What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[AdamHeard]

There are two parts to the bag and tag debate.

Access to the robot before competing, and access to the robot between events.

Give teams more time before their first event, and I bet they nominally show up just as unprepared (with some variance).

The real magic is giving teams time AFTER the compete so they can iterate and get ready for their 2nd show with all the inspiration and lessons from competing once (and webcasts, etc.).

[Andrew Schreiber]

Well, JJ already posted the sustainability model I've been tinkering with on and off for a year or so [1] I'll just talk a little about the thinking behind it.

A team needs 4 things to compete.
- A competition
- Money
- Mentors
- Manpower (students, but I wanted to be able to refer to these as the three Ms)


The competition is, for the most part, outside of the team's control but having competitions more local does seem to help. But, I kinda ignored this one tbh.

Remove any one of the 3 Ms and the team folds. Or reduce the sum total of them beyond a certain point and the team folds. This gives us a wonderful way to actually discuss what is going to have in impact on sustainability that's not just anecdotes about how much the upper half teams spend on practice bots [2] or some name calling about districts in certain states [3].


So, the question I want to ask is - How does removing bag day impact the 3 Ms of sustainability?


And then I have to add a follow on question to this thread:

Is team sustainability the metric we want to focus on? It's easy to say we want 100% retention [4] but the important question before setting any goal is Does this further the goals of the program? [5] Instead of focusing on how every single team started can continue can we focus on how do we start teams that will be inherently sustainable?


I think the answer is yes, but it requires really evaluating something more than retention numbers. It forces us to start asking really awkward questions about things. Team 1337 may a hundred students and loads of money, but no mentor involvement. Is that team REALLY furthering FIRST's goals? What if it was the other way around and was the proverbial mentor built team? What if it was a team with mentors and students but no money? Or if it only had 3 students?

My point is, if the team isn't furthering the mission of FIRST year in and year out, is that a bigger issue? Can we focus on quality of impact rather than simply existence?




[1] Available here if folks missed it https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...xeo/edit#gid=0

[2] We get it, it's a lot

[3] Everyone getting their bingo on?

[4] Or 98% or whatever metric you want to pick

[5] This is the part where folks start doing a double take considering how vocal I usually am about sustainability. I have a point, trust me.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

What if it was the other way around and was the proverbial mentor built team?

"It's not about the robot"

What if there are 5 mentors and 2 students by the bag&tag:
Still don't want the mentors to work on that robot?

As a CSA I've helped a few teams build a KOPbot at a competition (there are some rare cases you can get away with this).
They literally came with the crates still packed.
Is it mentor built or CSA built ?

What if your team had a lot of mentor built stuff to give it legs then switched to more student built?
What if your team has more mentor hands on in one part and less in another?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

"It's not about the robot"

What if there are 5 mentors and 2 students by the bag&tag:
Still don't want the mentors to work on that robot?

As a CSA I've helped a few teams build a KOPbot at a competition.
They literally came with the crates still packed.
Is it mentor built or CSA built ?

Post


Your Head?

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Post
Your Head?

My head is bald and as my Father was also one of my mentors - yes my head is mentor built.

On topic: as long as some kid benefits, even a little, it's an exercise somewhat worth doing but will it make anyone sustainable?
It is a huge red flag to me when robots show up needing major CSA help to be nearly operational.
That means something went very wrong somewhere, but I have no place to alert anyone to give them help next season as CSA.
I might get a team on the field for that game but that's addressing the symptom.

(Sorry had to update this a lot due to a nasty migraine.)

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

My head is bald and as my Father was also one of my mentors - yes my head is mentor built.

On topic: as long as some kid benefits, even a little, it's an exercise somewhat worth doing but will it make anyone sustainable?
It is a huge red flag to me when robots show up needing major CSA help to be nearly operational.
That means something went very wrong somewhere, but I have no place to alert anyone to give them help next season as CSA.
I might get a team on the field for that game but that's addressing the symptom.

(Sorry had to update this a lot due to a nasty migraine.)

Nah, the mentor built/student built comment was just so I didn't come across as biased. I agree there's a fairly large goldilocks zone of mentor involvement, It was more a rhetorical question.

I also feel that coming to an event with a non functional (non driving) robot is a symptom of exactly the problem I'm pointing out. We have a bunch of teams, rookie or otherwise, that for some reason or another are failing at the core challenge of FRC.


In healthcare there's a growing focus on quality of life rather than quantity. I don't want to see us focus on quantity of teams and neglect if teams are achieving FIRST's goals.

[rsisk]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

...but I have no place to alert anyone to give them help next season as CSA.

Please refer them to a Senior Mentor in the area. This is very much where we can help

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

There are two parts to the bag and tag debate.

Access to the robot before competing, and access to the robot between events.

Give teams more time before their first event, and I bet they nominally show up just as unprepared (with some variance).

