paper: Stop the Stop Build - Counterpoint

[gblake]

Originally Posted by JB987

Blake,
Much of your point here is based on the attribution of poor choice/time management on the part of struggling teams. In many cases, teams are limited in time they can spend each week and are limited as far as access to build facilities by school or district fiat. Additional weeks to work directly on their robot could help them better deal with time limitations...who knows, maybe even give them time to add an autonomous element to their performance

I understand.

However, there are skilled and experienced FRC people (who are excellent teachers/mentors) and teams that can show other teams how to turn one long, hard weekend into a decently-sophisticated, working robot.

If instead of using skilled /experienced people and a long, hard weekend, a team that has been struggling learns project management skills, plans and executes pre-season preparation/practice; then during the season, thinks up, designs, and executes a robot (including simple autonomy ) that is within their abilities and that fits comfortably within the 45 days; I predict success.

What will make or break them (for this part of being a team) is whether they can learn to set very modest goals initially, and only incrementally-increase the sophistication of their goals AFTER they have proven they can handle the modest goals.

With that in mind, unless they are simply limited by outsiders to truly ridiculously small amounts of time per week, I'll bet a very nice dinner that any *motivated* team that has learned to manage a project well, can build a good-enough FRC robot in 45-days (and build a better one the next season).

Basically, the struggling team needs to learn to accomplish (on average) in each of the 45 days (on a simple robot+controls), roughly what the fast-and-furious folks accomplish in each hour (on a reasonably sophisticated robot) during their 48 hour sprints. OBTW, to help the struggling team, they can get detailed design/implementation info for previous-season robots and controls from several sources.

If a struggling team's time-available-to-work is so tightly constrained that they can't accomplish what I described, regardless of how well they manage their project/time; then it would be a *good* idea (not a bad idea) to rethink the entire subject of competing in FRC. FTC, VRC, etc. are almost certainly better choices for them in that situation.

Bottom line: How to build an FRC robot+controls in under one week is well known. With preparation, building a rugged, dependable, allies-like-to-see-you, cookbook-ish, simple bot built in 6 weeks (with time set aside for practicing) for a given season has got to be do-able, unless the team is in a situation that is simply incompatible with FRC. The next season they can adjust their goals.

Blake
PS: Again, all of this is in the context of not letting the tail wag the dog. A simple robot that easily understood and altered is an excellent robot, if the team uses it, and the competitions, to inspire people to consider looking into STEM(ish) careers seriously. The team doesn't have make people into STEM graduates, or overwhelm audiences with the FRC equivalent of a space shuttle. Instead they just need to open peers' eyes to the fact that a STEM career can be rewarding, is worth considering, and is within their grasp.