[FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey

[gblake]

"I advocate tightening the current stop-build restrictions because I don't want to see the total FRC program slide too far down the slippery slope of over-emphasizing the competition part of an otherwise well-rounded FRC program." See the next paragraph for an explanation of why I wrote this.

In this thread about a survey about Stop Build Day, I think it would be useful and interesting if each post (even those that are part of a multi-post exchange) began with a short sentence or phrase stating why the poster opposes/supports eliminating, weakening, loosening, tightening, keeping, strengthening (or is undecided about) the current stop build rules.

I think doing that would help sub-topic discussions from wandering too far afield and/or could help avoid people talking past each other.

And - What I think is more important, I think it might very helpful for the person who created the current survey, especially if they choose to create a follow-on survey.

I wrote my one-liner above.

Someone else might write one of these:

"I'm a proponent of weakening the current stop build restrictions because I think spreading the same work over a longer period will reduce mentor burn-out."

"I am a proponent of loosening stop-build restrictions because I think OPR will go up for teams at the bottom of the OPR scale, leading to increased retention of those teams."

Some people might just post a one-liner in order to remind readers about opinions they have already expressed in other discussions.

Blake

[bkahl]

Originally Posted by gblake

...

Sigh

[Pauline Tasci]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

For the vast majority of FRC participants, being the best of the best at a worldwide scale is not in their vocabulary. Using the rationale of the very top echelon in terms of on-field success is not a representative sample for the FRC population as a whole. What it takes to "keep up" with these teams should not be a primary driving factor in determining what is the healthiest decision for the entire FRC team base.

Please refer to my verb usage.

You are not keeping up if you want to be the best of the best at a worldwide scale unless you do not stop working until comp with 2 robots (or more).

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!

[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.

[samir13k]

Originally Posted by gblake

"I advocate tightening the current stop-build restrictions because I don't want to see the total FRC program slide too far down the slippery slope of over-emphasizing the competition part of an otherwise well-rounded FRC program." See the next paragraph for an explanation of why I wrote this.

In this thread about a survey about Stop Build Day, I think it would be useful and interesting if each post (even those that are part of a multi-post exchange) began with a short sentence or phrase stating why the poster opposes/supports eliminating, weakening, loosening, tightening, keeping, strengthening (or is undecided about) the current stop build rules.

I think doing that would help sub-topic discussions from wandering too far afield and/or could help avoid people talking past each other.

And - What I think is more important, I think it might very helpful for the person who created the current survey, especially if they choose to create a follow-on survey.

I wrote my one-liner above.

Someone else might write one of these:

"I'm a proponent of weakening the current stop build restrictions because I think spreading the same work over a longer period will reduce mentor burn-out."

"I am a proponent of loosening stop-build restrictions because I think OPR will go up for teams at the bottom of the OPR scale, leading to increased retention of those teams."

Some people might just post a one-liner in order to remind readers about opinions they have already expressed in other discussions.

Blake

This is a really long post to tell people to keep posts short...

If this was strictly an "agree" or "disagree" topic then a multiple choice poll would have been sufficient, however there needs to be an opportunity for justification of everyone's point. A TLDR attitude prevents people from having their voices truly heard. Plus, adding a summary to a forum post only makes the post longer.

[Pauline Tasci]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

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.

The point I am getting at is teams have way more options on how they would like to construct their own build schedule without a SBD. So many programs like VEX, FTC, FLL, sports strive from this and can add so much more to the product.
If team's want to work more they can, if team's want to slow down they can, the possibilities are endless. Having a harsh deadline (especially a short 6 weeks) makes things harder in my world for both high performing teams and low performing teams. High performing teams want to be competitive so they must build 2+ robots to be the best of the best. Low performing teams have to stop working on their robot and can't add things, test, and more.

For Code Orange, we can't have 40 kids working on one robot, so we are going to build 3 to give our kids more opportunities to chase excellence. Many teams don't have that option, but eliminating a stop build day would give more kids the chance to work on features on the robot.

I helped start 2 rookie teams this year and both wanted to be competitive to ensure their sponsors stayed interested, kids were engaged, and parents would continue their support. So they both put in time to create 2nd robots. Both teams did exceptionally well (One even was #1 seed at SDR) and supporters raved and their program grew because of it.

Imagine how many more teams would get more support if they could show a little bit of a better product!

Kids get the most inspiration by seeing their hard work pay off. I've been on those low resource teams. We just want to have a bit more of a chance. Giving us more time would of helped with that!

The strive for excellence isn't something that "burns out all kids." What burns a lot of them out is wanting to be slightly competitive without enough funds or time to make a robot that works.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by samir13k

This is a really long post to tell people to keep posts short...

