2014 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by coalhot

After volunteering at the Greater Pittsburgh regional this year, I can say that I truly miss the days of regionals in the MAR area. You got a full day to work out issues, get inspected, play real matches that are being reffed as they will be for the rest of the event. And if the practice day is run correctly, each team gets ~8 matches to play in.

This also leads me to question why the MAR area needs the district system. This may be a topic for another thread, and has probably been beaten to death already; but seeing that there are 110 team in MAR, with 55 making it to MAR championships (and I don't recall there being that much growth in rookie teams this past year), why not do another regional into the pot that used to be there already? (Philadelphia and Trenton)

$ee, there are plenty of rea$on$ a$ to why the di$trict $y$tem i$ better for the MAR region.


Also more play/many (myself included) love that a district system drastically "seasonizes" FIRST.

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by Steven Donow

$ee, there are plenty of rea$on$ a$ to why the di$trict $y$tem i$ better for the MAR region.

Also more play/many (myself included) love that a district system drastically "seasonizes" FIRST.

However, $ome team$ near the population center of the di$trict have to $hell out quite a bit more ju$t to afford going to all three of their event$ in one $ea$on that are all over an hour away. The decrea$ed co$t of running di$trict$ has now in$tead been put on the team$ for their travel expen$e$, and I'm not $ure that'$ worth it.

I think the Mid-Atlantic Region has a lot of growing pains to attend to as far as their events go. Fortunately, the President of MAR, Gene O'Brien, has been very receptive to suggestions recently, and I'm looking forward to see what improves for 2015.

[Ben Martin]

Originally Posted by coalhot

After volunteering at the Greater Pittsburgh regional this year, I can say that I truly miss the days of regionals in the MAR area. You got a full day to work out issues, get inspected, play real matches that are being reffed as they will be for the rest of the event. And if the practice day is run correctly, each team gets ~8 matches to play in.

This also leads me to question why the MAR area needs the district system. This may be a topic for another thread, and has probably been beaten to death already; but seeing that there are 110 team in MAR, with 55 making it to MAR championships (and I don't recall there being that much growth in rookie teams this past year), why not do another regional into the pot that used to be there already? (Philadelphia and Trenton)

Coming a region outside the district system into the MAR district system, I much, much prefer districts. Our district practice day is far more productive with six hours of unbag time prior (this has replaced a full day of practice, and this is one of the last things I would want to give back for more practice matches). I am a firm believer that having six hours of unbag time available in our shop before each district event has dramatically increased our team's competitiveness the past two years, and it is one of the reasons that many teams have found they can get away with not having a practice robot (a big cost savings).

The district system allows more teams to make it into eliminations, more teams the opportunity to win awards, and more matches is a huge, huge plus. Also, I lost less work days and students lost less school through going to our two district events than I did going to the Greater DC Regional or MAR Champs this year. Districts are one thing I would not change.

For ourselves, I'm not worried about travel costs. We are on the western fringes of MAR, and we have hotel and transportation fees for every in-season competition we go to. That was five competitions this year, and we may do the same for several offseasons as well. We have a pay-as-you-go model, which scales well with the number of competitions each year.

[pabeekm]

One small issue I had with this year's game (and don't get me wrong, I loved Aerial Assist) was how difficult it made scouting. Last year, scoring totals, accuracy, basic drivetrain statistics, and climbing results were about all you needed to know about a robot. This year, however, you needed to follow individual teams very closely on a match by match basis (what they did with the ball, how fast their mechanisms were, how smart the driver is, how much they fouled, how good their partners were, etc.) because very often the match outcome and how much was scored were out of the control of any one teammate. Also, you didn't need to just know how "good" a robot was, but had to be really aware of what roles they could fill. This complexity is good in that it encourages teams to watch the field and heightens the strategizing, but it really hurts teams who don't have the resources or infrastructure set up for watching every robot in every match of such a complex game.

At champs this issue was especially evident because with 100 teams on a field, some of those teams in the top tier had never even played together or against each other and were unaware of what the others could do! One thing they might be able to try next year (if the game is as complex as it was this year) is use the extra space to host more, smaller divisions (maybe 60 - 70 teams each). This would make keeping track of the teams much easier, and cause teams to play with each other more often on the field.

