paper: Stop the Stop Build - Counterpoint

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by gblake

I understand.

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

If instead of a 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/preactice; then during the season, thinks up, designs, and executes a robot 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.

A 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 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 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 their time-available-to-work is so tightly constrained that the struggling team 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 in that situation.

Bottom line: How to build an FRC robot+controls in under one week is well known. With preparation, getting a cookbook simple bot built in 6 weeks for one season has got to be do-able, unless the team in a situation that is simply incompatible with FRC. The next season they can adjust their goals.

Blake

The thing is, it takes teams a while to learn this lesson (if ever). No amount of external mentoring, help, etc... will cause the shift until the leadership of the team is ready for it.

Once bag day happens, there is no time machine to go back.

However, if after competing once (at a low level) they see teams they can copy some details from (and perhaps receive from advice from others), they can take their robot that isn't scoring points at all and have it contribute at their second event.

I'm absolutely certain that kids prefer scoring points to not scoring points, and ideally greater inspiration will follow.

Potentially that greater inspiration will lead to them wanting a better plan for season, to get done sooner, to realize those benefits etc... but we can't just state from our high horse that kids should just do it right the first time.

We don't need to get rid of the bag, we just need to allow unbagging windows for all teams all weeks.