[FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Again, this has not been my experience, and I've not been mentoring teams who have practice bots. The quantity of work does decrease after bag day, but certainly not to the point where it's insignificant, and the biggest result of having the robot in the bag is that the resulting post-bag-day work is extremely inefficient and frustrating for teams that are not sufficiently well-off to have a practice bot to work on.

It seems that your argument is that the extremely regressive effects of the current policy discourage many low-resource teams from pursuing post-bag-day work. This argument seems to me sort of perverse - it is arguing that removing artificial restrictions on low-resource teams (i.e., the pragmatic effect of the current policy) is bad because more teams would then choose to take advantage of the resources they're currently (unfairly) prevented from using efficiently.

You really don't seem to be grasping my point. I'm not necessarily arguing for or against SBD, but rather for an expectation of work hours that is similar to what many teams have right now. What I don't want to see is a 150-hour, 6 week build season turn into a 300-hour 12 week build season. You may believe everyone is already doing that, but I can tell you from my experience that it is a relatively small percentage of teams.

My team, for example, goes from meeting 15 hours a week to maybe 3 after stop build day (And trust me - no one in MN would say my team is low-resource). It's a huge change that allows students to get caught up on work and enjoy other activities. Many of my students in the past have started up with golf, soccer, softball, or other spring activities shortly after stop-build, and if we were to extend our normal meeting times for another 6 weeks those students would either have to drop out of the team at that point or drop their spring activities. Do you want to force them to make that choice just because you want a robotics activity that spans multiple sport seasons?

What my whole post was saying was that yes, teams that WANT to can keep working at a break-neck pace for 12 weeks. Buts we can work as a community to create a culture that supports more manageable time investments, and I think you'd find a lot of teams willingly go along with it. But if we instead create a culture that expects everyone to work full-out for 12 weeks, it could be damaging to the program as a whole.