[Rebecca Wasmer]

Originally Posted by compwiztobe

Sort of related: Anyone know what happened to Spyder for Archimedes on Friday night? Somehow about 100 of the matches got deleted and there were only 22 teams in the division... Kind of threw me off.

On Friday night the Archimedes division had to play 4 replay matches. That evening the rankings only had 22 teams in the division because it only contained data from those 4 replay matches. Which caused a TON of confusion for many of my rookie team's parents back at home. They thought we were ranked 8th and the students spent a lot of time trying to explain that we were really in like 30th and the rankings for the evening were just wrong. :/

[Rebecca Wasmer]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

To add on to this, I think if FIRST is going through the trouble of adding in more opportunities for judging of awards, we need to be getting better feedback everywhere. I was very disappointed and had a confused look on my face when I took the awards lead down to pit admin to collect the nonexistent feedback, but going back over the feedback sheets we did get at Alamo and Virginia, I wish we got better feedback.

FIRST has my email and contact info for myself and the other contacts in TIMS. 422 went to championships to see how we stack up against other teams and learn from them. While we had the opportunity to do that with the robot, it was very disappointing to not get that same experience from judges of the highest honor in FIRST. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that we are miles behind 33, 340, 503, 604, 1108, 2486, or the Hall of Fame teams when it comes to program quality, but I want to know exaclty where we need to be improving and to see if we are missing anything.

I know under the new structure judges are overworked, but I would like the detailed, digital feedback offered at one of Spectrum's events (Dallas or Lone Star?) to be available at every event including Championship.

Being an alumni from 340 who personally worked on Chairman's, an ex-website judge, and a mentor for many teams now I cannot even begin to tell you how important feedback is! Each year Dean gives homework, but that's often not the only guideline that the judges are looking for. When I worked on website and Chairman's for 340 the information from the judges was imperative when it came to not only improving for next year, but also knowing what we did well. It made it so the team rookies could also read/watch what was submitted and know the same thing. When the website award still existed and I judged, being able to tell the teams what they did and did not do well helped me judge them better.

[Chris Hibner]

Here's my biggest negative:

No published or adhered to field or FMS requirements. I made a post near the beginning of February about this: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...07&postcount=3

My post above is with respect to hot goal timing. Given that there are no requirements, it's no surprise that hot goal timing was an issue all year.

Without hard requirements, there is nothing to test against. With nothing to test against, you can expect that your end product will not work as your customers expect. If hard requirement were published for the field (hot goal timing in particular) it would have been clear to Manchester that the field was not meeting the expectations of the competing teams.

Furthermore, how are we supposed to develop a control strategy to play the game without us having the field requirements?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Ok, I hate to be that guy but one of the lessons FIRST/RDs need to learn - Vegetarian food != just salad. I hate to complain about volunteer food but it's a small issue when I don't have time to run out and grab food somewhere else. Eating just salad for 2 meals a day for 3 days is not healthy. We have the same dietary requirements as the rest of you. If providing a vegetarian option is a problem let me know in advance and I'll make plans accordingly.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Ether

It would be far preferable to put it in the Match Results Page instead of the Team Standings Page, so we could have the info for each match rather than just the totals.

Or better yet, provide an API to the data instead of a web page that has to be scraped.

I think a bigger issue is giving fuller and better access to the various results pages for scouting systems to access them easily.

Also, there were serious problems with results pages going down or not updating, including at Worlds this year. At the two most popular regionals, Waterloo and Silicon Valley, results were largely unavailable the entire first day. That doesn't make for good publicity.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Ok, I hate to be that guy but one of the lessons FIRST/RDs need to learn - Vegetarian food != just salad. I hate to complain about volunteer food but it's a small issue when I don't have time to run out and grab food somewhere else. Eating just salad for 2 meals a day for 3 days is not healthy. We have the same dietary requirements as the rest of you. If providing a vegetarian option is a problem let me know in advance and I'll make plans accordingly.

Here, here, for teams and spectators too! This is becoming a bigger issue as food production being recognized as a large contributor to climate change risk. (I can send folks stats if they are really interested.)

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

I think a bigger issue is giving fuller and better access to the various results pages for scouting systems to access them easily.

I thought that's essentially what I was saying ?

Fuller = make all scouting-relevant data that FMS has collected available (instead of summing/combining the data in ways that cause a loss of useful detail)

Better = an easy-to access documented and stable API instead of scraping web sites whose formats may unexpectedly change mid-season.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Ether

I thought that's essentially what I was saying ?

