What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[PayneTrain]

Gentlemen! Congratulations on a fantastic thread so far. I have been hesitant to enter the fray up until this point, but the discussion is just so riveting and well reasoned, I finally stopped bloodying up the wall at my desk with my head to post this. The bag and tag <SNIP> has never been so incredible to bear witness to.

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

Well, damm. Please 'splain to me in small words how bag and tag kills teams.

At this point you are either trolling or refuse to read the thread. On the first page of the thread, a poster made this comment on it:

Originally Posted by Tim Sharp

It hits on the most obvious way to improve sustainability immediately, reduce the logistical and financial barriers to entry. Bag and tag creates artificially high barriers that are too much to overcome for many teams who operate near the margins.

So if the inverse was true, bag and tag in his eyes increases logistical and financial barriers to entry.

Whether or not you choose to believe that line of thinking is not on me, but you aren't doing yourself a lot of favors by complaining that people do not understand one side of the argument when you seemingly blatantly are ignoring the already existing replies on the topic. I would applaud such a breathtaking troll job but I fear you are sincere.

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

It may not outright kill teams, but it sure isn't doing us any favors when trying to grow & sustain FRC teams.

I've personally witnessed team success drive team sustainability. Many argue that robot performance does not matter at all, that it has zero bearing on if a team will succeed or fail long-term. I believe that this is false and that long term sustainability and long term improvement - both on and off the playing field - share a common link.

A team that plays well and to the best of their abilities and has some measure of success at a competition is an inspired team. They're excited, they're happy, they're proud. The students, mentors, & sponsors feel good because all of the time and effort they put into their teams paid off in some tangible way. Not an intangible "we really learned a lot this year, have a pat on the back" way but "wow, we programmed 3 autonomous modes that worked in 90% of our matches and won an award because of our consistency, and made it to the elimination rounds."

There are teams that never have that second moment I just described, ever. And at some point enough is enough - the students, mentors and sponsors don't see the students getting excited and they as a team aren't feeling inspired. Those are teams that fold after repeated years of feeling not so great after competitions.

Could ending bag and tag help improve the above scenario? I'd argue yes, it very well could for many teams. It gives teams a little more time to have that 'ah ha!' moment and get things working. It doesn't punish teams that can't build an extra drive base to put their 30 lbs of withholding allowance on to continue to practice and iterating. If we can raise the bar even a little bit for the lower and mid-tier teams, isn't that worth it?

Look to the VEX robotics competition if you want an example of how it should be done - no bag and tag. Constant robot access for iteration, improvement and practice. Would VRC be half of what it is today if they had a tools down / bag & tag policy? I'd argue no.

I still haven't read one statement arguing why bag and tag is still necessary other than statements that hint at "It's the way we've always done it!" I'm sorry, but that's not a good enough reason to continue to do it. There were plenty of people who shot down the district model because it was different. Now it's the future of FRC.

As a community that's supposed to be innovative and trying to drive culture change, we sure are afraid of trying anything new.

I think people can argue over whether there is direct causation of team sustainability coming from on-field success, but I hypothesize that 95% of teams who make eliminations in one year make it to the next year, and the number is significantly lower for those teams who do not. There is a correlation there worthy of investigation.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the 365 day season of VRC is not necessarily all sunshine and roses. I'll spare this board the invoking of BnS or asking the rhetorical questions like "Why does 118 wait until right before VEX champs to unveil their VEX bots publicly?" but I do not think the design convergence would happen to the same extent in a 15 week FRC season.

**ATTENTION CDENIZENS: PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT TALK ABOUT DESIGN CONVERGENCE'S RELATION TO BAG AND TAG IN THIS THREAD**

My favorite part about FIRST is how that more often than not, people like to argue things that make sense when grouped together into a philosophy or other school of thought, but when using a point in favor or against one thing in the group of opinions, it betrays another part of the philosophy.

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

B&T is the epitome of doing something just because we always have. FIRST is about innovation and inspiration. Removing B&T has a huge ability to do both.

For example here, I totally agree with you, but some yahoo is going to have an opening here to tell you about why you should like the ending of the singular cmp for the two postseason expos is an example of change people don't like. Then we can circle back to stuff like "Why aren't we all just buying stuff out of the Small Parts catalog from Amazon?" and we'd be talking about the 10 regionals Michigan has.

