2015 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[EricAnderson191]

The tournament structure, specifically average scores with no forgiveness for any mistakes, was atrocious. It's robotics - things go wrong. Consistency should be important, but if the first second of the first match can make your entire elimination run completely worthless, something needs to change. I never want to see the morale of a team so quickly killed again. I never want to have to make students play a match that they know is utterly pointless again. This must not be the new norm.

I disagree a bit here. A team at champs played at least 10-12 matches before getting to St Louis plus another 10 matches in their division. It is reasonable to think that most of the bugs would have been worked out. Knocking over stacks in elimination rounds is something that teams should have figured out how to prevent during practice sessions. The fact that some good teams who had been posting 200+ points in qualifications only to score 180 or less in elims points to plain old bad luck and issues with having drivers handle the stress of the competition.

At the same time, a bad match in Recycle Rush is pretty devastating. The X-Cats had a match at Finger Lakes where to get the average up our alliance would have needed a 300+ game while the other alliance needed to score, say, 50 points. Both scenarios were possible but not very likely.

[EricAnderson191]

I worked as a safety glasses attendant and had to deal with problems on Wednesday and Thursday.

On Wednesday before 5pm, pit access was supposed to be limited to 5 team members. There was no way to enforce this so most teams came through with everybody. This was a safety problem due to the large amounts of equipment being moved into the pits. Some monitors tried to enforce the 5 person rule which only annoyed people and slowed down the lines.

So for next year, if this rule/procedure is really important, FIRST needs to get buttons, ribbons, etc, to the load-in crew so convention center staff and FIRST volunteers can help enforce it. I do not care one way or another as I believe the fear of a person being impaled by trusswork or of actually doing the impaling will make people move thoughtfully.

On Thursday, one of the divisions was running late and we were told to shut down pits at 5pm on the nose. Ushers were there to do this and several teams who had legitimate business in the pits were denied. Some adults got nasty with the ushers who then called security. The issue was resolved when a paid FIRST staff member gave the necessary instructions to let people in.

On other notes:
- Men's bathrooms were gross after about 12noon. Leaky toilets, broken soap dispensers, and empty towel rolls ruled the day.
- Convention Center concessions were expensive. If I respect the operator's no outside food rule, then I expect not to have to pay $10 for a hamburger.

Meeting people was great and some the scenes of teams walking around will stay with me for a long time. After all, where else but an FRC even will you see a pig identify someone they know, give a hug, and then pose for a selfie?

Eric

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

YES!

I especially liked how in the very first interview she started off with "I'm here with... uh... I don't even know your team number" and she grabbed the interviewee's name badge to check.

Have you ever been in front of 30 thousand people? It's kinda scary. I had to announce my Judges at the NEU District (about 1/30th the size) and I was nervous. Heck, I forgot to announce who I was... I'm 26, have been speaking in front of crowds since I was 12. She was much younger.

Sorry, I am always going to defend someone who has the guts to go in front of people live, it's something most of us couldn't do.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Have you ever been in front of 30 thousand people? It's kinda scary. I had to announce my Judges at the NEU District (about 1/30th the size) and I was nervous. Heck, I forgot to announce who I was... I'm 26, have been speaking in front of crowds since I was 12. She was much younger.

Sorry, I am always going to defend someone who has the guts to go in front of people live, it's something most of us couldn't do.

I think being handed the mic after winning the Bayou WFFA was my worst adult* public speaking moment. I think I managed to stammer out a thank you to my students. We should probably attach that script to the Mobius Bearing to help out all the new winners.

*Worst ever was speaking as high school valedictorian at our ring ceremony. Towards the end I his a paragraph break and paused and I swear everyone held their breath hoping I was done. And then I kept going. I hope to never lose an audience that thoroughly again.

[JesseK]

My only unique negative this season stemmed from the ability to make a robot taller than our trailer and taller than our crates. It causes us many hours of headache to have to separate the vertical towers in such a way that they would work smoothly with the lift when reassembled. Then there's the whole issue about short people being unable to work on the upper part of the robot. Cap the starting height at 60" so we won't have the temptation to put ourselves through that again

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

• Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.
  ...
• Once again, FIRST totally dropped the ball on making sure people can follow events from home. The Championship streams were awful, and scores and rankings weren't event updating through most of the weekend. It is 2015. Why do PNW, FiM, dozens of regionals, or Chezy Champs have better streams than the FIRST Championship?

Neither alliance had a good QF-8. As I pulled our robot off the field it was utterly nauseating to hear it - it was so loud and seemed to be coming from most of the teams in the stands. It was so emphatic, as if the crowd felt they had actually done something to topple the Poofs. My team will attest to the fact that I'm not an externally-emotional guy - but that moment was gut-wrenching.

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

[Conor Ryan]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

There is nothing in the District/Regional Planning Guide about webcasts, maybe if there was we could get a little more standardization to allow for teams to host on behalf of the events. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ning-committee

The organizational expenses on FRC is ~$36 million for 2014, and it is difficult to make it loud when we can't tell Grandma to tune in easily (but at least she can go to one of two championships if she makes it!). I'm really hoping we can get more transparency into the financials so we can get a good estimate on what the organization spent on the concerts/FIRST Finale at CMP. I think most of the organization would rather have a substantially better webcast and production over those add on experiences.

