[FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey

[Deke]

I think these are two great points on this subject:

Originally Posted by waialua359

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.

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I'm for stopping bagging. But I also understand that it would have minimal real impact for low performance teams on their competitiveness [1]. More impactful would be figuring out why so many teams continue to ignore the resources placed in front of them (Ri3D, kitbot, various build days hosted by teams) and figuring out how we can develop more resources and get them used.

Example - how many teams at your events failed to reliably drive? I seem to see at least one per event that's using the kitbot but wiring or programming was too hard. How many fail to move in auto? For me, way too many teams fell into that category. So, the question becomes why? The kitbot can be put together by following instructions. The wiring can be done similarly. And for the most part driving should work fine out of the box. But why is it still so hard?

The following is just from my own observations from watching competitions over the years in a district system.

I think there are teams out there with a very low "ceiling" on their robots/teams performance that would not be solved with infinite amount of time available to them. This can be due to lack talent/resources/skill/capability/knowledge or whatever terminology you want to use.

However, I think there is a much larger subset of teams that do have the knowledge/talent/capability to have a high "ceiling" but run out of time to realize the "ceiling" that they have.

I get to watch a lot of the same teams in person at FIM districts and see a lot of the same teams from the first to second event. There are many that fall into the too little too late to make it into the DCMP. Many matches in the district system allows you to iterate and get better, with more time than regionals, but you still need to come out punching or you'll miss the DCMP boat. Believe me, been there, done that.

I'm in favor of removing bag day because I see many teams reach their "ceiling" at their second event and be competitive, when they were barely able to perform at their first event.

Also, removing should remove a level of bureaucracy with the sign in and out that is not value added IMO.

People have shown to be very adaptive to the situation they were given. I don't think there will be the extreme cases of eliminating bag day will cause all the robots to be competitive, or it will burn all the mentors and students out. I just think it will help the middle tier teams reach their potential. To me, it's not that drastic of a change.

[Whatever]

This is kind of minor point but I haven't seen anyone make it.

Over 20+ years as an engineer in the semiconductor industry I have learned to appreciate good marketing requirements at the beginning of a project. There is nothing is worse than working on a project with shifting requirements and projects with really poor requirements have a habit of getting a lot of good engineers laid off. In FRC the equivalent to market requirements is the robot strategy that drives the build season. I would argue that consistently good teams are the teams that do the best job of predicting how the game is going to be played early in the build season. More build time and more chances to reset the design does de-emphasize this aspect of the program.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Deke

I think these are two great points on this subject:





The following is just from my own observations from watching competitions over the years in a district system.

I think there are teams out there with a very low "ceiling" on their robots/teams performance that would not be solved with infinite amount of time available to them. This can be due to lack talent/resources/skill/capability/knowledge or whatever terminology you want to use.

However, I think there is a much larger subset of teams that do have the knowledge/talent/capability to have a high "ceiling" but run out of time to realize the "ceiling" that they have.

...

I'm in favor of removing bag day because I see many teams reach their "ceiling" at their second event and be competitive, when they were barely able to perform at their first event.

I've snipped out a couple of pretty major points.

1) Yes, there are teams that, given an infinite amount of time will simply not be able to build a functional, let alone, competitive robot.

2) I'm not convinced of this. I'm convinced they run out of time because they think their ceiling is far higher than it realistically should be.

3) I think this is more an issue of teams needing to compete more.