However one of the most interesting things about this round of the b&t bout is that those who are against its removal seem to be avoiding arguing for how bag and tag improves sustainability. It's been hit on, but not for the sake of telling you how bag and tag keeps the playing field level. I don't give a flying fish about the playing field being level if we are having a problem keeping teams alive. CONSTANTLY DYING FRC TEAMS CAN BE WORSE THAN NO TEAMS. I've been fortunate to be part of only a few totally DoA seasons and they suck and make everyone feel sad. That's not the competitor in me, that's me seeing upset students and worn out mentors. I don't understand why we want to keep putting that on people unless it's a masochism thing.

The internet has evolved into "meme culture". However, one of the OG memes is not something like Rick'Rolling or SANDSTORM DARUDE, but the 6 week build season.

The entirety of my 8 years in FIRST, this line has become more and more farcical.

Originally Posted by popnbrown

For the sake of giving you an answer, since you've asked a few times, and because adding more chaos sounds like a great idea. 6 weeks has always been a selling point. We always tell potential sponsors/students/mentors how we build this robot in SIX WEEKS.

So while I can't argue it's necessity, the value it does provide is a universal limited time frame that's apparently significantly shorter than real world projects. I view it as a really really good opportunity to learn about project/time management.

I find the idea of telling mentors and students you build the robot in six weeks to be interesting. How many mentors do you keep when you tell them what is essentially a giant lie up front? How many families? Maybe your team literally does nothing outside of the competitions after you bag it. If not, you're lying.

When it comes to sponsors, we actually talked to our key sponsors this year about our plan to run a true 16 week build season. We talked about how we can improve student engagement by planning a season around building two robots and competing at 5 events over 16 weeks. How did they respond to us wanting to double our build load and triple our competition load? They doubled our money. I'm not saying you get this from every potential sponsor, but taking the opportunity to show them what value we get out of extra events and extra robots really excited them.

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

Every time I tell someone we built our robot in six weeks, my nose grows a few inches...

Pretty much. Ever since we stopped saying it, student and sponsor retention has gone up!

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Is it still reasonable to "artificially" end robot work on the same day for every team? I think it is. It keeps the playing field level and doesn't put early-competing teams at a disadvantage by giving them less time to work on their robot. High-resource teams can find ways to make productive use of additional time even without access to the robot, of course, but I believe that to be a team strength that should yield benefits. It is not something that can be easily addressed on the "playing field" front.

Having the six week deadline is also a concept that I know many mentors plan on in order to justify deep involvement with a team during the build. Without it, I myself would definitely cut down the time I spend in a given week, and I am pretty sure I would end up contributing significantly less time in total outside the actual competitions.

The sphere of thinking that concerns B&T enabling a level playing field requires some mental gymnastics to get to the idea that B&T aids sustainability. One alliance wins a given tournament but all FRC teams have a chance to chase their own success and catch inspiration along the way. How much success can a team catch if they can't drive their robot?

As far as I know, no one is putting a gun that could shoot you in the head in the same bag and tag as the robot your team builds. No one makes me show up to a 422 meeting. I think FIRST would be better off instituting a weekly hours limit with no bag and tag. I am hanging that one out there so someone can tell me its unenforceable.

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Why is that? Surely you don't work on the robot between the time you bag it on the prescribed date and the time you regain access to it for your first competition. Are you nitpicking the difference between 42 and 45 days? Or are you bagging an unfinished robot and counting on a withholding allowance to let you build the rest of it outside the official build time to bolt on later?

Instead of removing bag & tag, I would very much like to see the withholding rules go back to the "identical spare parts" wording, or even go away entirely.

I hope you are in the same trolling academy as GeeTwo. 1678 has to compete like hell to get into worlds in the state of California, as they have to compete in the regional system with no rolling pre-qualifiers to the championship or the new postseason expositions. You're welcome to gum up machine shops at regionals under your proposed rule change. That'll earn a lot of fans.

Although we are guaranteed to get at least 30 more posts in this thread over a bunch of freakin' garbage bags, Andrew did us the favor of putting the horse down already:

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Is B&T actively killing teams? No. Absolutely not.

Is removing it going to make FRC harder for at risk teams? I don't have evidence to believe so.

Is keeping it making life harder for those same teams? I believe so.


What benefit does B&T really bring to our program besides an artificial constraint? And is that artificial constraint important to the goals of the program?

