What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[Knufire]

Originally Posted by gblake

Do you have a more detailed breakdown of the numbers that would show if the teams were 10-year veterans that hit a major rough patch, or were 2-year hot-house orchids that wilted on the first sunny day because they didn't have a good root system?

I pulled how long each of the listed teams were active off TBA, along with any rookie awards or championship attendances they might have had.

Interestingly enough, two of the listed teams returned for the 2016 season. One was a 6 year veteran team that only took the 2015 season off, another was a one-and-done 2013 rookie that resurrected.

I don't have the data to match which factors affected which teams.

[IronicDeadBird]

FIRST needs to start showing data that actually mean something outside of the FIRST scene. Compiling hard data and showing that these programs actually mean something and have a positive impact would be far more beneficial then a team coming home with a blue banner when it comes to winning over school boards and sponsors.
I'd ask FIRST to leverage the connections they have to help teams contact sponsors at higher points instead of trying to get a message from the clerk at gas station up to the appropriate people.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

FIRST needs to start showing data that actually mean something outside of the FIRST scene. Compiling hard data and showing that these programs actually mean something and have a positive impact would be far more beneficial then a team coming home with a blue banner when it comes to winning over school boards and sponsors.

You mean like the Brandeis University studies?
http://www.firstinspires.org/about/impact
http://www.firstinspires.org/sites/d...ngs-year-3.pdf

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Allow regionals to run their own lights and sound, and find a way to pass that savings on to teams. This doesn't have to be in terms of reduced registration for all, but could in grants, etc...

Considering most of CA is running regionals in district venues, it's a bummer that they are forced to raise the additional funds required to pay Show Ready Productions to run the event.

The savings could also be used to build up the fund for the eventual switch to districts (which I would assume is years off due to the difficulty the houston champs date puts on a District champs).

While I do understand this makes sense, why did we pay $5000 to do Inland Empire last year in a high school gym?

As much as I like many of the Show Ready event personnel and the job they do, if its the choice between that and substantial reduced registration fees (as demonstrated by district events), I'd take the latter.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

You mean like the Brandeis University studies?
http://www.firstinspires.org/about/impact
http://www.firstinspires.org/sites/d...ngs-year-3.pdf

Yeah except as someone who is casually into FIRST and mentors I don't like the odds of expecting a sponsor or a school board to keep up with them.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

Yeah except as someone who is casually into FIRST and mentors I don't like the odds of expecting a sponsor or a school board to keep up with them.

I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you saying that teams shouldn't have to reach out to sponsors and school boards to sell them on the merit of FIRST?

[jman4747]

Originally Posted by marshall

While the point has most certainly been beaten to death, I think there are a lot of us that feel it is relevant to the sustainability of FRC teams and that is what this thread is about.

Yes.

Anything that helps teams get more competitive and advanced helps the sustainability of the team and the program.

One other point on curriculum...

Even before a full classroom ready curriculum is developed, the control system and programming documentation needs to be more robust and include more complete examples. Even something as simple as team 358's LabView example page which was maybe the single most useful document I've used for programming. What I would like to see is an example robot code for each language based on what a mid level team would actually field. Basically like when a team releases their code but with more polish. it's very frustrating as a new programmer to not know how all the examples you see for how to run a motor or how to initialize a sensor are supposed to work together. For a team that may not have access to an optimal programming mentor base you need more than a list of functions and a basic example often. Meanwhile looking at the software produced can be somewhat daunting. That I think would go a ways to improving morale and helping teams become more competitive early on.

[cbale2000]

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
...

Hope no one minds, but I took the liberty of making a copy of that spreadsheet and adding a few more tabs to compare rates of team loss, as well as some graphs for showing team retention by team age. Thought the results were interesting, so I figured I'd share it...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15ys5j6c2QXwaIhTeKTSLQ5TfnfIJy1ee-8FHf0RXUS4/edit?usp=sharing

Sheet Tabs underlined in Green are either new or have new content in them.

[evoluti1]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

It's time for FIRST to take the next step and offer a model that schools find useful for accomplishing their mission.

This x1000. The fact that many FIRST teams don't get enough support from their schools to sustain for more than a few years, while these same schools give enough support to sustain other forms of sports and education for many years, all while FIRST markets itself as combining the best parts of sports and education, should tell us we're doing something wrong.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Teams with the resources and dedication to build practice bots don't tend to be the ones that fold. Chipping in your $0.02 about practice bots probably doesn't mean much in this thread. With regards to mentor burnout and bag day, there are two competing schools of thought on that issue, and it likely wouldn't impact all individuals the same way. Let's save the bag day talk for the threads about bag day.

