[FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey

[efoote868]

Originally Posted by Cory

Could you elaborate on what your competition season looks like? You are from Indiana and 868 seems to be an upper tier Indiana team. Are you not taking advantage of unbagging windows? Do you not plan any upgrades for your robot? Do you just unbag to practice/test software? Do you iterate on mechanisms? What are you working on (or not working on) each week between the last week of February and CMP?

Carmel High School has about 5200 students. Approximately 120-160 students will show up to the call out. We require students during build season to meet every day after school, meetings usually last 3 hours (last season MWF was 3:30-6:30PM, TTh 6:00-9:00PM, this is for the teacher that sponsors the team). Sometimes we will have meetings Saturday, late in the build season we may meet Sunday as well. These weekend meetings don't count for attendance.
We require attendance to let students miss school for competitions. You can understand what would happen if there was no time commitment required to be "on the team," especially with a school of that size.

After stop build day, student and mentor participation is reduced significantly, and those that do meet it's voluntary and not counted on attendance.

Managing a team our size is no small feat, and an official "SBD" makes the team draw down very easy. I understand and appreciate wanting to work on the robot during competition season, but without an official end of the build season would strain our mentors, particularly the teachers. It's not hard to imagine it's the same elsewhere.

Originally Posted by Cory

Jim's paper had a very reasonable intermediate step of giving everyone FRC wide 8 hours a week (every week, not just weeks you're competing) unbag time. I've seen almost no discussion of this, just the posts about how the sky will fall if we eliminate SBD and the opposite posts that it's insane we continue to have SBD.

I've posted 3 times on CD that I support this, and entirely separately (before all the discussion or Jim's white paper) I gave that as my feedback to FIRST.