I eagerly look forward to what I can only imagine to be <SNIP> that is more circular discussion of a bunch of plastic bags!

----

Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog

What is so bad about attrition as long as the FRC pool of teams continues to rise? In essence - some teams die on the vine and others flourish. This is not a reflection on FRC but an exercise of Darwin's 'natural selection'. Teams that have what it takes can make it - and others do not. FIRST and it's sponsors have already done their work by spreading out their resources to teams that may need it - but how have those teams used these resources?

Or are we in a place in FRC that we all need equal access to all resources?

Yes, my team wants to have what the best of the best have - but we are confined to the resources in our area. And I will be honest with you, I believe that we have enough resources to compete with the 'best of FRC teams'. We feel that our greatest resource is 'time' with 'talent' being a close second.

I think the argument about what you are saying comes down to whether or not you believe the primary growth model of FRC should be shotgunning rookie registrations and seeing what happens. As far as I know, there is not a double digit loss of high school lacrosse programs every year. I would like to believe the powers that be know what is best for growing FIRST, but with each passing year I doubt the "shooting the money wad" strategy more and more.

I think how you approach the challenge of sustainability in FRC depends on your answers to at elast these two questions:

Is the current "money shotgun to rookies" growth model still the primary way we should be growing FRC?

Is a bad FRC team better than no FRC team?

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

...

[EmileH]

Brace yourselves, reality check incoming.

I would first like to preface this response by letting everyone know that a bag and tag discussion as intense and "bloodying" as this one was not my intention when creating the thread. I also did not think it would morph into an argument this strong.

Before we address the topic of Bag and Tag and whether or not it leads to more sustainable teams, we should define FRC team sustainability itself.

What is FRC sustainability?

Sustainability, by Wikipedia definition, is the capacity to endure. I will alter this definition slightly for the purposes of future discussion in this thread:

Sustainability, in an FRC sense, is the ability of a team to have a good enough foundation to stay as participants year after year. This foundation is comprised of a team's community support, mentor (technical/business knowledge) support, monetary support/sponsor relations, and finally, a school/student partnership (an incoming stream of students). This foundation should be strong enough that if there is mentor or student turnover, the team should be relatively unaffected in its' ability to continue to participate in the program.

We do NOT need to define sustainability as a level of competition. Being competitive doesn't necessarily mean that a team is sustainable. However, the key here is that when teams improve sustainability and build up their foundations, increased level of competition will come as a side effect.

On the topic of B&T...

Short and simple, Bag and Tag will help improve team sustainability indirectly by allowing lower resource teams to have a longer build season, but it will increase teams' level of competition more than it would increase sustainability. For this reason, I believe that Bag and Tag would be a nice thing to eliminate, BUT building foundations for weak and unstable teams is FAR more conducive to sustainability than getting rid of Bag and Tag.

Edit: To summarize: Help teams build foundations and that will lead to infinitely more sustainable teams.

Now, everybody take your mind off sustainability for a while and go read 254's technical binder. It's awesome.

Remember, the majority of participants in this thread are members of sustainable teams. We should be thinking about several of the new teams in the 5-6000s that had no foundation and will not be participating next year, and how FIRST - the community AND the organization in New Hampshire - can save these teams from going defunct and help grow all of FIRST as a result.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

Gentlemen! Congratulations on a fantastic thread so far. ...

TL,DR: Teams that struggle to build a sound robot will be best helped by practice before the build season, and the ability to reuse what they accomplish, not a by longer build season for all of FRC.

I'm at the LOL stage. Not the beating my head on a wall stage, and certainly not the thunderous applause stage.

Every argument you (PT) listed has a decent counterargument, and every one of those counterarguments has a decent counter-counterargument,. A few from one side or another have been left out, but most are here somewhere.