The real magic is giving teams time AFTER the compete so they can iterate and get ready for their 2nd show with all the inspiration and lessons from competing once (and webcasts, etc.).

Ditto

[wireties]

In this thread and others two enabling contributors to sustainability emerge. My team has beat this topic up this spring and it comes down to the same two goals - increasing the numbers of dedicated mentors and fundraising. You can't use tools you can't afford and without mentors to train. You can't retain all students without engaging teachers/mentors and the money to compete. And so on...

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

The real magic is giving teams time AFTER the compete so they can iterate and get ready for their 2nd show with all the inspiration and lessons from competing once (and webcasts, etc.).

Before I say anything let me preface this by saying I like some parts of this idea.

The issue I see with this is that many teams only do a single regional. Especially when we are talking about the teams that may drop out. This problem is alleviated with the district system however it already does something similar to what you proposed. If your proposition happens the gap at a week 4 or 5 regional between the single regional teams and multi regional teams is going to widen significantly simultaneously probably raising the drop off rate.

There is hope to this system however. What if teams got to keep their bags open after the first regional of the season. This would give everyone a week or two break and a time to watch other robots compete.

Although I still think the playing field would be more level without it at all.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Give teams more time before their first event, and I bet they nominally show up just as unprepared (with some variance).

I understand this argument, but I think it ignores 4 major sustainability factors beyond just time itself:

1. No B&T means we have much more room as a community to run scrimmages. This lets struggling teams get playing/testing sooner, even if on low-cost team fields with a few other robots. Even this level of insight could help a lot of the teams we're talking about, even if they don't have a second official event for that magic.

2. Using our first event as the deadline gives us all more time to help teams that are struggling/want collaboration. This would be a culture shift and would not happen automatically, but many teams (including 1640) do some limited outreach like this within the B&T deadline. More time, particularly more weekends, can help with that simply on a logistical level.

3. While poor time management can erase any gains, there is something to be said for the difference between unexpectedly losing 1 of 6 weeks to snow versus 1 of 9 (insert any numbers), particularly when the snow days are likely to still be early.

4. I won't claim this because it needs data, but I personally believe that we tend to ignore teams that truly don't meet very often. I've inspected teams that literally meet a few hours per week, end of story, for no fault of the students. I try to introduce them to VEX. There's nothing wrong with that, but there is an argument that adopting VEX/FTC's lack of B&T would open up opportunities and audiences we don't even know we don't know.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

We're trying to talk about how to keep FRC teams and make them sustainable, correct? How does bag & tag help in that goal? Blaming the teams 100% instead of thinking about maybe how we could make things a little easier on them isn't all that helpful.

After seeing hundreds of teams over the years field robot that struggle to move and don't play the game at all, I'd argue that they didn't have plenty of time.

Of course all of your points are a factor - time management being a huge one. We need to find a way to help teams to manage their time better.

If FIRST could do one thing that wouldn't impact them at all financially or logistically and would help a significant number of teams, it would be to end bag & tag.

...

No one blamed a team. There is a difference between separating root causes from less important variables, and assigning blame. Let's not think in terms of blame.

About the other points, there are a zillion things that FIRST could do to help struggling teams field a useful robot without altering the current length (44 days) of the initial build period - things that would help the struggling teams without tempting the healthy teams to expend even more resources on their robots.

One example would be to annually publish a how-to manual for building, and programming a simple, useful robot (plus control station), if that would be consistent with the purpose of building robots in the first place. However, my natural next thought is that any healthy team could do this already.

Or a healthy team could simply build a kit bot for themselves in the first 48 hours after the game is announced, and could then spend the rest of the build season helping N struggling teams instead of trying to win a blue banner for themselves. Imagine how well that would be received by the Chairman's Award judges ... That would be extreme, but it's a thought experiment that shines a light on the "Healthy teams need more time to help struggling teams" argument.

I understand the no bag & tag arguments, but I remain unconvinced that struggling teams' root causes will be affected.

Blake

[jman4747]

Originally Posted by gblake

One example would be to annually publish a how-to manual for building, and programming a simple, useful robot (plus control station), if that would be consistent with the purpose of building robots in the first place. However, my natural next thought is that any healthy team could do this already.

Or a healthy team could simply build a kit bot for themselves in the first 48 hours after the game is announced, and could then spend the rest of the build season helping N struggling teams instead of trying to win a blue banner for themselves. Imagine how well that would be received by the Chairman's Award judges ... That would be extreme, but it's a thought experiment that shines a light on the "Healthy teams need more time to help struggling teams" argument.

I understand the no bag & tag arguments, but I remain unconvinced that struggling teams' root causes will be affected.

Blake

I get and don't disagree with your first two points and I've made the point before that we need more comprehensive tutorials.

