Moving Championships back

[Cory]

Not going to happen. Some schools will not allow travel outside of the school year. FIRST would NEVER do this.

Not even worth discussing.

[tjf]

This would occur after a lot of schools end, and many schools forbid access to workshops / student travel "with" the school outside of the school year.

Why would FIRST do something that would only hurt their teams that qualify for champs?

(Opinions are my own.)

[FarmerJohn]

Originally Posted by Cory

Not going to happen. Some schools will not allow travel outside of the school year. FIRST would NEVER do this.

Not even worth discussing.

Hey, I agree with you!

If I may, however, it seems the tone of your message may come off as slightly negative, with the all capitalized NEVER and your final comment of "Not even worth discussing.".

Now, does that bother me? Not at all, but Poseidon5817 appears to be a student, and shutting down a student's idea in a harsh way may lead to students shying away from sharing their new ideas to the public (especially when it comes from a mentor of 254, whom students look up to on this site). The idea may not work out, but next time I'd suggest explaining your thought process as to why it may not work as well as the student intended and avoid the phrasing that makes it sound like "No, your idea is terrible!". That way next time this student has a good idea (and while it doesn't work, I still think this is a good idea to combat a well-known problem in FRC), the student will feel more comfortable sharing what he/she thinks up and instead isn't hesitant to speak because previously others shut him/her down right away.

Just an idea Let's build students up instead of breaking them down.

[Hitchhiker 42]

I like this, but (emphasis on the but), for me if we put it after AP exams, then we have to also start dodging final exams, which start for some schools immediately after that, and for other school occur at the end of June. Basically, this means that to not have students missing both study time and the actual exams, Champs would land somewhere in the end of June/beginning of July.

That I would find problematic for the obvious reasons stated above already.

[bkahl]

Originally Posted by FarmerJohn

it seems the tone of your message may come off as slightly negative

It seems you've never gone through Cory's post history, or met him.


And in all honesty, Cory IS right. There's no reason not to be blunt about it.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by bkahl

It seems you've never gone through Cory's post history, or met him.


And in all honesty, Cory IS right. There's no reason not to be blunt about it.

I'm pretty Sure Farmer John is Andrew Lawrence, so they've met.

I've been wrong before though.

[Poseidon5817]

Originally Posted by bkahl

It seems you've never gone through Cory's post history, or met him.


And in all honesty, Cory IS right.

Alright guys, rather than debating this and turning this thread into another one of those threads, let's use the thread for its intended purpose: discussing the pros and cons of this idea. Everyone has an opinion and that's to be respected, but let's not put anyone down. It's not becoming of respected mentors and students of FRC to put people down or be short in a public forum. There's no right or wrong here, it's a discussion.

[MikLast]

Originally Posted by Poseidon5817

Alright guys, rather than debating this and turning this thread into another one of those threads, let's use the thread for its intended purpose: discussing the pros and cons of this idea. Everyone has an opinion and that's to be respected, but let's not put anyone down. It's not becoming of respected mentors and students of FRC to put people down or be short in a public forum. There's no right or wrong here, it's a discussion.

Biggest con: FIRST Will never implement this. There isint much else to say.

[Poseidon5817]

Originally Posted by MikLast

Biggest con: FIRST Will never implement this. There isint much else to say.

Just saying FIRST will never implement this is not contributing to the thread. The whole point of this thread was to bring up discussion on the pros and cons of the idea. FIRST not ever doing it is not a pro or a con of AN IDEA as much as it is a result of the pros and cons. Just because a team will never implement a ball drive in competition season doesn't mean that we can't talk about it, guys.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Poseidon5817

Just saying FIRST will never implement this is not contributing to the thread. The whole point of this thread was to bring up discussion on the pros and cons of the idea. FIRST not ever doing it is not a pro or a con of AN IDEA as much as it is a result of the pros and cons. Just because a team will never implement a ball drive in competition season doesn't mean that we can't talk about it, guys.

There's a small bit of difference between a cool concept or mechanism that isn't practical and an idea that will never be tried.

The mechanism has some inherent value in the process - design, manufacture, evaluate, iterate.

An idea that is a nonstarter (such as FIRST should crowd source the game design this year), while it may spark some interesting discussion, has significantly less value as an educational tool because there's no feedback loop to see if the discussion is correct. And if it's something that is already proven there's no real point in discussing it.

Which category does this discussion fall into? As worded - the former. As Cory stated, FIRST is not going to move the World Exhibition Events past the end date of school years. The Pros and Cons are largely irrelevant for that discussion.

However, of value may be a discussion of the impact off season events have on teams. It's effectively the same question (can we move the competition season to include some of the summer vacation?) but it is practical, applicable, and can actually be evaluated.

Also - schools don't all end at the same time across the globe, perhaps that would be another avenue of discussion. - Does the current World Exhibition Event fall within your school year? What impact does it have on your attendance?

[Sperkowsky]

For all those saying it will never happen.

Who ever thought first would make 2 Champs?

Bottom line is you never know.

And too all those that are saying by having this outside of the school year it will hurt attendance it's worth mentioning that this system allows much more time for teams to fundraise. Think of all the district qualifiers, wait list qualifiers, or late regional qualifiers that have scrambled to get funds and come up short.

[MikLast]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

For all those saying it will never happen.

Who ever thought first would make 2 Champs?

Bottom line is you never know.

At least this idea is somewhat good...

Originally Posted by SpaceBiz

You seem to be forgetting about the upcoming water game where this idea would make total sense. Teams will definitely need extra time to modify their robot before champs because of the extra time to make everything water proof. Plus if you push Champs back after memorial day teams can use their local outdoor pools to have drive practice.

Shoot, you're right! This now makes total sense! We must implement this now to make sure the water game works perfectly!

[bkahl]

Originally Posted by Poseidon5817

Just because a team will never implement a ball drive in competition season...

..

[Poseidon5817]

Originally Posted by bkahl

..

will

My point is guys, that there is no reason to be rude and condescending to someone on here for an idea. I wasn't spamming, I wasn't flaming anyone, just posting an idea wanting to hear the community's opinion.

[EricH]

I'm... neutral on the idea.

You don't have to dodge AP testing, which is a good thing... except that you lose any ability for the students who are doing AP tests to do robot work for a couple weeks. (I'd bank on that being the case, with testing being so important to academics these days. Shame that education isn't as important to academics. Whether it's the school or the parents clamping down, you'll lose those students.)

On the other hand, for anybody who's not doing AP (and is doing CMP), you add another several weeks to an already long season. 14 weeks from Kickoff to the Week 7 events isn't exactly short! There's ways to mitigate that, admittedly, but that's still something to factor in.

I can see the pro of having more time to plan travel; that's always a plus. (And you can do fundraising at that time, too, even better.)

But then you get to the whole "end of school year" if you run it too late. Now, out here, school year ends in the early June timeframe, give or take a couple weeks (depending on start date); if you snuck CMP in early in May you've got a shot but anything later is going to be trouble. For the college mentors, they might be getting out earlier still, so that introduces some interesting complications.


Could it be done? Sure. Not for another 5 years, though. Venue contracts are signed, don't want to undo that. Is it a good idea? Eh, maybe they'll come up with something totally different by then, like having Kickoff in December.