What comes to mind most often for me over the last couple of days are these thoughts:

• That someone in FIRST didn't set the 44 day limit because of shipping deadlines. That would only be possibly true if the build start date were a law of the universe. It's not. So, does it make sense to drop that line of reasoning? From day one FIRST could have kicked off each season in the Summer/Fall, if they wanted to, and could have created a 6 month build season.
• That while the length of the build season is creating a lot of virtual smoke and thunder now, some time in the future I'm confident that robot weight limits, or the number and types of allowed motors, or the rule(s) about restarting from scratch each season, or mandatory bumpers, or ... will be the bete noire and cause celebre. ALL of those cause struggling teams to struggle more when building an FRC robot. ALL of those are arbitrary decisions someone took when they were explicitly deciding what challenges/constraints the FRC annual challenge would entail. But! They were/are arbitrary only in the sense that they involve some judgment/wisdom. I'm 100% sure that their current settings were not chosen capriciously. FRC isn't about building the best robot that can play each game. A part of FRC is about the learning experience of satisfying lots of constraints to build a compromised robot that can do well at the game. Time is simply one of those constraints. This (and the previous bullet) is my observation for Ryan D. and others who rail against the imposition of a time constraint.
  
• That helping struggling teams have a successful build will be best done by helping them practice the construction, programming, and project management before the build season. I say this in the sense of helping them learn to fish, instead of giving them a fish. I suggest adding an inexpensive, Fall, annual, robot-building & project management curriculum, and KOP/BOM, and letting the simple robots built during the Fall compete unmodified (maybe allow some modest changes) in the Winter/Spring (think of plowie in Dave's animations). There will be plenty of devils in the details, including avoiding letting too much of the game cat out of the bag, but the intent behind the current 44-day time constraint will be preserved (won't be circumvented further) in a useful sense; and struggling teams will have a valuable safety net. Siri asked earlier what my idea it's. This is it.

Blake

PS: My suggested Fall curriculum would contain a double-dose of mentor training to dislodge the instinct that "It is about the robot/banner"; and to help them learn how to inspire students to try STEM activities and careers without falling into the trap of letting their team's year in FRC be overly influenced by the few hours they spend at a tournament.

PPS: Did anyone notice what I tried to do in that 3rd bullet? I suggested giving struggling teams a much longer build season, and a way to increase the strength of their team's foundations; without giving non-struggling teams a free pass to over-invest (any more than they might now) in the robot-building part of FRC.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by gblake

...

I frankly couldn't give a toss about counter-argument vs argument in the way that my post wasn't really there to take a side on any opinion on B&T; I just wanted to make sure I was not alone in witnessing a stunning lack of awareness of some posters.

On the topic that you were pushing in to, I have a loosely developed idea of how a Division II of FRC could work in some areas but it's not hammered out really well right now and is part of a larger post that this thread at the moment would not benefit from...

Essentially a Division II FRC would take place from August to December, playing a modified version of the game Division I experienced from January to April.

Targeted benefits of Division II
-Cheaper registration fee: Division II events would essentially be FIRST sanctioned offseasons in their structure and venue. You are playing on a worn field. You could/should be able to register a team for $1000 and get two district events?
-Allow Division I teams to mentor Division II teams: it's out of season for potential division I teams so they can use some outreach efforts just by taking their robot to a division II team shop and showing them what they did, or they could invite a division II team in to their shop.
-Train up new volunteers in new roles: pretty much moving a benefit from an offseason competition into a "second season" competition.
-Try out new higher-level rules like no bag and tag, motor allotments, bumpers.
-Give COTS manufacturers time to develop and stock relevant items to lower the cost for these teams
-Probably more benefits

I could also list the drawbacks that I have already considered but frankly I'm interested into seeing how people try to rip it apart. At the administrative level it's hard to see how this can work in anywhere that isn't Ontario, Minnesota, California, or Michigan, and these teams likely would not go to a postseason exposition like Division I has, but the idea is that they might not be able to afford it anyway.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

... I have a loosely developed idea of how a Division II of FRC could work in some areas but it's not hammered out really well right now and is part of a larger post that this thread at the moment would not benefit from...

Essentially a Division II FRC would take place from August to December, playing a modified version of the game Division I experienced from January to April.

...

When I thought about creating a division-style split among the teams in order to help struggling teams, I thought of some reasons that discouraged me from suggesting it

A) It would definitely have an effect on struggling teams, but I think the change doesn't directly attack a root cause of teams' struggles. I think those root causes are being ill-prepared for starting the build season part of FRC, plus a few others.

B) I think that struggling teams need a foundation of being better prepared, and need a safety net. Competing in a lower-performing division is still competing (that will include some learning), and competing is distracting. To me creating two divisions didn't shed enough of the problems teams encounter in the current annual rhythm, and didn't focus enough on zero-risk education and practice (that would carry over as a safety net in the Spring).

Blake

[EricH]

Caution, long post.

