently skilled worker can make an FTC robot in under a week. But in order for FTC to be effective to the students, they need to be able to enforce a top-down design structure for their robot - that's generally the same structure that FRC will use (or rather, it's what successful teams would ideally use). Organization is also important, even though with FTC there's not really a stop build date. Organization helps the FTC team get more design iterations in, and disciplines them to the rigors of the 6 week build of FRC.

That said, FTC is not necessarily the be all end all solution to training for FRC. Again, echoing previous posts, actually building a robot is essential to getting team members up to speed. If one were to structure a team such that first years and a select set of upperclassmen spent the entire year building and learning different FRC designs/skills/systems/etc, and then the first years were then promoted to being part of the build team, that would also give the students the experience and skill set needed to field an effective FRC team (assuming, of course, that said set of upperclassmen were capable of actually teaching and organizing the students). If we develop this system further and establish a sort of mentor/upperclassman mentor/underclassman trainee structure, where rookie students are mentored by skilled upperclassmen who were then mentored by the actual mentors (sort of how an Air Force ROTC squadron is organized, with the cadre mentoring the wing leadership and professional cadets, who in turn lead and mentor the general military cadets), we have a self-sustaining system that adequately prepares students for leadership and design roles within FRC.

Overall, integrating FTC into an effective training pipeline for FRC is probably the best thing to do, if FTC needs to be a part of the pipeline. Otherwise, FTC takes away at least a year of FRC specific training, unless summers are adequately used, in which case again, FTC needs to be well integrated so that the transitions between years are smooth and well used.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm speaking on the assumption that students will progress through at least a full season of FTC before ever starting FRC, not jumping from FTC to FRC in a single year.

[Chris is me]

There are thousands of students who prepare for FRC without FTC experience who go on to play with the best in the world. "FTC is the single best thing our students can do to prepare for the FRC season" is just not true.

That doesn't mean it's not a good thing, or not a key component in many robotics programs, but the idea that FTC is a "magic bullet" for FRC preparedness is just false.

I think ideally, a fall training program should accomplish a few things. New students should have some training and experience with their preferred discipline (fabrication, prototyping, design, programming, etc). They should have some experience at some sort of competitive robotics event. Finally they should start to get an idea of "how to win" - how great hard work is correlated with success. FTC is a way to accomplish these things. VRC is another. Going to a fall off-season and running training seminars is yet another. There are quite a lot of ways to make this work.

Personally, I really think that FTC has moved away in the past several years from being an accessible and simple robotics competition to a difficult, complex, custom-machining-required cousin of FRC. When all you needed was COTS parts and your imagination, FTC showed such strong promise... But now it's far more of a cost, time, and experience commitment. I guess it's a bit more relatable to FRC, but at the expense of new students being able to leap right in.

[audietron]

I believe that FTC is a great program on it's own as others have already said. I do think it can help in getting an idea of what FRC is like but otherwise it should be on it's own.

Ftc takes up time in the fall and if a team is good enough they will go to state which is during the Frc build season for us. With ftc (like frc) people can never stop building or improving their robot so it does take up the build season a lot.
Frc can always help mentor ftc during the fall to help out with future frc members (if they choose to move in to frc or continue to improve in ftc) and help with communication skills.