Ideas to move in the direction of making FIRST competitions 'fair'

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I'm trying to figure out how, 2006 Curie Division Champ, 1139 equates to the New York Yankees. They had a RELIABLE DRIVE BASE , INNOVATIVE system to keep balls from jamming and an INNOVATIVE launcher .

Earlier in this thread I went a little bit off-topic and forgot to express my own opinion on ideas to make FIRST competitions 'fair'.

My opinion is: FIRST should (1) re-write a rule when attempts to apply it have demonstrated that it doesn't work, and (2) keep improving the kit of parts by deleting parts that don't work well and adding parts that do. No quantum leaps are required. Just an ongoing process of continuous improvement.

Sean is correct above; the present FIRST rules actually encourage, and certainly do not frustrate, teams that are capable of innovating -- even if they are not funded like the New York Yankees.

Sean's dad was correct in expressing a similar opinion a couple of years ago.

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Bongle

With a bit steeper gradient (first year: 8 weeks, 2nd year: 7 weeks, 3rd+ years: 6 weeks), this is the best idea I've heard in the thread so far. It is concise, it is definite, it is enforceable, and it gives help in an area that rookie teams probably struggle the most with: time. I don't think you'd get too many people whining about "that rookie team dominating because they got all the extra build time", because everyone would know that next year that team will have less time. Further, it isn't easy to manipulate this system. With cash or mentor divisions, you might have teams under-reporting cash spent or mentors used just so they get into a less competitive division. On the other hand, it is impossible for a team to claim they've only been competing for one year so that they get more time.

It's so easy to waste time on a rookie team just trying to figure stuff out. If you've got a first-year programmer with no instructions other than the internet, it isn't unusual to waste an entire night doing something that would take a 2nd or 3rd year programmer 5 minutes to do.

Different rules for different teams is never a good idea.

Yes, rookie teams may have a hard time getting going their first year, but by allowing them extra time to build their robot you're just sugar-coating reality. This would be comparable to over-protective parents who never let their kids more than ten feet out of their sight. We can't shield teams from reality and never let them fail or experience the "real FIRST".

The only way to truly learn life lessons is through hard work, and for many people that means working especially hard to get the robot done in time. If that means putting in several all-nighters, then so be it. Is the chance of failure very real? One-hundred percent YES. But that is life.

As Walt Disney once said, "I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you're young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it, I’ve never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid. I’ve never had the feeling I couldn’t walk out and get a job doing something."

The only time a team truly fails in FIRST is when they stop trying. Otherwise, I'd say keep the same six-week build season, keep the same rules for all teams, and keep the same randomized divisions. Reasons for justifying different divisions in FIRST based off "this is the way its played in other sports" has no sound reasoning for FIRST. Baseball and boating competitions are about one thing: winning. In FIRST, that "one thing that matters" is not winning, but it is the I in FIRST, inspiration. How a team inspires its students - either by winning, trying as hard as they could, or any other means, is moot, as long as the end product is inspiration.

[Stuart]

For Inspiration Recognition of Science and Technology.

if you were to change the rules to limit teams and make a more even playing field, you would destroy the inspiration part.

FIRST is not about a robot competition . . there just happens to be one at every FIRST event.

[Dan Petrovic]

I don't think there is a good way to make FIRST fair.

A team is how the members want to make it. If the team has the enthusiasm and work ethic to be successful, then they will. If a team really doesn't want to do much, just sort of slack off and wait for build season to argue about everything, then that team wont be successful.

FIRST can't do much to make the playing field level. It comes from the team members. It starts with teamwork. If you don't have a team that works well together, then nothing will be accomplished. This can be solved by getting together as a team and doing... something! It doesn't matter, just get out and do something together. A lot of time is wasted when arguements came up. That happened to us this year. There was an arguement about whether we should shoot or score in the side goals, then another arguement about the shooter design.

Arguements lead to wasted time, frustration, and poor products of one's work because of that frustration.

Communication is another big one. Communcation isn't entirely being able to talk. There's more to that. Communication is rendered to just someone babbling if no one is listening. Team members need to know how to listen to eachother. If the controls and mechanical aren't on the same page about what's going on, 6 weeks into it, everyone will be cursing at everything.

FIRST can do everything in it's power to make the game as fair as possible, but it's useless if a team can't get along.

The only true way to make it fair is for the powers that be in FIRST hold our hands through it all, and that's no fun.

Okay, I'm hungry. Bye.

-Dan!

[KenWittlief]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

... In FIRST, that "one thing that matters" is not winning, but it is the I in FIRST, inspiration. How a team inspires its students - either by winning, trying as hard as they could, or any other means, is moot, as long as the end product is inspiration.

that was true in the past, but for the last several years winning a regional also meant you could go to the championship. For some teams, if you dont win, you cant go.

Many teams take the stance that building a great competitive robot, and trying your best to win, is the way to inspire the students. How inspired will you be if you build a great robot, and play excellent matches, and your team still does not place well, if you dont make it to the playoff matches, if you dont get to attend the championship for 3 or 4 years?

