paper: Stop the Stop Build

[Joe Johnson]

Jim,
Really amazing work. Thanks.

I love that you specifically called out that "6 weeks is a myth." It has been a myth for 2 decades.

I also love the data showing that basically a lot of teams are going to suck the first week they compete, whether that's Week 1 or Week 5, they are going to have a bad weekend. And the longer they wait to complete, the badder that weekend is going to get because the rest of the field is making progress (by going to competitions).

The time has come. Let's rip off the band-aide. End Stop Build Day. Let teams keep their robots for the full FIRST Season.

Will some teams build a completely new robot after Week 1? Sure maybe. But really, who cares? A lot of those teams will just put themselves into a deeper hole trying to copy Poofs or Symbotics or Robotnauts or whomever. They won't discover the problems that are not obvious until it's too late. And even if they are successful at knocking off one or two features from another team, I'd rather live in that world than the current world where so many teams bring less than functional robots to their first competition.

Dr. Joe J.