Mythical Six Week Build Season

[mrnoble]

Awesome that we get to discuss this again.

The unintended consequences will be rampant, but in the end, there will still be three basic categories of FRC teams at competition:

1. top level teams, who work year round and take advantage of every opportunity and loophole available to win more;
2. low resource, low knowledge teams, who will come to competition with poor quality robots, and
3. teams who are willing to work ridiculously hard, but cant yet be called "elite" (if they ever get that far)

In other words, the rich would stay rich, the poor would stay poor, and a bunch of us would just keep chuggin'. So we might as well keep it the way it is.

My opinion.

[Whippet]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

There are a lot of teams that quit building on bag day, and they show up to the competition with 6 weeks worth of designed and built robot. It appears that most of them are not on CD during the off season, to comment on threads like this.

I come from a team like this, so perhaps my input might be beneficial to this thread. Team 4301 consists of approximately 5 full-time students, about 10 more who go to meetings at least twice a week, and the physics teacher who has so generously given up his afternoons and weekends to allow the team to function. Our school district policy technically does not allow us to meet for more than an hour a day except on weekends, but we have been able to push it to 1:30 to 2 hours for short bursts when we really need it. We do not CAD or program at the meetings, as these activities can be done independently at home/in class and would not be an efficient use of our limited shop time.

As one could imagine, the real issue we face as a team right now isn't so much funding or manufacturing resources as it is the availability of student labor hours to build the robots. Every year, with approximately 7 people showing up per weekday meeting and 5 on Saturdays, we're lucky to have even the most simple of robots fully bagged by Build Stop. For example, our 2014 robot, despite its complete lack of complexity, was completed in the last few minutes of a 1 hour build meeting on bag and tag day. That's the struggle we deal with every year. Now, the robot itself wasn't actually bad, but one of our biggest impedances stemming from the late completion was that we had zero practice time before our first quals match. As a result, the robot – which relied on precise positioning to catch the ball – only ever caught one ball over the course of the entire tournament because I had no experience driving the machine.

Contrast this to our 2015 year, where the robot was arguably equally as complex as the previous one: KOP + Mecanum drive, one actuated moving mechanism powered by a single motor. This time, however, we got the thing completed an entire day before build stop. The difference? Well, we made it into the eliminations bracket for the first time in our team history, and as an alliance captain nonetheless. This all, based on our team's post-analysis of the season, stemmed from that single day of driving practice.

So what is my team's position on keeping the 6 week build season? We are entirely in favor of getting rid of it. Even if we decided to enforce an artificial 6 week deadline on build completion, the driving practice alone would enable us to make drastic improvements to our robot performance at tournaments. Beside this, the extra time would allow us to be able to more comfortably design more mechanically complex robots with the confidence that we could actually complete them before the tournament. This makes us able to not only be more competitive at the competitions, but it also allows us to be more attractive to potential sponsors by being able to show them a more polished and functional machine than before. Finally, it would allow all of this to occur on a more relaxed schedule. Everyday meetings would no longer be necessary, and we could actually have one or two days a week as cool down time to reduce the burnout on both the mentor(s) and the full-time student members.

tl;dr: low-resource "kickoff to bag" teams would benefit greatly from the removal of the build stop date, even if the only benefit was that they could have a little bit of practice time they could not have had before.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

I have difficulty understanding this point of view. Do you not understand that

A) teams are already meeting after stop build day at a volume similar to build season

B) teams are not obligated to meet at the same volume after build season as they were before build season, and they would be under no other obligation to do that if bag day is eliminated

Or is there another breakdown somewhere?

I'm going to apologize immediately because this turned into something sort of all over the place, but still mostly related to this discussion.

Teams and the people involved with them are (with a few exceptions) not obligated to do much anything at all. For the most part this entire endeavor or building robots and competing with them, of mentoring and educating students, is completely voluntary. FIRST doesn't tell us we need to meet every day of the week any more than they tell us how many wheels we can have on our robot. We choose to do it, for all sorts of reasons.

There's been much made of the difference between "average" teams and successful teams, but a good deal of it boils down to time, culture, and by extension, community. Success isn't just about wanting to succeed as a team-- I'd argue that nobody wants to fail, it's feeling the burning desire, the passion that drives you to spend more time than someone else might consider possible doing something you love. I know when I was in high school, what got me out of bed from January to April wasn't the 8 hours of formal schooling I had ahead of me, but the hours I know I would be spending from 3 to 9 on robotics, whether we were meeting or not. Now, I've tempered a little in college, but now I bus an hour and a half each way to help three FTC teams and an FRC team twice a week outside of build season and probably way too much during build season, while still balancing all the normal demands of getting a degree and having a personal life. I know I'm not alone in loving this program, and I would gladly spend more time working with my students if it were physically possible, but rationally, I know that if I had a longer build season with my students, it's very unlikely it would be a positive thing for me.

I should also probably say how stop build actually affects me and my team: it cuts our number of shop hours (especially on Saturdays) down to about 3/4 to 1/2 of what it is during build season. It reduces the days I bus down from 4-5 to 2. The people in the shop are almost exclusively people who actually have work to do, or who are highly passionate about what's going on. They'd be in the shop whether there was a stop build day or not. This is also pretty much how it was on my high school team, and I'd imagine it's something like what FIRST expects the effect to be.