[DarthCoder]

I'd like to see it go back to winning instead of average score, and I'd like to see defense return. We had so much fun playing a defensive robot the year before, but we were kind of disappointed that defensive play was gone in Recycle Rush. When defense is an option it serves to even the playing field a bit, because the big high scoring juggernaut teams can still be taken down by a really good defensive performance. I also think that the way autonomous was scored this year wasn't very fun either. We got our can in the auto zone 90% of the time, but we only got auto points for it twice because other teams just sat there and everyone had to get inside the auto zone for any points to count.

[MagiChau]

Originally Posted by Conor Ryan

There is nothing in the District/Regional Planning Guide about webcasts, maybe if there was we could get a little more standardization to allow for teams to host on behalf of the events. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ning-committee

The organizational expenses on FRC is ~$36 million for 2014, and it is difficult to make it loud when we can't tell Grandma to tune in easily (but at least she can go to one of two championships if she makes it!). I'm really hoping we can get more transparency into the financials so we can get a good estimate on what the organization spent on the concerts/FIRST Finale at CMP. I think most of the organization would rather have a substantially better webcast and production over those add on experiences.

This year FiM completely took over the role of providing broadcasts for Michigan competitions. Every competition I watched was provided in HD through a Twitch stream.

I think all of the FIRST planning committees need to recognize HD webcasts are the bare minimum for every event. Having teams provide the webcasts is only an ad-hoc fix since they may not be able to cover every event or become unable to provide coverage in future years.

The rest of the world needs to follows Michigan's footsteps.

[Carolyn_Grace]

I'm going to be pretty blunt here:

My personal opinion is that Show Ready is out of touch with what creates an efficient production for FIRST. All Show Ready, A/V, or any production staff should always be physically paired with a knowledgeable FIRST person.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Carolyn_Grace

I'm going to be pretty blunt here:

My personal opinion is that Show Ready is out of touch with what creates an efficient production for FIRST. All Show Ready, A/V, or any production staff should always be physically paired with a knowledgeable FIRST person.

I'd be cautious to make this claim without knowing how much of the decision making process is HQ/Planning Committee and how much is SRE.

[Taylor]

I understand that in real-life engineering, mistakes can be fatal - catastrophic even. I understand that FRC is made to mimic real-life engineering - too tough a task, not enough time to do it, not enough money to fund it - the things Dr. Flowers says every year.
I also understand that FRC is at least partially a high school event. I liked using the Qualification Average as a way to rank the teams - it seemed much more effective than the traditional WLT method. And good teams with bad matches could still perform in eliminations through alliance selections.
But the challenge of overcoming a bad match in eliminations was, in many ways, impossibly hard. If a team got a DQ - even if it was due to miscommunication with event staff - it was a death sentence for the entire alliance.

[Carolyn_Grace]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I'd be cautious to make this claim without knowing how much of the decision making process is HQ/Planning Committee and how much is SRE.

I was cautious. I included the phrase, "In my opinion" for a reason. I understand that this is strictly a personal opinion, and one that many others may disagree with. That's okay.

Regardless, I stand by my statement that all Show Ready, A/V, or production crew need to be paired with a knowledgeable robotics person.

Many district events and state championship events are managed more efficiently and have better production value than some Show Ready managed robotics events. (FiM State Championship, for example...)

Why is this?

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

Yeah, we hit this snag last year and this year we didn't even bother in Virginia. 2363 ended up archiving the matches and I think they did it by attaching a camera to a pole at the top of the stands. It's pretty silly.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Carolyn_Grace

I was cautious. I included the phrase, "In my opinion" for a reason. I understand that this is strictly a personal opinion, and one that many others may disagree with. That's okay.

Regardless, I stand by my statement that all Show Ready, A/V, or production crew need to be paired with a knowledgeable robotics person.

Many district events and state championship events are managed more efficiently and have better production value than some Show Ready managed robotics events. (FiM State Championship, for example...)

Why is this?

I actually think Show Ready adds a nice polish to the events. They just bit off more than they could chew this time around. When things start to go south some things needed to be cut loose for the sake of the show going on.
Now that they know what they are up against I suspect they will do a much better job next year.

[Jay O'Donnell]

Originally Posted by Carolyn_Grace

I was cautious. I included the phrase, "In my opinion" for a reason. I understand that this is strictly a personal opinion, and one that many others may disagree with. That's okay.

Regardless, I stand by my statement that all Show Ready, A/V, or production crew need to be paired with a knowledgeable robotics person.

Many district events and state championship events are managed more efficiently and have better production value than some Show Ready managed robotics events. (FiM State Championship, for example...)

Why is this?

One of the people in charge of Show Ready Events happens to be from our town, sponsors us, and knows a great deal about the program. Try putting on an event for 40,000 people, it's not easy.