[FRC Blog] Stop Build Day Survey Results

[AdamHeard]

Even if the survey had said everyone was in favor of eliminating SBD, I wouldn't trust the results.

The survey phrasing was pretty darn awful in terms of phrasing.

It also would have been helpful to have a panel of consulting mentors or something present 3-5 options to FIRST. FIRST would critique these, then present them to the masses with some education of their details.

I bet everyone had different interpretations of what their answers mean.

Weekly unbag windows seems like a pretty darn good compromise.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Weekly unbag windows seems like a pretty darn good compromise.

Agreed. This would be a relatively non-controversial change; one that simply gives the advantage that district teams already enjoy (especially those who attend extra events) to everybody.

Even if you have gripes with the survey methodology and put large error bars on each bar in the graph, I'd wager that ~90% of those in the "1: Eliminate Stop Build Day" camp would think this is an improvement on the status quo, and probably 1/3 to 1/2 of those in the "5: Keep Stop Build Day" category would agree. Even if the survey is biased by a factor of 2x in either direction, it adds up to consensus.

[Mark McLeod]

Spin city

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Spin city

Just you wait until I tweet at 3AM that my side won the survey.

[Nate Laverdure]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

The phrasing was pretty darn awful in terms of phrasing.

Alanis Morissette-style irony?

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

Just you wait until I tweet at 3AM that my side won the survey.

Bigly.

[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Even if the survey had said everyone was in favor of eliminating SBD, I wouldn't trust the results.

The survey phrasing was pretty darn awful in terms of phrasing.

It also would have been helpful to have a panel of consulting mentors or something present 3-5 options to FIRST. FIRST would critique these, then present them to the masses with some education of their details.

I bet everyone had different interpretations of what their answers mean.

Weekly unbag windows seems like a pretty darn good compromise.

This post's accuracy is pretty darn good in terms of accuracy.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Caleb Sykes

This post's accuracy is pretty darn good in terms of accuracy.

Yugely accurate?

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by marshall

So a majority of responding teams (2,196) build more than one robot...

This is probably the most surprising result for me. I'm curious about the distribution of on-field performance of the responding teams. Because I am biased to think that 50% of all teams do not build a second robot, I imagine this survey got significantly more responses from teams who excel at competitions. It is tough to quantify how that skew affected the results of the survey.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

It also would have been helpful to have a panel of consulting mentors or something present 3-5 options to FIRST. FIRST would critique these, then present them to the masses with some education of their details.

I bet everyone had different interpretations of what their answers mean.

Weekly unbag windows seems like a pretty darn good compromise.

Yeah Adam but just like they didn't have a baked-in focus group of teams for split postseason events they don't have a baked-in in focus group of mentors for this

[mathking]

The wording on the survey was not great, and any detailed survey like this is obviously trying to do a more nuanced evaluation than simply "eliminate or don't eliminate." One thing that strikes me as a statistician is that there is likely more motivation on the part of those favoring getting rid of stop build day. First because the motivation level for "change" events is generally higher than for "remain the same" events. So in a survey like this, I would bet that all other things being equal, the 1s are likely overrepresented compared to the 5s relative to the entire FRC population.

[guniv]

I'm pretty against getting rid of Stop Build Day, but like mathking says above, I would have expected a larger turnout from those in favor of getting rid of it.

Nonetheless, I answered all of the questions truthfully and some could be considered contradictory to my stance, like "managing unexpected events.. drive time... last minute needed parts." I'm not surprised to see that those indeed have a large percentage calling it a disadvantage. I wonder if we ever see the full data, how many "contradictory" answers we might possibly see.

[Rachel Lim]

Here's a visual representation of some of the breakdowns they provided but didn't graph (build one/multiple robots, in regionals/districts, rookie year).

I find it very interesting (and very weird) that teams who build multiple robots are more in favor of keeping bag day.

[Hitchhiker 42]

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

I find it very interesting (and very weird) that teams who build multiple robots are more in favor of keeping bag day.

On the contrary, that makes sense. If you already have the resources to build a second robot, why change the rule (other than money, but you already have that), whereas teams that don't have enough resources would more likely ask for no stop build day.

TL;DR High-resource teams in general favor the status quo which is understandable.

[Hitchhiker 42]

Originally Posted by Ed Law

Imagine dividing into more bins from 1-10 instead of from 1-5. Let's say 10 is do not eliminate stop build day. It will even look clearer than the bar for do not eliminate stop build day is much much higher than the other bars.

... or it might not. Consider people who thought it was higher than a 4, but not quite a 5. On that new scale, they'd say 9/10. But on this scale, they put 5. I know that was what happened with me at least.