In our society there are a number of laws to help save people from themselves, and in FRC that's how I view the stop build day. On one level, I hate it, and wish it would go away forever so I can divert the resources we've been using to work around those limits to more valuable things, but on the other hand, I love it because it means I can start ramping down my robotics induced insanity and take a step back to reevaluate where I'm at in all the other (equally important, but more often ignored) aspects of my life.

So yes, FIRST doesn't tell me I need to add on a 40 hour work week with my team, but I do it anyways because I love it, during build season. But on a less visceral level, I can sometimes appreciate "the man" coming in and telling me it's time to dial it back for a little bit. And while at the time I fight it, at the same time I know it's probably what's best for me and a number of other people.

A small note on the difference between FTC/VEX and FRC-- and don't get me wrong, I love FTC, and though I'm only now participating in VEX U, I'm sure I would have loved being a part of a VEX team in grade school too-- they are, without a doubt, less intense programs on average. Yes, there are teams that are more intense than the average FRC team, but FRC, especially at the middle to high level, is, well, the hardest fun you'll ever have. There's so much more pressure to succeed and do well at competition, both internally and externally. It's that sporting atmosphere, the drive for victory, that, like in "real" sports, fires people up. FTC has some of that, but the events are smaller, the teams are smaller, and the stakes are smaller, and so the fire is less intense. In FRC, even lower resource, smaller teams have people who are intensely interested in the competition as a whole. I'm not sure the same can be said in FTC.

tl;dr: I hate stop build because it's an obstacle when working with my team, but I love it because it saves me from myself

[asid61]

The main valid argument I've seen for the "stop build day" is that it would discourage teams from going to Week 1 regionals. However, I argue that teams would go anyway due to locality and the fact that everybody has only had the 6 weeks anyway- it would change very little. However for teams that don't have the funds to build two robots and/or go to only one local regional, the benefits would be immense. Personally I would vastly prefer the extra time to drive, test, and improve things, as we usually go to week 3 and 5 regionals.

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Whippet

tl;dr: low-resource "kickoff to bag" teams would benefit greatly from the removal of the build stop date, even if the only benefit was that they could have a little bit of practice time they could not have had before.

Seems to me that the work expands to fill the available time. If you knew you had another 3 or 4 weeks to work on the robot, would you spend that time practicing with the same simple robot you usually build in 6 weeks? or would you build a "better" robot with the additional time, and still not get to practice with it?

We've had the same experience with practice on our FRC team, as well as other robotics projects. Setting a self imposed 5 week build deadline lets us spend a week getting to know our new robot, and we've done well at competitions using this approach.

[jman4747]

I don't see the burnout problem like others do. Meet less often over a longer period and you solve that. You could also shorten meetings or cut out some week days and use weekends or vise versa.

If you were a team that could sustain that whole period at full chatter then you save the practice bot while simultaneously getting more time overall.

Everyone will be able to save on shipping costs and better utilize machining sponsors because your lead times won't be as short. Snow days and government shutdowns become less of a problem too.

I also think that design convergence might not be too bad since, depending on how drastic a change, it could be unreasonably expensive for most even given the time.

[aryker]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

...or maybe the limited build time was part of the original idea of FRC...

I'm surprised more people haven't brought this point up already. I always viewed stop build day as beneficial because of the experience it gives to the students--namely, the experience of a hard deadline that everyone would prefer to be just a little bit further away.

As CEO of an engineering consulting company, I see these at work all the time, and every time I do I'm grateful for the experience I had on my high school FRC team that prepared me for it. It's valuable for these kids to learn that no one is going to wait on you in the real world, and that whenever you see a deadline on a calendar you should treat it as immovable and plan accordingly. I know my clients appreciate this approach, and I can't think of a single situation in life where this mindset would steer anyone wrong. If stop build day teaches this effectively, then it's invaluable(especially when so many high schools these days have a "no zeroes" policy, but that's a rant for another day...).

[Jay O'Donnell]

Originally Posted by aryker

I'm surprised more people haven't brought this point up already. I always viewed stop build day as beneficial because of the experience it gives to the students--namely, the experience of a hard deadline that everyone would prefer to be just a little bit further away.

As CEO of an engineering consulting company, I see these at work all the time, and every time I do I'm grateful for the experience I had on my high school FRC team that prepared me for it. It's valuable for these kids to learn that no one is going to wait on you in the real world, and that whenever you see a deadline on a calendar you should treat it as immovable and plan accordingly. I know my clients appreciate this approach, and I can't think of a single situation in life where this mindset would steer anyone wrong. If stop build day teaches this effectively, then it's invaluable(especially when so many high schools these days have a "no zeroes" policy, but that's a rant for another day...).

The problem is that it's not really a deadline anymore because teams are working around it. And if we opened up build season then the deadline would be by your competitions basically.

Not saying I agree with opening up build season, just stating those points.

