Why do we bother bagging?

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I think the point is you're not guaranteed access to money and sponsors simply by dint of hard work.

Quite true.

But you're also not guaranteed to build a great robot just because you have money and sponsors. I don't see a very high correlation.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I think the point is you're not guaranteed access to money and sponsors simply by dint of hard work. It'd be pretty naive to deny the roles of socioeconomic status of team members and luck in determining team resources.

In most other aspects of life, I agree that socioeconomic status is a huge determinant of success, but I don't honestly see how that can be the case in robotics. Unless team members of financial privilege are literally giving thousands of their own money to their teams, everyone seems to be on a roughly level ground in FRC. You start with not a lot, you develop relationships with sponsors and donors through outreach and communication, and the more work you put in the better your result. For me, it's a far more idealized version of what the real world is "supposed to" be, and that's one of the program's greatest strengths.

The way socioeconomic factors come into play with regards to robotics teams is if the region the team operates in as a whole is economically advantaged or depressed. In those cases, there's simply more access to potential sponsors and donors by virtue of the location. There's not a lot that FRC could do about that, and what they can do (max robot cost limits, etc) is already being done.

If someone could explain to me how "rich teams" somehow get money more easily, or how financially privileged team members result in an easier time finding success, I'd love to hear it. I'm willing to have my mind changed here.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I think the point is you're not guaranteed access to money and sponsors simply by dint of hard work. It'd be pretty naive to deny the roles of socioeconomic status of team members and luck in determining team resources.

I can agree with that and I don't deny it (much of my undergrad work involves studies in this), but implying that it is as easy as just asking parents to drop in money is also naive. Also, teams shouldn't be raising money during build season anyway. If that is a problem, they should raise money all year.

I guess I'm pretty biased on this issue, but my anecdotal evidence comes from helping teams from Philly, Trenton, Newark, Texas, Cali, Louisiana, Oklahoma, etc. all teams who thought they were in too tough of a place to raise money or find resources. It takes a long time and a lot of baby steps to create change. I think too many teams aim for too much too quickly and get disappointed when they can't acheive their goals.

A shop full of 5 axis waterjets and Mazaks won't build a thing by themselves, to be long term competitive you need talented people. As the FIRST program stretches outward, fulfilling it's ultimate goal, the "unfair" factor will grow. As poorer schools from distresed communities become more involved, the disparity in technical assets will become even more clear.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

Quite true.

But you're also not guaranteed to build a great robot just because you have money and sponsors. I don't see a very high correlation.

This too.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

But you're also not guaranteed to build a great robot just because you have money and sponsors. I don't see a very high correlation.

You don't see a high correlation between team access to resources and robot quality?

I disagree heartily. Money and sponsors certainly don't guarantee team success, but they offer a huge amount of help along the way.

Anecdotally, this year 4464 had a robot budget of $1000 and about 7-8 regular students. We were only able to hobble together the parts for a working robot due to the extraordinary generosity of several local teams. Moreover, the mentors made a conscious decision to step back and give more responsibility to the students, which we think gave them a much more valuable experience.

As a result, while our robot was mechanically finished and fully wired on stop build day, we have not had time to debug essentially any of the code. If we had a couple thousand more dollars in our budget, we would have a huge advantage over our current position, simply by being able to test. No withheld parts, no redesigns, simply access to a copy of our robot to test code. This is not possible with our current team, both due to monetary constraints and limited manpower.

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

You don't see a high correlation between team access to resources and robot quality?

I disagree heartily. Money and sponsors certainly don't guarantee team success, but they offer a huge amount of help along the way.

I guess things are different out here in Arizona. We do pretty well without spending much money at all on our robot, or on equipment. Last year we were top seed, and won the AZ regional, with a robot made with a dozen students armed with nothing more elaborate than a table top band saw, and a few cordless drills. With two engineering mentors and a couple teachers, taking turns watching over us.

I've also spent some time hanging out with 842. I'd say robot building and competitive success have a lot more to do with the particular people there are on a team, than with socioeconomic factors, etc.

[DanielPlotas]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

I wonder if team size correlates with attitude about the Stop Build Deadline. Larger teams can have more students actively involved with building a robot if they build two of them. Smaller teams might lack the manpower to build a practice robot before bag day. I'm just not sure how best to craft a survey in order to get useful data.

we effectively have three people working the entire six weeks, so we have absolutely no chance of building another one unless we completely finish the first one in about four weeks.

[Racer26]

Originally Posted by Galaxy Knuckles

You know....except money too. Which is a huge issue for the poorer teams who can get no funding and whose parents aren't rich enough to supply them with money either meaning that to even compete or get tools they have to spend almost as much time fundraising as building.... It changes nothing as far as the time spent a majority of the time just the cost. Fairness was never the issue here I (outdatted logistics? maybe fairness...no)

Every team has equal abilities to fundraise.

There are many teams in poor areas of the country with big sponsors, and many teams in wealthy areas with very limited sponsorship.

Sponsorship dollars on most teams generally has little to do with the wealthiness of the team's location.

In my experience: The teams with little sponsorship tend to treat FIRST as "that thing we do for 6-12 weeks in the winter/spring", and the teams with big budgets tend to treat it as "a year round thing with off-season competitions and learning in the fall, and constantly fundraising and approaching companies"

Most of those big-budget teams? They worked hard for those dollars, during the off-season, so that when it comes time for build season, they don't have to worry so much about money.

