What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

An interesting aspect to point out about the community is that FIRST doesn't have a decent wikia (which I find hilarious). With a community this large you think someone would have thrown together a wikia for FIRST. Most video game communities come together and get a solid reference point and factual database done for a video game in like a year. Yet somehow nobody has spearheaded a top level FIRST wikia where we centralize useful information taking some of the burden off of FIRST to distribute said information...

There was FIRSTwiki that was hosted here at CD (though through a different domain) but it was shutdown a few years back (it had been overrun with spambots, and had woefully out of date software). There is somewhat of a push to create a new FIRSTwiki (current attempts are based out of GitHub, which I personally have mixed feelings about), but honestly it needs someone to setup a good backed (domain, formatting, database, captcha, etc). I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be happy to be editors (myself included), they just need something to edit.

[techhelpbb]

There is not a single post I can derive this from so I will touch on a few things that cover a wide range of points from various posters:

Organized funding of an education goal is the reason for public schools to exist. The fact that FRC is so vital is specifically because organized funding of the schools can often fund goals and set achievements that various elements of the communities the school serve do not agree are priorities. So long as FRC is a patch for the educational system it is extremely likely to have a 'rogue' funding model where: mentors, sponsors and families essentially go beyond their required contribution (usually in property taxes) to pursue an education goal that often the school system has either failed at or has decided is not a suitable common goal. This 'rogue' funding model is 'disruptive' to the education industry in it's very nature and one could argue that there is value in teaching students how to fund being disruptive to an industry because it is increasing required to be innovators when you are an adult. Lets face it - common currency and a lack of barter very likely mean that fund raising is a vital skill.

The idea of building a simple robot before build season is actually something FRC11/FRC193 has tried with MORT-U before competition season starting in September for some time. I believe it is not enough. The core issue is that FRC is a driving a set of skills into the educational system not well serviced for a wide variety of reasons. We actually got better at addressing this by creating FRC193 as junior varsity where the students have up to 2 years to acquire the skills for varsity FRC11 and even then the learning curve for the more advanced manufacturing has not entirely been satisfied. FRC would just be a contest to a vocational schools that already have goals set into the design and manufacture of machines. Those same schools would have their shops ready and have a clear set of: standards, goals and tests to insure they achieve their foundation education goals and as a result can present evidence to back that achievement up when required. FRC does not make this requirement. FRC participation is just close enough to the skills still out in the community that even in an area where manufacturing is nearly dead you can usually find some people that have a good idea how to get this done. The issue becomes: between the funding for this activity and trying to be a proper educational program, which so many FRC teams are actually doing without possibly understanding, we are actually fighting a battle so much bigger than it appears.

From my experience FRC teams need to realize that they are effectively educational and apprentice opportunities. If the schools that often support these FRC teams fail to grasp that large FRC teams signal a need in the community for something they are not doing, then these schools are going to make it much harder on the community element in that team because those people are all paying their mandated share (usually through property taxes) and whatever it takes to continue to fix what is not getting done. I know a few people that actually hoped to 'win' shutting down FRC teams by hoping that refusing support for an educational goal under-served was going to make it painful enough these FRC teams they would just go away. This led to a lot of stress and pain for those teams. To put this in perspective most years I double my mandated share of education cost to the community with my contributions to FIRST so that's $10,000+ that is lost in my: materials, time and money (one can say this is a choice but sitting idle 'getting mine' while others stumble is not my style).

I think if we acknowledge that this is a disruptive educational opportunity as a whole we can refocus our resources in much more effective ways. I know that some schools might view my statements here as a direct challenge to their authority but frankly: that authority is supported in part by my $11,000+ a year in property taxes that go to those schools.

I have always believed that the sort of people that thrive in FRC are the sort that would be just as happy to setup ad-hoc vocational schools of their own if public education was not there because the need exists and it should be served. The problem is you already have a system that doesn't always meet that need and you are addressing both the costs of that and the added cost you are accepting. So basically the schools need to get on board. Otherwise you realize you just need to build that vocational/incubating opportunity and call it a makerspace .

To this end: FRC is only somewhat sustainable as a whole, and it should be, based on exactly the situation it is in. If FRC were sustainable it might not even attract the kind of attention it gets. This is both the driver of heroic effort and a general failure that heros are often the folks that don't make it. If you think about it, FRC drives attention to specific people and the larger the accomplishment of those people the more likely it is to do that. If the barriers fell and everyone worked together the challenge would be less. It's the paradox that, I think, leads to mavericks giving way to strategists. Mavericks drive people hard but eventually when the pasture is greener people want to slow down so they start to ignore the mavericks and the strategists start to figure out ways to pick up where sheer force of will and a battle cry leaves off.