If I can summarize the B&T debate succinctly so we can get back to increasing sustainability, and be advised that the numbers are just to identify, and assigned in no particular order:

Side 1 says that eliminating B&T makes more sense, would help them more, and teams can still choose to follow B&T if they want to. Side 1 says Side 2 just doesn't get it (and rather openly, I might add).

Side 2 says that keeping B&T makes more sense, and would help them more, for usually opposite reasons than Side 1. And Side 2 also says Side 1 doesn't get it (also rather openly).

Side 3 (a very small minority, generally landing with side 2) says that Side 1 and 2 are both wrong and we should still be operating under robot shipping rules as far as withholding goes.

And no side is willing to back down. I guess Side 4 would be "It doesn't matter what we say, we'll see what FIRST says, now can we get back to discussing sustainability?"

So how about we agree to disagree on that topic (at least for another six months or so, when FIRST announces whether or not B&T is back), assume that at least as far as sustainability is concerned it's a wash either way, and continue on?


Sustainability. What I see there isn't necessarily something HQ can actually do much about. I mean, short of lowering the barrier to entry (anybody not want to pay $4K instead of $5K?), the financial side is always going to be problematic. (I figure a rookie team budget for their first year to be an absolute minimum of $10K--registration, robot, and maybe some cheap T-shirts and tools.) If a team can get that part taken care of, they might or might not be sustainable--let's go with they'd be 33% more sustainable if they can guarantee a revenue stream (and remember, 83% of all statistics are made up on the spot, including the last two.) Maybe Dean's Homework this year will help. Maybe it won't.

Mentoring can be a problem too. I've got a challenge for all ya mentors out there. I see that a lot of experienced folks move to a new area and end up with an established team. A team that's got mentors and has been around a while, and is sustainable. How many teams could you help turn from "maybe they show up with a robot" to "sustainable" by simply working to mentor them instead of the more established team? Think about it. (There's other considerations, I'm aware--for example, the team actually needs mentors because they're set on the rest but NOT mentors--but that's kind of been niggling at me the last 3-4 years.)

Nomadic teams tend to have problems too, I'd think. Imagine having to move every. single. year. Can it be done, sure. I've heard of those teams succeeding despite all the moves. But I think it can be argued that an established "home base" can do a lot more for a team's sustainability than overzealous parents can. At least they know where to find the team...

And then there's the dedicated student factor. As in, the students so dedicated that when they graduate the collective team knowledge is gone... Or not dedicated enough to bother showing up.

How many of those

What can FIRST HQ do? More seminars on team management (fundraising, recruiting and retention, finding places to build--that's a start, maybe include "replacing your primary sponsor"). Lower costs of entry. And more Senior Mentors to help teams find those missing pieces. That'd be my top 3 for things that FIRST can do.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by EricH

If I can summarize the B&T debate succinctly so we can get back to increasing sustainability, and be advised that the numbers are just to identify, and assigned in no particular order:

Tricky thing about sustainability - the two resources are time and money. If all of the members are stressed out and burned out at the end of the season, the team risks folding because low participation time the next year.

--- (my musings on this thread) ---

At this point, I'm of the opinion that most school-based teams would be better served if their finances were a split between a school district and an independent NPO. So many state and local legislatures screw with how extracurriculars are funded/allocated that, IMO, the booster club model is the only real way to sustain a team that doesn't have one large central sponsor. I wonder what FIRST would come up with if they analyzed creating a membership-based financial arm that served as that NPO entity for teams. This would allow GREAT fundraising by a single group of students/adults to really have an impact in later years - something that usually isn't possible in a school budget.

The B&T debate (for me, FWIW) isn't about competitiveness or challenge so much as it is about the stress of a season. As a team who has consistently made it to Worlds we know that our competition season extends the build season by another 8-9 weeks. Even take away all of the CA wins, we would consistently make it to DCMP's now, meaning the season is another 6 weeks after build season.

The 6 week season is a lie for participants who are held accountable for robot performance, and has been for about 8 years. B&T stresses every single one of my build team members - adults and kids - long after 'bag day'.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by JesseK

I wonder what FIRST would come up with if they analyzed creating a membership-based financial arm that served as that NPO entity for teams. This would allow GREAT fundraising by a single group of students/adults to really have an impact in later years - something that usually isn't possible in a school budget.

