What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[rwodonnell]

Originally Posted by jgerstein

I was curious about this too, so I pulled some data from TBA. A few teams show up a year or two before their rookie year because of off-seasons, but not enough to have a major effect on the numbers.

The last two tabs are the raw data I pulled from TBA and an expanded table showing which years each team was active in.

Team Survival

This is great, thank you! (How do I read it?)

By the way, if I understood how to give the little green dots, I would give you some for this...

[mastachyra]

NASA has been supporting new teams for awhile with their grants. This is the type of large scale project that is not a waste of time for FIRST.

Maybe FIRST can garner similar support for 2nd, 3rd, 4th year teams. Like, let the a corporation grab that year and stick with supporting.

Imagine 3M or 3DSystems giving $3000 to 300 3rd year teams!

[hrench]

Originally Posted by marshall

Eliminate bag day.

I'm just Not seeing this helping at all. Bag day is when we stop spending money. During build, we have a burn-rate of hundreds-of-dollars a week. The day we bag is the day that stops. Bag day saves money.

Bag day is when I go home at night and see my family again. I can sustain not eating dinner at home for only so long before they forget my name. Bag day keeps mentors sustainable.

If we built a second-robot after bag day (we normally don't) we would keep designing, building parts and spending money--and building two copies of everything--that would actually cost more than not bagging. But I don't really want that.

If you don't have bag day, can you point to any team that would use that as a reason to Not build a second (or third or fourth) robot? No, those teams will still be doing that.

Also with no bag day, our drivers would practice, practice, practice and get much better than they are. But every hour the robot is moving, something is breaking and though that's going to allow us to improve the robot, it also will cost money.

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

The biggest reason I see teams die has nothing to do with funding. It's loss of their primary mentor. I don't think that's really something that can be easily fixed which is a shame.

I think Sperkowsky's comment here breaks into two catagories:

1. Many teams fold after just one or two years. I think money is a big factor for these--when they lose the rookie-team grants, finding money is a big shock. Usually mentors have to find that money.

2. Mentoring is usually fun, but every year there are huge headaches and conflicts between people (other mentors and students). If you have single mentors carrying too many headaches, it's very negative. The rewards of being a mentor have to exceed the negatives. I don't know how you can increase the reward. I think you have to decrease the negatives. Spread them between more people?

Sadly, a team has a life, just like a person and every team is on an arc to someday fold. Just like a company. Just like any organization. If you want to keep a team alive and vital, you just have to plan for the inevitabilities...losing funding, losing build space, losing people. And this planning is hard, sometimes insurmountable.

One solution to a mentor quitting killing a team is that mentors can recruit their replacement before they quit/retire. When I was recruited, it was made clear to me who I was replacing. Every mentor is on an arc to someday leave or retire too. Just like cells in a body, there has to be a plan to replace them.

[jgerstein]

Originally Posted by rwodonnell

This is great, thank you! (How do I read it?)

I'm glad I can help!

Sheet 1 (% of active teams by rookie year): Each row represents a rookie year (there were no 1993 rookies, so I left 1993 out). Each column is a year from 1992 through 2016. Each cell contains the percent of teams from that rookie year that were active in the given year. For example: Cell V12 indicates that in 2011, 45% of the teams that were founded in 2004 were still active.

Sheet 2 (# of active teams by rookie year): Each row represents a rookie year (there were no 1993 rookies, so I left 1993 out). Each column is a year from 1992 through 2016. Each cell contains the number of teams from that rookie year that were active in the given year. For example: Cell V12 indicates that in 2011, 75 of the 403 teams that were founded in 2004 were still active.

The other sheets are not particularly useful for looking at directly.

Originally Posted by rwodonnell

By the way, if I understood how to give the little green dots, I would give you some for this...

Thank you! If you do want to, there is a scale icon next to the post number where you can do that.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by hrench

If you don't have bag day, can you point to any team that would use that as a reason to Not build a second (or third or fourth) robot? No, those teams will still be doing that.

I will commit right now that 900 would stop building a copy of a robot and would instead use the resources to help create a second team if we no longer had bag day.

I'll also commit that without bag day we can help more existing teams to program their robots and make bumpers prior to the start of a competition.

[nlknauss]

It takes a few years for a team to form reliable, on-going partnerships with corporate sponsors. It also takes about the same amount of time for teams to create their own structure for spending through the course of a competition year. Having a regional structure in place to work with teams as they develop their programs can be helpful with this whether it is a regional director, FIRST senior mentor, or team of volunteers.

The other side of this is team management and support. There are many ways to do this, but many teams do spend a lot of time in their second and third years thinking about how this should look. A similar support group can be a great deal of help for mentors, teachers, and students on young teams.

Basically, the rookie year isn't the only year a team needs assistance with its formation.

