Team Update 14 (2016)

[Doug G]

Originally Posted by Mr V

To those that think if there was no bag day that there wouldn't be teams that choose a week 5 or 6 event with the idea that they will finish their robot after watching a week 1 or 2 event are being quite naive.

That would be one way of trying to compete, but I doubt it would result in more teams being competitive... The more likely scenario is you rebuild a robot based on what you see after a week 1 or 2 event before you compete in week 5 or 6. Oh yea, that kind is already happening.

Originally Posted by Mr V

I also think that there would be a few teams that don't decide which route to follow until seeing week 1. In the context of this year's game I could see a team building both a low bar and a non low bar robot and then deciding which one to finish perfecting to take to their event.

Many teams already do this... it's called prototyping. We built a low bar robot prototype and after seeing how it performed, we continued with that design. If it didn't perform, we would have gone with a taller bot. But to do this, we had to stockpile a ton of material and pay for express shipping for items so it would be done in the first week. Wasted money.

Originally Posted by Mr V

Even if the desire is not to copy a top performing robot you can not deny that there would be teams that pick later events to give them more time to perfect their robot, driving and code. It could make it quite hard to fill up those week 1 and 2 events and I believe it would be even more of a problem with areas in the district system.

Are you sure about this? I can't speak to the district system or for events in other regions, but out here in the west, every event is full and teams are having to go out of state in many instances. Look at VEX events. Look up the early events (Sept & Oct). They seem to fill up. Why? VEX teams know to be competitive at the state or national level, to maximize the engineering process of iteration, to get lots of competition practice, you need to compete at several events. The top teams in VEX attend several events and iterate their robots in between. Isn't that a good thing?

So might early events not get the sign ups as quickly... maybe, but I don't think it would be as dramatic as you think.

We need to stop it with this "6-week build season" nonsense... those days are gone. Let's move on without B&T, save some $$, and level the "rough terrain"!