Basically if the goal of FRC is to make heros: we got that. If the goal of FRC is to make it stable and sustainable you might find what made you a hero today makes you a bit of a crank tomorrow. To this end I think you need the maverick to found a team (odds are long and obstacles many) but the strategist (understanding the limits, finding motivation, planning for good and bad, planning season over season) to sustain a team.

That's not a just FIRST issue BTW. I just finished with a job that had a maverick CTO. Worked everyone to the edge but actually made progress against insurmountable odds. Then when the pastures got green everyone started to gripe and started slowing down. Then I left because the charge against all odds was not followed by transition to a sustainable strategy between the top speed and no speed. I am glad I saw that, in part because of my FIRST experience, because I made out very well on my personal strategy to seek sustainable growth leveraging the aftermath of that charge when those around me were unable to hit that mark. Where I left will now seek out a position of much less growth which unfortunately is probably not very competitive in their market and will eventually result in attrition that will create the next maverick. Ever see an FRC that is hit or miss? That pattern exists into some of the most central industries on Earth.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

Word.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by marshall

Word.

Hey it's only $50 million dollars that last place spent.
What's $50 million really?

[gblake]

T-pbb,

Good points.

About the idea of letting teams build, and later compete with, a Fall SimpleBot ... I agree that without more training than would be necessary to simply follow IKEA-style instructions to assemble and program a SimpleBot plus Driver's Station, teams won't become ready to do more sophisticated design, construction or programming.

However, instead of using the SimpleBot to prepare for building a space shuttle , I envisioned that struggling teams would use it to avoid dropping out of FRC entirely. It would be the simple, inexpensive, reusable, safety net they would use while regrouping, or to avoid the dreaded robot-parts-still-in-the-KOP-crates syndrome at their first rookie tournament.

In a perfect world, the SimpleBot curriculum would sneak in enough project management training to enable a team to correctly plan introducing more advanced subjects in future seasons. I'm sure most of us agree that accurate & consistent time/project management is the bedrock skill that enables a group to get the most out of whatever resources they have. The point would be (re)teaching them how to (re)teach themselves how to fish. I think that is a more fundamental goal than what you guys were trying to do with your JV/varsity split

Blake

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by gblake

The point would be teaching them how to teach themselves how to fish. I think that is a more fundamental goal than what you guys were trying to do with your JV/varsity split

Blake

I am sure many early stage teams today would get value from even assisting in the assembly of a kit of parts. This was why the senior mentor for my area is asking FIRST if we can teach a class in the summer with my robots so they can see this process for themselves. Not stuck on teaching it myself, just offering up parts I have without impact to FRC11/FRC193. I was hoping we could open it to anyone that could get there so we were being kind of formal.

Where I think your idea goes a step further is it seemed like you wanted to offer early play. At least in MAR we have the guts of a field without the field controls so if a venue was made available one could be the maverick and push an early stage build and play if we could just get the control system or adequate alternative.

On the scale of build a KOP robot or do nothing: I accept completely to build a KOP robot. Plus a slow build would be a great place to document cleanly.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

...

Where I think your idea goes a step further is it seemed like you wanted to offer early play. At least in MAR we have the guts of a field without the field controls so if a venue was made available one could be the maverick and push an early stage build and play if we could just get the control system or adequate alternative.

On the scale of build a KOP robot or do nothing: I accept completely to build a KOP robot. Plus a slow build would be a great place to document cleanly.

Some folks suggested "early play", or two-tiered play, and there definitely are successful examples of Fall (or Sunmer) competitions of varying sophistication.

However, for what I suggested for struggling and/or rookie teams, I would explicitly not include a Fall competition. Instead, I would save that part of FRC for the Spring (the current system), and would allow teams to use their (unmodified?) SimpleBots in those Spring events (they aren't forced to take it apart and start over, they get to just use it).

Why? Preparing for competitions is a distracting time-suck on many levels, and it pushes teams to go out on limbs with their robot (more risk, more churn, more uncertainty, more internal debating, more stress, more expense, more struggle, ...).

Instead, my suggestion is to spend the Fall carefully managing the construction of a SimpleBot (that is identical to every other Fall SimpleBot). Then, after doing that once or twice, when the team is ready, they try accurately planning and building a modestly more complex bot for a regular season. Then, in the the season after that, they turn things up another notch. Lather, rinse repeat.

If the teams can keep their project management skills intact, then they can safely grow (in whatever direction they want to take) as much as their resources and ingenuity allow. But first, they have to acquire those skills and make them part of the team's soul.

Going on field trips (going to competitions) is a different activity/skill. Doing that is definitely an interesting part of FRC, but it's a different part.

Blake