[Mark Sheridan]

I am reminded of these great ideas for compromise a few years ago. Getting a little practice, tinker and programming time before competition would have a large improvement in competitiveness of competitions.

Originally Posted by IKE

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.

Originally Posted by Ed Law

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?

[aryker]

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

The problem is that it's not really a deadline anymore because teams are working around it. And if we opened up build season then the deadline would be by your competitions basically.

Not saying I agree with opening up build season, just stating those points.

Good point. Personally I have never seen this as a huge problem because most people on our team(students, teachers and mentors alike) are about ready for a break by stop build day, so we enforce it as a hard deadline.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

The problem is that it's not really a deadline anymore because teams are working around it. And if we opened up build season then the deadline would be by your competitions basically.

Not saying I agree with opening up build season, just stating those points.

A proposal: All robots MUST bag at the 6 week mark. Teams are expected to enforce a tools-down policy--this includes practice robots and software development.

After 1 week, robots may be unbagged for up to 15 hours a week, in time increments of no less than 1.5 hours and no greater than 3 hours (noted on bag-and-tag form), with the exception of recognized demonstrations which may run for up to 5 hours per unbag per day but count against the total allowed for the week (and appropriate documentation should be provided to inspectors--photo, signature of key FIRST person who was present on the lockup form--keep it mild here, just to show that there was actually something going on as far as demos and it wasn't just a workday). All work is allowed.

The intent is to strike a balance between robot work and the rest of "life"--take a week to catch up, then you get some time to work on the robot.

Or, here's a novel approach: Put the robot in a crate and ship it...


That being said, I like the hard stop.

[Caleb Sykes]

Here's an idea, how about instead of eliminating bag day for all teams, FIRST says that any teams that are willing can opt-out of bag day provided they do the following:
Donate some amount of money, say $2000, directly to FIRST
Spend some amount of time during the build season, say 100 hours, volunteering with other FRC teams

Teams that don't build practice robots wouldn't opt out, so nothing changes for them. Many of the teams that currently do build practice robots would opt-out of bag day instead of building another robot, netting FIRST thousands of dollars and getting thousands of extra hours of support to teams that need it.



I'm being facetious of course, but honestly, it is possible that I would like this better than what we have now. All of that money and effort that high-caliber teams put into building a practice robot could easily be channeled into things that are more beneficial for the teams themselves as well as for the entire community.

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

We already saw design convergence with the systems that are easy to modify in many years. It didn't ruin anything.

• 2011 - Minibots
• 2015 - Can Grabbers
• 2012- Bridge Balancing devices (stingers)

I bolded one statement for emphasis. I'm not really sure that I agree with this. I think the teams who were first to come out with dominant versions of the mechanisms you described above would disagree. By the end of 2011, nearly every competitive team in St. Louis had a <1.5 second minibot. Our team has never been more burned out than we were this year because of the constant iteration caused by the Canburglar wars. Frankly, the can wars from last season are a major reason I'm not even remotely excited about the upcoming season (and frankly, I barely even participated in Canburglar iteration, compared to the rest of our team). Burnout is a real thing.

Now, regardless of what I just wrote above, the big question is will eliminating "bag day" reduce or increase participant burnout. I think it's obvious that it would allow for more polished robots. As for burnout, I'm really not sure which direction it would go. I do know a lot of teams need to be saved from themselves.

Originally Posted by jman4747

I also think that design convergence might not be too bad since, depending on how drastic a change, it could be unreasonably expensive for most even given the time.

Yup. The design convergence was bad on minibots and can grabbers because they were small and could be done at a relatively low cost. (I say relatively. For some teams the money spent on these arms races would be more than many teams spend on their entire robot.) However, doing a full redesign similar to what 33 did in 2009, or 254 in 2015, is something that very few teams can pull off; both due to a lack funds and a lack experience.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by aryker

I'm surprised more people haven't brought this point up already. I always viewed stop build day as beneficial because of the experience it gives to the students--namely, the experience of a hard deadline that everyone would prefer to be just a little bit further away.

As CEO of an engineering consulting company, I see these at work all the time, and every time I do I'm grateful for the experience I had on my high school FRC team that prepared me for it. It's valuable for these kids to learn that no one is going to wait on you in the real world, and that whenever you see a deadline on a calendar you should treat it as immovable and plan accordingly. I know my clients appreciate this approach, and I can't think of a single situation in life where this mindset would steer anyone wrong.

When stop build day goes away, we will trade a very squishy deadline for one that is absolute. Should you fall short of stop build day goals, you have at least a week (and often many more) to decide and implement your withholding strategy. Should you not finish your robot by the event, you have no fallback since your Sunday robot can't earn you any points.

Honestly, in both approaches students get great exposure to hard deadlines that no amount of pleading can move. I think removing stop build day potentially makes the teaching deadlines more memorable (or at least more painful) since you don't have the safety net of the withholding allowance.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." -- Douglas Adams

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Karthik

The design convergence was bad on minibots and can grabbers because they were small and could be done at a relatively low cost.

...and because the scoring mechanic underlying both minibot racing and can grabbing was a winner-take-all, asymptotic race to the bottom.