How inspired will you be if you see teams that have machines that are not as good as yours, or teams that dont drive and play the game as well as you, place higher, and get chosen to go on, when you are left behind?

If things are too far out of skew, then students will learn a different lesson than the one we want to teach. Work hard, do your best, but then its a toss up whether or not you will reach your goal?!

If you goto Vegas and play Blackjack, or the Black/red on the roulette wheel, your odds are just under 50:50. Would you play if you knew the cards were stacked against you, or the wheel was rigged, if you knew the casino was not playing fair?

Likewise, what are we teaching students on teams that dont try hard, teams that build poor machines, but they end up with 6 or 7 super alliances, and win most of their matches, and place in the top 8? Hey that was easy!

Originally Posted by InfernoX14

....A team is how the members want to make it. If the team has the enthusiasm and work ethic to be successful, then they will. ...

that is what Im hoping we can moved towards. If the competiton was fair, if all teams had an even chance of winning if they work hard and are creative, then your statement would be correct.

But as it is now, you can have a great team, build an outstanding machine within the capabilites of your team and sponsor, and still have a very poor chance of winning a regional, going on to the championship, and winning there. Your team can play extreemly well in every match, and still lose every single time.

Im starting to think the imbalance, the unfairness, has been ingrained in FIRST for so long that many people cannot even see it, cannot recognize that its there, and that it exists on several levels.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

Many teams take the stance that building a great competitive robot, and trying your best to win, is the way to inspire the students. How inspired will you be if you build a great robot, and play excellent matches, and your team still does not place well, if you dont make it to the playoff matches, if you dont get to attend the championship for 3 or 4 years?

How inspired will you be if you see teams that have machines that are not as good as yours, or teams that dont drive and play the game as well as you, place higher, and get chosen to go on, when you are left behind?

How about being 62nd out of 62 teams at the 2003 VCU? We got beat by a team that didn't uncrate their robot.
What did 116 take away from that. A desire to NEVER let that happen again.

[Libby K]

A team is how the members want to make it. If the team has the enthusiasm and work ethic to be successful, then they will. If a team really doesn't want to do much, just sort of slack off and wait for build season to argue about everything, then that team wont be successful.

^agrees.

<my $0.02>

FIRST is not a level playing field sometimes, but neither is life.

</my $0.02>

[Cory]

So many people are getting worked up about teams with multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars and 20 engineers and massive machine shops with the latest and greatest in CNC machinery at their beck and call, etc, etc.

Stop and think about that for a minute. How many teams do you actually think have $150,000+ in funding? How many do you think have 20 engineers? For those teams that do have 20 engineers, how effective do you think it is for them to even have 20 engineers? Probably not very. I sure as heck wouldn't want 20 engineers on my team. Nothing would get done, unless you were going to have 20 subsystems.

The fact is, very few of these teams exist. Of the ones that do, so what? They're likely not doing much better than a team with half as many engineers, or half as large of a budget. Even so, it doesn't matter at all. Clearly the students on these teams are being inspired. If not, their team would collapse. No students would join it if they hated it and weren't learning anything. As has been said so many times, it does not matter how the students are inspired, so long as they are inspired

On to the point of resources. People in FIRST are very good at judging books by their covers, so to speak. If a team has a painted robot, or complex mechanisms, they must be super well funded and have a ton of resources. This can be true. Often it is not.

I'll bring up an example that's been brought up multiple times in the past (and hopefully not embarass them too much )--Team 968. They don't have resources. They don't have money. They're lucky to scrape together the entry fee. They wouldn't have been able to go to nationals last year if a generous donor hadn't paid the way for the winners of the LA regional.

Yet every year they manage to produce a professional looking, well engineered machine. I have yet to mention that they don't have engineers. They have a couple college students majoring in engineering, and a single teacher. Not one engineer. With that small mentorship group, and a small group of kids, they manage to produce some of the best looking and performing robots out there, year in and year out.

Im sure many teams looked at 968 this year and last, and the year before and thought that they were one of those $100,000 teams with 20 engineers. They work out of a classroom. They don't have machinery.

Which brings up my next point. Tons of teams/individuals complain about not having machining resources. 968 has none of these. What they do have is desire. If you want something bad enough, you can get it. All it takes is to call up all the local machine shops you can find in your phonebook. Many are willing to help, even with significant time committments. I don't know how many they got to donate time, but I can tell you we had probably 4 or 5 machine shops which donated time to make parts for us.

The resources are out there. The biggest difference between an average team and one of the powerhouse teams is desire. When the average team is complaining about how unfair it is that powerhouse teams have all these resources, the powerhouse teams are working hard to get these resources. When the average team is taking sunday off, or going home at 5 pm, the powerhouse team is working 7 days a week, and going home at 10 pm.