I'm not going to tell my students they have to stop at a kit bot when there are other ways to solve this problem. This isn't just about maintaining competitiveness, forcing a limit on a team hurts their own ability to inspire their students. "Sorry but we need to artificially take away you'r ability to try to do better so we can level the playing field." The team I spent the most time helping is another 35min - 50min (varies by traffic) away. Even if I took more time away from my team my net work load in hrs per week would go up! I imagine many of us would be helping teams who are farther away than our primary team.

Or you could give me more time to help that team by:

Driving the extra 45min to visit them once in awhile but not so often

sharing our manufacturing sponsors (long lead times make it hard to fit in our own parts during six weeks)

Spend more time during the season sharing ideas and what we learned with them while they can still work

Give them time to get up to speed on CAD so they can make use of our resources

Give me more time to convince their administration that no the KOP is not literally everything you need for a successful robot and yes you should let them buy that gearbox from VEX Pro.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by jman4747

...
I'm not going to tell my students they have to stop at a kit bot when there are other ways to solve this problem. This isn't just about maintaining competitiveness, forcing a limit on a team hurts their own ability to inspire their students. "Sorry but we need to artificially take away you'r ability to try to do better so we can level the playing field." The team I spent the most time helping is another 35min - 50min (varies by traffic) away. Even if I took more time away from my team my net work load in hrs per week would go up! I imagine many of us would be helping teams who are farther away than our primary team.
...

I'm glad we have some overlap in our ideas, but I think you misinterpreted something.

I didn't say that a dictator-mentor should hurt the students that that mentor advises. What you wrote opposing the notion that someone might do that is interesting, but off-target from the thought experiment I wanted to pose. That's not what I wanted to suggest.

My extreme example was supposed to be about illustrating that maximizing the help one team might give others is dominated by factors other than the length of the build season. It wasn't about forcing anyone to do anything.

Through more than one channel, FIRST tells us that it's not about the robot. Another way to say that is that it's not about *our* robot. If a team full of students, confident in their own abilities, decided to adopt an extreme, outward, service-before-self focus (to change a larger community than their own) for one or more seasons, they wouldn't be limiting their success, they would be a shining example of community-changers.

About the distances, Skype and similar tools shorten commutes dramatically in places where modest communication bandwidth exists.

About the other good ideas - We all should keep them coming.

[EliseCH]

Originally Posted by bdaroz

Sure.

Speaking from my team's experience, we got into it knowing the goal was "build a bot", and we received copious amounts of grant money to start up and compete - to the point we didn't need to worry about sponsors or funding (to a level). The game manuals gave us a good idea how the game and competition worked at a technical level, but...

At our first event:

* Food - We knew we could order from the venue (expensive) but we weren't prepared for how hard it would be to get food in (and have a place to eat).
* Judging - How to interact with the judges, our first pair of judges looked to us like just another team scouting (what can your robot do?). The second pair asked more questions, but both times were were under the gun coming off the field and due to queue up almost immediately. (Our student that was to be our PR face was in the stands to make room in the pit for an urgent repair.)
* Pit - We had a few folding tables, a tool box, a 3D printer, and some pare COTS stuff. No banners, "tent", and our robot cart was... well.. rookie. Some cheap and basic ideas on what *AND HOW* to bring stuff to the venue would have helped. (Taking a step further - the "basic rookie team pit kit")

* If we qualified for worlds we were terrified. We didn't know if we'd get the rookie award, or if we'd be able to go, what it meant, how many could go, how much it would cost, or when FIRST would need the money. (FIRST Team emails were going into SPAM folders, we found later) In short, if it happened, we were massively unprepared. (Thankfully it was a week 3 event, so there may have been hope.)


After the competition (we did well by our standards, but didn't get any Worlds-qualifying awards)....

* Now what? - Between April - January what do we need to do?
* Financials - Being so financially supported as a rookie team, we have little understanding of what level of support a 2nd year (or later) team could expect. Do we need to chase down local companies now? A lot? A little? What might a 2nd year team budget look like?
* Engagement - Keeping in mind end of year testing (AP / NYS Regents / Finals, etc) what should we do to keep our students engaged, and to what level? And starting in September?
* Goal Ideas - Some rookie teams are happy they got a bot on the field, others had higher starting goals, but what would some 2nd year goals be for a "typical" team?
* Off Season Events - I know about them because of CD, and some interaction with other local teams (not a lot of off-season discussion in week 3, but...)

Beyond the bot:

As a rookie, until we hit competition and started seeing the Chairman's Award presentations and really started interacting with other teams, everything beyond the bot was pretty well lost on us. (And to be honest, rightfully so for our team our first year). As we look to years 2+ even just a bulleted list of "inspiring" ideas that other teams have done, outreach, etc, to give teams something to look to and build off of.

Granted, this was just our experience, but if you decide to take this on and want more info or to discuss, let let me know. Thank you!

I would be happy to talk to you in more detail about sustainability.
I can not type everything up right now, but if you would like to connect via email to start a dialogue, please PM me.