I still think that bag day is really relevant to team retention, but the reason why has little to do with practice bots. Many/most teams need the handicap of being able to change their robot after experiencing the game for the first time in order to have a rewarding season on the field. Rewarding experiences help "pay for" the difficulty of running and sustaining an FRC team.

Sustaining an FRC team is really hard! It requires raising money; gathering interest and support from students, parents, administrators, and sponsors; managing a project involving a large group of students of varying abilities, interest levels, motivations, and distractions; managing a group of volunteer mentors with different abilities, interest levels, motivations, and distractions; running a 6 week engineering design crash course; and orchestrating all of the logistics necessary to sustain a team through a build and competition season. I have never been on a team where any of these tasks were easy and without lots of frustration and many headaches. You'd have to be crazy to do this year after year without some sort of rewarding experience.

There are many types of rewarding experiences in FRC, but many of them are predicated on achieving some sort of basic engineering success. Not necessarily winning, but "the robot I toiled and built to accomplish some function has actually succeeded in doing so!", at least.

I can't say that all of the teams that fold would not have folded if only they had an open bag and could improve their robot...but I strongly suspect that some could have.

I do know that once you've experienced a handful of rewarding FRC moments, leaving the program becomes really difficult, even when life is calling.

[gblake]

If anything, simplifying the build goals, the build expenses, and the time spent attempting to carry them out is what a struggling team needs; not a double dose of each.

The first FRC seasons are big meals to eat in one gulp if you are a young/rookie team that didn't first cut your teeth on an simpler challenge.

Simplify and constrain, instead of pushing in the direction of increased complexity (veterans will use time to create complexity and consistency - rookies will have even more problems than they do now if they want to keep up - time won't solve those problems).

I know there is a strong community that wants to push FRC as far as possible in the Formula One direction (and use more build time to do it), but if rookies and veterans are on the same field, that's not the way to avoid overloading, overworking, and overwhelming the rookies.

[Knufire]

Originally Posted by gblake

(veterans will use time to create complexity and consistency - rookies will have even more problems than they do now if they want to keep up - time won't solve those problems).

...

...but if rookies and veterans are on the same field...

The argument isn't that removing bag time will level the playing field, or reduce the disparity between rookie and veteran teams.

The argument is that, with the current system, too many rookie teams build robots that simply don't function or accomplish any basic gameplay related task. These teams then get discouraged because they couldn't build a robot that positively contributed to the any of the alliances they were a part of, and decide that the time and effort they put into this program wasn't worth the disappointment at the end. Theoretically, moving to an open build schedule would give these rookie teams more time to reach this bar of performance, where they would have the rewarding experience that Jared's post talks about.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Knufire

The argument isn't that removing bag tie will level the playing field, or reduce the disparity between rookie and veteran teams.

The argument is that, with the current system, too many rookie teams build robots that simply don't function or accomplish any basic gameplay related task. These teams then get discouraged because they couldn't build a robot that positively contributed to the any of the alliances they were a part of, and decide that the time and effort they put into this program wasn't worth the disappointment at the end. Theoretically, moving to an open build schedule would give these rookie teams more time to reach this bar of performance, where they would have the rewarding experience that Jared's post talks about.

I don't think lack of motivation or inspiration is why we see high 2nd/3rd year attrition rates.

I think we see them because running an FRC team takes an inordinate amount of resources, both human and financial, and most teams that start really don't have any plan for acquiring those resources in a sustainable fashion. You can get by for a year or two with a couple of people overworking themselves to keep things afloat, but eventually people burn out and you're left without any real way to run the team. That timescale coincides neatly with teams no longer being eligible for the 1st-year/2nd-year NASA grants, too, so for a team that wasn't sustainably built the funding dries up at about the same time that the people holding the team together tend to burn out.

[Knufire]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I don't think lack of motivation or inspiration is why we see high 2nd/3rd year attrition rates.

I agree with you. I didn't mean to imply that lack of inspiration or motivation were directly responsible, but that the discouragement of building a non-functional robot is a contributing factor to those key people involved in running a team "burning out".

[jman4747]

Originally Posted by Knufire

The argument isn't that removing bag time will level the playing field, or reduce the disparity between rookie and veteran teams.

The argument is that, with the current system, too many rookie teams build robots that simply don't function or accomplish any basic gameplay related task. These teams then get discouraged because they couldn't build a robot that positively contributed to the any of the alliances they were a part of, and decide that the time and effort they put into this program wasn't worth the disappointment at the end. Theoretically, moving to an open build schedule would give these rookie teams more time to reach this bar of performance, where they would have the rewarding experience that Jared's post talks about.

Also those of us already overworked with our own teams can find more time to help rookie teams along during the build season.

It would also provide a longer period in which a potential sponsor or mentor may be able to visit and actually see the team working which can be as compelling as seeing a competition for the first time.