[FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Pauline Tasci

Please refer to my verb usage.



In my world, FRC teams should strive to get all they can out of the program and to learn the most they can. What I have stressed on my own team and my own career is the importance of iterative design and never having a product just be good enough. Strive to create the best thing you can, and any great engineer knows you can always improve your product. That thought process is how you become an innovative individual.
Eliminating bag day will give more teams an opportunity to continuously improve and learn from that on a cheaper scale. Imagine how many teams could add more things with more time! They would learn so much more about engineering.

FRC is expensive. And learning more for a cheaper price than 2 robots for a majority of teams seems like something we should be striving for.

Thanks!

This leads us right back to the conversation that was occurring regarding burnout and what it means to "keep up." Nobody doubts that having more time means teams will have the capability of doing more with their machines. What is in doubt is the other impacts of extending the official dates of build season. At the moment the discussion is specifically focusing on what pressures teams will feel to expand their work schedule to fill that new time, and the implicit impacts of that on student and mentor burnout. That ties directly into a number of other factors that have been discussed previously in other threads (student recruitment, student grades, mentor retention, team retention, etc). That's why I challenged your evaluation of using Einstein-caliber teams.

In short, few people are disputing that more time can mean you can do more with your machine. What people are disputing is what that time costs, and whether the standards of the teams that already work that time are truly a proper metric to compare the rest of the FRC population to.