If this was strictly an "agree" or "disagree" topic then a multiple choice poll would have been sufficient, however there needs to be an opportunity for justification of everyone's point. A TLDR attitude prevents people from having their voices truly heard. Plus, adding a summary to a forum post only makes the post longer.

It's not his fault people don't know that the earth is really flat and not actually round.

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Does anyone actually have any data that shows how many FRC teams build two robots currently?

I believe Issac Rife tried to collect this data a few years back.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Karthik

I believe Issac Rife tried to collect this data a few years back.

This is the post I believe you are referencing.

Issac might have more data now, not sure.

[Whatever]

I have seen a lot people say in this thread that eliminating SBD would eliminate the building of two robots. While mentoring FTC I saw a number of teams build 2 or 3 different robots over the course of a season. I knew for multiple teams their plan was to update their strategy based on the latest game play and design/build a new robot from scratch for each tournament. Whether that is good or bad I will leave for debate but I would be pretty surprised if FRC teams wouldn't follow suit if bag and tag was eliminated.

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by Pauline Tasci

The point I am getting at is teams have way more options on how they would like to construct their own build schedule without a SBD. So many programs like VEX, FTC, FLL, sports strive from this and can add so much more to the product.
If team's want to work more they can, if team's want to slow down they can, the possibilities are endless. Having a harsh deadline (especially a short 6 weeks) makes things harder in my world for both high performing teams and low performing teams. High performing teams want to be competitive so they must build 2+ robots to be the best of the best. Low performing teams have to stop working on their robot and can't add things, test, and more.

This is what generally I've been thinking about.

Do Vex/Vex IQ students/teams struggle with burnout? Honest question here.

-Mike

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

This is what generally I've been thinking about.
Do Vex/Vex IQ students/teams struggle with burnout? Honest question here.

I have no statistics on this, but student/mentor burnout is still an issue for some VEX Robotics Competition teams.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

This is what generally I've been thinking about.

Do Vex/Vex IQ students/teams struggle with burnout? Honest question here.

-Mike

Mike,
last year we had 8 VEX/VEX MS/VEX IQ teams. Many of our teams built multiple robots throughout the season in hopes of improving their robots. More than half of them were completely different than their original designs at the start of the season which competed in at least 1 event.
Generally speaking, there was no student/mentor burnout. More than 1/2 of our High School students that do VEX also do FRC. Even with that, no burnout.

However, if we tried to do that for FRC, I would guess that student/mentor burnout would definitely take place. This is why I dont believe VEX is a good comparison with respect to building multiple robots for FRC with respect to resources, time spent, and the amount of energy needed.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by waialua359

Mike,
last year we had 8 VEX/VEX MS/VEX IQ teams. Many of our teams built multiple robots throughout the season in hopes of improving their robots. More than half of them were completely different than their original designs at the start of the season which competed in at least 1 event.
Generally speaking, there was no student/mentor burnout. More than 1/2 of our High School students that do VEX also do FRC. Even with that, no burnout.

However, if we tried to do that for FRC, I would guess that student/mentor burnout would definitely take place. This is why I dont believe VEX is a good comparison with respect to building multiple robots for FRC with respect to resources, time spent, and the amount of energy needed.

Having a school with students that do both makes you a good person to ask... what's the difference in person-hours/meeting hours between building one VEX robot and one FRC robot? when looking at burnout, measuring the difference in terms of number of hours probably makes a decent metric to compare two programs with.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Having a school with students that do both makes you a good person to ask... what's the difference in person-hours/meeting hours between building one VEX robot and one FRC robot? when looking at burnout, measuring the difference in terms of number of hours probably makes a decent metric to compare two programs with.

Our students spend roughly 3-4 hours per day for about a 6-week time period to build a VEX robot from scratch. Its much harder to determine subsequent designs, because after already competing at events and seeing youtube videos of other tournaments, they can get ideas of subsystems that can be replicated much easier than in FRC.
In FRC, we put in over 300+ hours for the average student in the 6+ week build season to build 1 robot.

Here's something that no one has really elaborated on yet. What about student/mentor talent?
IMO, elite teams will always be elite teams no matter what rules you change. They are good not because they build 2 robots and continually iterate as the main reason. Its plain and simple.....talent.
I was blown away to here recently that teams could put in less than 1/2 the amount of time and build world class, Einstein ready robots.
I dont think you can do that with all the resources in the world or a change in schedule, without first and foremost the talent and experience to do so.
In Jim Zondag's white paper, he specifically names some example elite teams. Change the rules and they will STILL be elite.