Mythical Six Week Build Season

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Michael Blake

I think we need to look at 6 week build as a baked-in pillar by the founder.

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

So for my money, I am all for keeping the six week build.

Originally Posted by GKrotkov

Asking for students to sacrifice other aspects of their life for 6 weeks is fair, given the massive benefits that FRC brings. It is not, however, reasonable to expect that students give much more than that, because we're getting to the point where it will prevent students from joining, or even continuing with the team.

Originally Posted by Jessi Kaestle

Teaching Real-World Engineering: This to me is the larger, if not largest, reason to keep stop build day.

Except you can already keep building after 6 weeks if you want to! Current "stop build day" is only a stop build day if you are unwilling (or financially/logistically unable) to continue working on your withholding allowance and/or a second robot.

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

In FRC, your bagged robot is version 1.0. You keep working on improvements, and practice day at the event you change it to 1.1. Then you see how it does on the field, design other improvements, and address those for version 1.2 at your next event. Take away stop-build, and your short changing that cycle, in my opinion.

I think (the general lack of) local access to good practice fields is what short changes the cycle. Many teams don't put their "1.0" robot on anything resembling an FRC field until their first competition, and then they have to react and scramble to adjust without their robot in their shop. This is why year after year, the stats show that robots get dramatically better after their first event.

I agree that if you made build season 8 or 10 weeks long and don't address this, many teams will show up to their first event with little more than slightly more polished versions of the same robots they show up with now. The difference is that getting to 1.1 and 1.2 (and in some cases 2.0) has fewer barriers. The difference between your 1.0 and 1.1 robots can be the difference between a student having a wholly disappointing experience and an extremely rewarding one - every team should have that opportunity, and shouldn't have to work through artificial barriers to do so!