Fuller = make all scouting-relevant data that FMS has collected available (instead of summing/combining the data in ways that cause a loss of useful detail)

Better = an easy-to access documented and stable API instead of scraping web sites whose formats may unexpectedly change mid-season.

Mid Season? Mid event... We've been asking for this for YEARS.

[Toa Circuit]

Originally Posted by Loralyn P

Something small that I would really like to see (and I have no idea why they didn't do it this year) is clarification on the rules of the Dean's List interview, and a better feedback sheet. Currently, there is no mention of the time limit in the Dean's List section of the Administration Manual, and the feedback sheet was the most minimal thing I've ever seen. At least put in a "you can improve on" section!

This.
I had a whole one comment on my sheet... It was along the lines of 'keep spreading FIRST'. :/

I do have to say though- the whole interview process seems kinda a lottery. I mean, an essay and a five minute interview (that from what I could tell, was just to serve as clarification for details)? How much does that really tell? Unless you are going solely by statistics (number of teams started, assisted, what have you)...

In 4H (in my state), for the highest awards we get we have to keep thoroughly documented records, which are assesed at a county level, then a state level, and then there is an (approximately) hour long interview to complete, that gets recorded and debated over several times to select ~30 students from the state to send to congress.

Something a little more rigorous seems due if the award is truly to select the absolute cream of the crop...

(This isn't to say the winners of this years' award didn't earn it. I don't know if they did or not. I'd enjoy being able to read some of the essays that get submitted! I think they gave a brief summary upon presentation in 2012, IIRC)

Other things that are negative... I'm not too keen on the PR that FIRST is pushing. FIRST drew me in because it wasn't about pop culture, political correctness, and almost everything that was pushed during the closing ceremonies. It was about promoting producerism; getting students involved in the real world. Now it's too much about inspiring. It's a bit like setting gasoline on fire. It makes a nice big pretty fire that a lot of people will notice, but you could be using that gasoline to power your car and get you somewhere. People also notice fast cars. I really don't think we need to make FIRST loud- we need to make it profound and visible. People need to be joining this organization for the right reasons- and I personally think that if your main reason for joining is because a pop star endorses it... you're doing it wrong.

But that's the nice thing about FIRST- ultimately, the teams make up the heft of the organization and are the real face of FIRST.

Also, integration between TBA and FIRST scoring? YES PLEASE!

[Doug Frisk]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Ok, I hate to be that guy but one of the lessons FIRST/RDs need to learn - Vegetarian food != just salad. I hate to complain about volunteer food but it's a small issue when I don't have time to run out and grab food somewhere else. Eating just salad for 2 meals a day for 3 days is not healthy. We have the same dietary requirements as the rest of you. If providing a vegetarian option is a problem let me know in advance and I'll make plans accordingly.

That's more of a venue specific thing than related to FIRST specifically. You get what the venue provides when you order a vegetarian option. That said, the regional events I volunteered at had fairly decent vegetarian options, though I don't specifically recall seeing the vegetarian options in St. Louis.

Remember though, that a lot of these events are run on a shoestring. In Duluth; the Lake Superior and Northern Lights regionals they didn't even have coffee for the volunteers because it wasn't in the budget. Despite the fact that I'm pretty sure not serving coffee is a human rights violation I muddled on through.

So while I encourage the Event Managers to work so that the vegetarians get more than rabbit food I think that we as volunteers need to understand that some things just aren't within the control of the Event Manager/FIRST>

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by DareDad

Remember though, that a lot of these events are run on a shoestring. In Duluth; the Lake Superior and Northern Lights regionals they didn't even have coffee for the volunteers because it wasn't in the budget. Despite the fact that I'm pretty sure not serving coffee is a human rights violation I muddled on through.

So while I encourage the Event Managers to work so that the vegetarians get more than rabbit food I think that we as volunteers need to understand that some things just aren't within the control of the Event Manager/FIRST>

That's why I even offered to take care of it myself, they just need to let me know. I'm more making a bit of noise to raise awareness among folks that vegetarians exist and have the same dietary requirements as the rest of you, we just cannot eat meat. Salad isn't a meal for anyone.

And, maybe all food should just be vegetarian then, turns out meat is quite expensive. Maybe then they'd have budget for coffee.