It should be informative to look back at this year's PNW funding structure and see the influence it might have on team sustainability.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

I frankly couldn't give a toss about counter-argument vs argument in the way that my post wasn't really there to take a side on any opinion on B&T; I just wanted to make sure I was not alone in witnessing a stunning lack of awareness of some posters.

On the topic that you were pushing in to, I have a loosely developed idea of how a Division II of FRC could work in some areas but it's not hammered out really well right now and is part of a larger post that this thread at the moment would not benefit from...

Essentially a Division II FRC would take place from August to December, playing a modified version of the game Division I experienced from January to April.

Targeted benefits of Division II
-Cheaper registration fee: Division II events would essentially be FIRST sanctioned offseasons in their structure and venue. You are playing on a worn field. You could/should be able to register a team for $1000 and get two district events?
-Allow Division I teams to mentor Division II teams: it's out of season for potential division I teams so they can use some outreach efforts just by taking their robot to a division II team shop and showing them what they did, or they could invite a division II team in to their shop.
-Train up new volunteers in new roles: pretty much moving a benefit from an offseason competition into a "second season" competition.
-Try out new higher-level rules like no bag and tag, motor allotments, bumpers.
-Give COTS manufacturers time to develop and stock relevant items to lower the cost for these teams
-Probably more benefits

I could also list the drawbacks that I have already considered but frankly I'm interested into seeing how people try to rip it apart. At the administrative level it's hard to see how this can work in anywhere that isn't Ontario, Minnesota, California, or Michigan, and these teams likely would not go to a postseason exposition like Division I has, but the idea is that they might not be able to afford it anyway.

So how would this fit into the existing offseason events? It might be more fruitful to modify the offseason events to emphasize the experiences for the Div II teams. Changing the draft rules to break up power teams could be one small step. Changing rules to increase the value of easier tasks is another. Other ideas?

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by gblake

[*]That helping struggling teams have a successful build will be best done by helping them practice the construction, programming, and project management before the build season. I say this in the sense of helping them learn to fish, instead of giving them a fish. I suggest adding an inexpensive, Fall, annual, robot-building & project management curriculum, and KOP/BOM, and letting the simple robots built during the Fall compete unmodified (maybe allow some modest changes) in the Winter/Spring (think of plowie in Dave's animations). There will be plenty of devils in the details, including avoiding letting too much of the game cat out of the bag, but the intent behind the current 44-day time constraint will be preserved (won't be circumvented further) in a useful sense; and struggling teams will have a valuable safety net. Siri asked earlier what my idea it's. This is it.[/list]
Blake

I think this is a potentially fruitful strategy. The question is how to got more experienced teams to find it in their best interest to reach out--incentives can be incredibly powerful. I suggest that FIRST announce in September that some form of team work will be needed to score maximum points in the upcoming game. In 2014 it was the assist, this year it was getting on the batter to capture. On the other hand, in 2015 a third robot too often became a liability. FIRST should be delivering a clear message about the benefits of coopertition before the build season starts.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

I think this is a potentially fruitful strategy. The question is how to got more experienced teams to find it in their best interest to reach out--incentives can be incredibly powerful. I suggest that FIRST announce in September that some form of team work will be needed to score maximum points in the upcoming game. In 2014 it was the assist, this year it was getting on the batter to capture. On the other hand, in 2015 a third robot too often became a liability. FIRST should be delivering a clear message about the benefits of coopertition before the build season starts.

Yes & Thanks for the hopeful thumbs-up.

My suggested criterion/goal would be "Carry out this lesson plan, and you will build a simple robot (plus driver controls) you can (re)use. Additionally, if you fully take the lessons to heart you will learn how to plan and build a custom robot whenever you feel ready to take that plunge".

Because of the uneven nature of help from other teams, I would urge FIRST to produce a set of pre-season-build, how-to instructions/classes that FIRST standardizes. Experienced teams could become familiar with the instructions and supply valuable face-to-face help.

For new teams FIRST might even make completing the simple bot mandatory in teams' rookie years?

For long-established teams going through a rough patch, building the simple bot gets students' and adults' feet back on the ground, (re)teaches technical and/or project mgmt skills that might have been lost, defuses some arguing & churn, is inexpensive with an easy BOM, generally simplifies everyone's season/year, and ensures that the team will have something to show for their work.

