[FRC Blog] Stop Build Day Survey Results

[mathking]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I'm curious to hear from teams that build significant or full practice robots that wish to keep bag day. That's probably where I'll learn the most about this perspective.

That would be us. For the last few years (either six or eight depending on how close a copy you want) we have built a practice robot that is a pretty close copy of the competition robot. Not always exactly the same but very, very close. I have expressed it before, but my reason for wanting to keep stop build day is that we will lose team members (both students and mentors) if we do not. We practice with the second robot, and a few students work on tweaking devices sometimes. But we spend less than 20% as much time and have less than 20% as many students involved in the practice at any one time as we do during the build season. That is a sustainable level of activity for us after stop build day. Over half our team members do a spring sport or are in the spring musical, and we would lose some of them, and some mentors, if we changed.

As I said before, I have no doubt that on the average the robots would be better if there were no stop build day. At least in the short term. There is no reason that adding more time to work on the robot would make robots worse (excepting every once in a while where there is a catastrophic accident) and reasons that at least some robots would be better. Using the same logic I do not doubt there would not be as many participants in FRC, because I don't believe there are lots of people out there not participating because of the limited build season. So for me it is a question of better robots for fewer kids or not quite as good robots for more kids.