[rwodonnell]

Originally Posted by jgerstein

I'm glad I can help!

Thanks for the explanation on the google sheet. I hope you don't mind, but I created a copy of the sheet and added a column in the "raw data" tab with this formula:

=if(D2 <> 2016, E2, "")

What I wanted to see was, for teams that were not active in 2016, how many years were they active.

Here's the histogram of that:

[marshall]

Originally Posted by rwodonnell

Thanks for the explanation on the google sheet. I hope you don't mind, but I created a copy of the sheet and added a column in the "raw data" tab with this formula:

=if(D2 <> 2016, E2, "")

What I wanted to see was, for teams that were not active in 2016, how many years were they active.

Here's the histogram of that:

Srsly? 600 teams have dropped out after 2 years?

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by hrench

If you don't have bag day, can you point to any team that would use that as a reason to Not build a second (or third or fourth) robot? No, those teams will still be doing that.

We would build 1 and only 1 robot in a heartbeat if they eliminated bag & tag. The only reason we do it today is to be competitive and give our drivers and operators additional practice time.

Eliminating bag & tag would save us a lot of money & time - no more buying 2 to 3 of everything. It would also reduce the overall number of parts we make during build season. The time we spend trying to get our competition robot to match the performance of our practice robot wouldn't be needed either. We could also spread our schedule a little bit and not have to meet every single day, reducing mentor and student burnout.

There are SO many benefits to eliminating bag & tag. It's just a remnant of the old ship date when we used to have to crate up the robot and I think it needs to go.

[rwodonnell]

Originally Posted by marshall

Srsly? 600 teams have dropped out after 2 years?

The number was 599, but when you add in the 169 that dropped after 1 year, then you have 768 teams that lasted 2 years or less. When you add in years three (459) and four (304) dropouts, you have 1531 teams that have lasted only through one cycle of high school kids. That's roughly a quarter of all teams ever created.

[Dan Petrovic]

Originally Posted by marshall

Eliminate bag day.

While I fully support eliminating bag day, I don't think that's why teams don't survive.

Eliminating Bag Day levels the playing field a bit more. Teams that have the resources to build a practice robot won't have a leg up on the teams without those resources through extra driver practice, software integration, and a platform to test new features.

I doubt there are teams out there that say "well, we can't build a second robot, so let's just give up on FRC"

Originally Posted by marshall

I will commit right now that 900 would stop building a copy of a robot and would instead use the resources to help create a second team if we no longer had bag day.

And yes, that's definitely very noble of you, but how many other teams are thinking like that?

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Dan Petrovic

While I fully support eliminating bag day, I don't think that's why teams don't survive.

Eliminating Bag Day levels the playing field a bit more. Teams that have the resources to build a practice robot won't have a leg up on the teams without those resources through extra driver practice, software integration, and a platform to test new features.

I doubt there are teams out there that say "well, we can't build a second robot, so let's just give up on FRC"

It's not really about the practice robots. It's about burnout.

If you have to build the whole robot in 6 weeks, no more no less, you feel compelled to meet very often. Lots of work is done in very little time. This makes it very hard to retain mentors year to year.

If you spread that out a few more weeks, yes work will expand to fill the time allotted, but you can meet with a more relaxed schedule if you want and still be reasonably competitive. The burden is spread out over a longer period.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Dan Petrovic

Eliminating Bag Day levels the playing field a bit more. Teams that have the resources to build a practice robot won't have a leg up on the teams without those resources through extra driver practice, software integration, and a platform to test new features.

My thought process is thus:

Eliminate bag day and the teams with less resources can get more help with their robots. This makes them more competitive. Being more competitive helps them to win awards and boosts inspiration and confidence. Boosting those in turn enables them to survive for longer.

[Roboshant]

We actually talked about this on the first episode of F4. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/41J-ZPWeQjE.

[jman4747]

Originally Posted by dk5sm5luigi

If you solve this then you will solve most of the problems. I have seen many teams with little funding survive because their primary mentor went out of their way to do what ever they needed to keep the team running. You lose that mentor and the team disappears.

This is also a major reason why it is hard to start new teams. You need to find that mentor who is crazy enough to start a team.

This and...

Originally Posted by marshall

Eliminate bag day.

And with that I'm pretty sure some of you will have finished a bingo card.

(I can list several ways this can save money and mentor burnout but we've already been over it before... Just think about it seriously please) And of course registration costs in general need to come down.

And

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

This might be the most important step. VEX offers a curriculum that allows school districts to justify assigning a teacher to the program.

One other thing that absolutely needs to happen is just getting a higher percentage of the engineering population involved in the first place. For as much as we talk about getting new people interested in STEM I still run in to countless engineers who don't know about what we do. I think we would be well served by getting more of these people involved.