However, getting back to your points, help during the pre-season (wherever it might show up) from experienced teams would be a good thing, and coopertition points to make the resulting simple, consistent robots more useful on-the-field would be a good thing too.

Blake

[Oblarg]

What I think teams need, and which has only been mentioned a couple times in this thread, is institutional support from FIRST in procuring human and financial resources.

Teams fold because they lose mentors and/or money. There are other reasons, but those are the ones I've seen the most, they're the ones I've experienced myself, and they're the ones that seem to be most prevalent in the (limited) data we have. If FIRST wants to do something about team attrition, they need to do something to help with this. Everything else is just, to use a tired metaphor, rearranging deck chairs in the titanic.

[pianotech70]

As a newbie to FIRST and robotics in general, as this is my first season, and in a rookie team at that, I would like to offer a few observations. But first I must make a few qualifying statements. We are blessed with great machining facilities, several higly qualified mentors who are well versed in machining and engineering, and decent income. We are not connected to a school, which is a plus factor in some ways, and negatives in others. All in all, we have done well for ourselves in competition in several of the teams we have active. That being said, I look at a few things that have happened, and scratch my head a bit. I originally thought that B&T was a good idea, but since we were able to build a second bot to experiment and tweak and for practice purposes, I guess the B&T idea kinda stopped making as much sense. We did as others do, build a second bot and so recreate our comp bot to an extent because we had the ability to see where a measurement may be off a bit, a motor not tough enough, or a tolerence needing adjusted. SO, B&T was observed, and adhered to stringently to the rules, but we were able to work past that deadline using our practice bot. Not everyone has that ability.
Being that we are not school based, but area based, we don't have to seek permissions that schools ask to 1) travel out of state 2) arrange school transportations 3) deal with class time restrictions 4) beg a school for funding. But we have our own issues anyways as most of you already are aware can arise. Our local school systems are in very tight budget restraints and our independent status is a plus for us. Our money flow is different, and our mentor base is not restricted to a school system's requirements.
But.. as to mentoring needs, there is a goldmine of retired people out there who would love to mentor. There are people in nursing homes that would love to share their expertise with students in the areas of business, and mechanical talents. I personally know a man who was retired that worked for Ford making cars and R&D on rocketpacks!!! Perhaps some of these folks could be tapped? And some retired people have great shop facilities, by the way.
But mentoring can be a great financial aid where money is tight, to reduce the costs of prototyping a design and possibly wasting materials in experimentation, a mentor may be able to steer discussion to more usable directions and avoid obvious mechanical failures.
I guess what I am saying is, B&T is part of the game, but there are ways around it.... if you have the money and wherewithal to afford 2 bots or similar solutions. Mentors are out there, but maybe we need to look in unusual places to find unusual mentors. And utilization of our resources greatly depends on the individual constraints of each individual team. No silver bullet is going to fix all or even most of the problems. I kinda like the dual tier ideas being passed around.
Just my piddling two cents worth from a newbie.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

What I think teams need, and which has only been mentioned a couple times in this thread, is institutional support from FIRST in procuring human and financial resources.

Teams fold because they lose mentors and/or money. There are other reasons, but those are the ones I've seen the most, they're the ones I've experienced myself, and they're the ones that seem to be most prevalent in the (limited) data we have. If FIRST wants to do something about team attrition, they need to do something to help with this. Everything else is just, to use a tired metaphor, rearranging deck chairs in the titanic.

Allowing struggling teams to build in the Fall, and use in the Spring, a simple, inexpensive, standard, teaching robot (capable of helping win tournament matches); would allow them to need fewer mentors, to need less from the mentors they have, and to train new mentors.

It would also probably reduce costs (at least a little), while freeing up students and mentors for fundraising activities, instead of consuming them in a typical year's build prep, build, and post-build upgrade time sinks.

The suggestion isn't a miracle cure, but it does seem to help (at least in my head) on several fronts.

Established teams who choose to adopt the option would be consciously choosing to put the robot on the back burner for a year (it's not about the robot) in order to focus on other matters, like getting their funding and/or mentoring house(s) in order; without having to abandon participating in tournaments, etc.

If FIRST did implement something along these lines it wouldn't be the type of direct institutional support from FIRST HQ you had in mind Oblarg, but it would at least be indirect support in that it takes some pressure off struggling teams by putting an easily implemented floor under the robot part of their annual task list.

Blake