Back to the original topic of this thread:

I agree with an earlier poster that because of how bag+tag is run, there is literally nothing but my honour saying that the robot was in the bag on stop build day and hasn't left its bag until competition. I'm certain that there are at least a few teams who cheat, and bag it the night before competition and lie about it. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I don't really care if teams do this. They cheapen the experience for themselves, but they don't really affect other teams by doing so, since big-budget teams just build a practice robot and achieve essentially the same result: more time to work.

The bags make robots unwieldy to move, and achieve nothing (plus add a whole bunch of headaches for inspection when transporting the robot tore a hole in the bag, etc). The same thing could be achieved by still having stop build day, and just making a mentor sign off that they've been hands-off since stop build day.

For that reason, I would be in support of abolishing the bag, but keeping a stop build day.

[DanielPlotas]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

You don't see a high correlation between team access to resources and robot quality?

I disagree heartily. Money and sponsors certainly don't guarantee team success, but they offer a huge amount of help along the way.

I think its more being able to consistently year after year produce a competitive robot. every once and a while, a small team will have a very good design and perform well, but the next year, more than likely they wont repeat this success.

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

You don't see a high correlation between team access to resources and robot quality?

I disagree heartily. Money and sponsors certainly don't guarantee team success, but they offer a huge amount of help along the way.

There might be some correlation, but I don't think it's high. It's my personal belief that excellent engineering mentors are enough to overcome any disparity in money and resources. This is the type of engineer and mentor I strive to become. There are a lot of teams that have large budgets and resources, but still don't field winning robots. There's plenty of teams that live on $50-$100 microsponsorships and buy parts out of pocket that do field winning robots. The difference lies in how these teams use their resources and how they build within those resources. Excellent teams will then work hard to increase the amount of resources they have.

[EricWilliams]

Originally Posted by Racer26

Every team has equal abilities to fundraise.

There are many teams in poor areas of the country with big sponsors, and many teams in wealthy areas with very limited sponsorship.

Sponsorship dollars on most teams generally has little to do with the wealthiness of the team's location.

Disregarding everything else about this discussion, (I'll leave that to much smarter people) I just can't let this go without comment. Socioeconomic and demographic disparities between groups is something that will always exist - that's just the way it is. And while no plan/solution/method is going to make things "fair" for the (wonderfully) diverse teams that compete in FIRST or anything else, everyone certainly has a responsibility to understand how those disparities affect all groups to facilitate the greatest amount of opportunity available to everyone.

My personal observations after having lived in vastly different areas of the US: the biggest difference between (and I'll focus here on STEM extracurricular activities, but it's a fairly universal concept) affluent areas and struggling areas is community/parent engagement. Please keep in mind this a generalization required to investigate and solve problems, so counter-examples remain exactly what they are: exceptions to rules.

Things like lack of reliable transportation, inability to take time from work, and household responsibilities are not mitigated simply by "hard work" and "working in the off-season". They are real, persistent problems, and they directly relate to a team's ability to fundraise and prepare for success. When your parent base can't mobilize around and in support of your team, when you don't have the community connections to potential corporate sponsors, and when schools are more worried about simply keeping classrooms running instead of providing resources for extracurriculars, "hard work" becomes a fairly moot point.

FIRST has been smart in promoting lower-bar-for-entry programs (Jr.FLL -> FTC), but even at those levels the differences are clear. Not that there aren't a ton of examples of great teams from poorer areas or struggling teams from wealthy areas (Chicago FTC Qualifier and SBPLI FRC Regional are my personal examples), but simply identifying exceptions is not good enough. We need to find out what makes these exceptions possible and evangelize it.

If it's culture change and opportunities to succeed we (as the FIRST community) seek, sweeping these disparities under the rug of "you get what you put in" is not only unhelpful, it's downright damaging.

We're all passionate about great STEM education and enabling young people to be successful in life, but that passion has to be extended to all corners. And if there are problems in delivering those opportunities, everyone should be aware of them and work to overcome them.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

I guess things are different out here in Arizona. We do pretty well without spending much money at all on our robot, or on equipment. Last year we were top seed, and won the AZ regional, with a robot made with a dozen students armed with nothing more elaborate than a table top band saw, and a few cordless drills. With two engineering mentors and a couple teachers, taking turns watching over us.

Last year, 4464 were top seed and rookie all-star at DC. Even with our limited means, though, we were far better off than most other rookie teams I've seen.

It doesn't change the fact that right now, compared to teams with more resources, we're severely hampered by our budget limitations in a way that could be completely avoided if the bag and tag rules were more sane. I simply do not see the benefit of pretending to have a hard deadline when teams with sufficient funding and manpower can effectively circumvent it. If the deadline is to exist, it should be equally stringent for all teams. You should not be able to, as was said earlier in the thread, "buy time."

[MrForbes]

One of our alliance partners last year built a practice robot, and they ended up spending Thursday rebuilding their competition robot. The robot did good, they were our first pick, but they also seeded poorly because of that darn practice robot causing them to spend Friday doing the practicing they should have been doing Thursday.

btw that's a team from a socioeconomically disadvantaged area, struggling to get funds.

I think that each team's situation is quite different. I don't see the bag rules helping or hurting too much...it seems to me that there are a few teams that have their act together enough to take good advantage of the "long" build season, but those teams are the same ones that would be figuring out how to win without the "long" build season.

In other words, it doesn't really make much difference in the grand scheme of things. I personally like the deadline.

[nxtmonkeys]

How about this: Build a practice robot drive frame over the summer.Then, you can spend less time on building the practice robot. Then, you can spend more time on the real robot.