Mythical Six Week Build Season

[Jessi Kaestle]

This topic seems to come up every year, and on average the general consensus here seems to trend towards eliminating Stop Build Day. I have two main counters to this trend.

Mentor/Team Burn-Out and Level-Loading Higher and Lower Resource Teams: I grouped these together because they are connected when it comes to the lower resource teams. Though some have brought it up, it seems to me from reading this thread that some here have lost sight that Chief Delphi is not a proper sampling of FIRST Robotics Competition Teams as a whole. Most lower resource teams that I have talked with drastically reduce how long they meet in the weeks between stop build day and competition. So when deciding if mentor (and/or student) burn-out would happen, remember that you should be thinking of the teams that struggle to have enough mentors (and/or students) during build season due to the current time commitments already being a massive deterrent. As a result I don’t think the elimination of stop-build day will level-load these teams with their higher-resource counterparts, if anything it might just move them further down the bracket in terms of competitiveness.

Teaching Real-World Engineering: This to me is the larger, if not largest, reason to keep stop build day. Whenever I am explaining FIRST to someone who is deciding if they are going to provide me something* based on what the program is I ALWAYS use that it teaches “Real-World Engineering” as a selling point. Then go on to explain that the students have a strict timeline, budget, and build constraints like they will once (if?) they get an engineering job post-grad. In addition to being a selling point, it is also a good teaching point. Once these students enter the work force they will not have a deadline that they get to decide (teams decide which events they do, if we eliminate stop build day, this will become a bigger deal than it already is), nor will they have extended time to study and analyze the competition then completely rework their work to take advantage of the lessons they learned from their competition.**

*the something could be team based such as funding or mentors; student based such as a scholarship or university admissions offer; event based such as volunteers; or personal based such as a job offer.

**This already happens to an extent, but I envision would get worse if stop build day was eliminated.