Desire to be the best you can be is what separates the two. Not machine shops. Not money. Not having 20 engineers. Heck, I look around on CD, and last year many teams were posting pictures of the machine shops at their high schools, or the machine shops they had access to. I saw tons of shops that we'd absolutely love to have access to--multiple CNC mills and lathes, manual machines galore, etc. By no means are we a disadvantaged team, far from it, but our machine shop can't even begin to compare to those I've seen of many teams given the "disadvantaged" label. Similarly, I'm sure there are tons of teams with multiple engineers who fail to ever approach the level of teams with far fewer engineers, or none at all.

Now obviously there are situations in which hard work and desire aren't going to get you to the top. But there are so many teams out there who could significantly improve their own standing by simply not complaining about what everyone else has that they don't, and working their hardest to get the things that those other teams have.

Finally, before you judge a team by what you think you see, it might serve you well to get to know the team itself. Only then can you form an informed opinion, and many might be very surprised at how different their views were from reality.

[KenWittlief]

The biggest difference between an average team and one of the powerhouse teams is desire. When the average team is complaining about how unfair it is that powerhouse teams have all these resources, the powerhouse teams are working hard to get these resources. When the average team is taking sunday off, or going home at 5 pm, the powerhouse team is working 7 days a week, and going home at 10 pm.

this statement could cause a great deal of hurt to a small team with limited resources and mentors. Telling a team they did not win, that they dont have access to a multimillion dollar machine shop, that they dont have awesome mentors... because they did not try hard enough is condesending.

If a small team is very successful, and their success can be attributed to them (and not to the alliance luck of the draw team matching), then they would advance up on whatever structure or division format exists for the next season. If you prove your team is great playing against other teams on your own level, then you win this year, and you move up to a greater challenge next year. Certainly there will be small teams that excel. That is what a competition is all about - seeing how well you did, based on how well you prepared for the event.

I guess I have asked for too much to try to focus on coming up with ways to make the FIRST competiton more fair than it is today. This thread has fallen into a hopeless debate on whether or not FIRST is fair, and whether or not it even matters.

It seems pretty odd that a program that is suppose to be a culture of change, has fallen into its own patterns and habits, so much so that it cant even see the issues.

but as they say, seeing the problem is the first step. If you cant recognize there is a problem, then nothing can be done about it.

[Bongle]

Someone didn't like the "rookies get more time" rule suggestion

I personally don't really want a rule change in favour of weaker teams. As someone else said, it does kind of cheapen the victory a la "I'm the best of the worst!". However, of all the playing-field-leveling suggestions in the thread, I like that one the best because it is much easier to implement and enforce than divisions based on money, mentors, or success. Plus it DOES apply equally to all teams: all teams are rookies at some point.

The resources are out there. The biggest difference between an average team and one of the powerhouse teams is desire. When the average team is complaining about how unfair it is that powerhouse teams have all these resources, the powerhouse teams are working hard to get these resources. When the average team is taking sunday off, or going home at 5 pm, the powerhouse team is working 7 days a week, and going home at 10 pm.

In my time at 1141, we would often have a schedule something like this:
7am - school opens, work at machine shop until 8:30
8:30am-2:30pm - school (during lunch and breaks work on the robot)
2:30am-5:00pm - robotics
5:00pm-7:00pm - go home for dinner/homework
7:00pm-whenever the janitors kicked us out (usually midnight)- robotics

Weekends would often run from 9am to midnight on both days. 1141 has desire flowing out the wazoo. The problem is that there are plenty of teams that have just as much desire, but something extra.

It can't simply be desire, there is something else (I really don't know what) seperating the best from the rest, and I think it would be good for FIRST to figure out exactly what that is. I'm not convinced it is simply money, because money doesn't buy good designs. It (probably) isn't the students, since on average, you'll have the same batch of students at every school.

The main thing I think FIRST could help with is figuring out why there is a gap between consistently mid-pack teams like 1141 and consistently successful teams like their anagram 1114. What are the practices of highly succesful teams? How is it that 1114/1503/1680 can so consistently come up with very highly effective robots year after year? Do they practice the design period ahead of time with previous year's games? Are they infused with tons of high-quality engineers that help with the design greatly? Are the designs of the same quality, but simply executed better*? Are they simply larger and can thus pull off more grandiose designs? Do they attract a different slice of the student population?

*As an aside, my current team (1281) had a laugh while looking at team #25's robot at nationals. It was fundamentally identical to ours (high hopper, gravity feed to low shooter, fast 6 wheel drive), but each part of it was executed just that little bit better. Their hopper was rigid and so had fewer jams. Their shooter imparted more speed to the balls and was more accurate. It probably wasn't just luck that they designed it that way, they probably had their meetings and design process structured in such a way that only the best implementations of each feature was used.

I think the best thing FIRST could do would be a bit of research into what the spark is in consistently succesful teams. How do they do it over and over again? If they distributed a best-practices design and organization manual with the KOP, I think it would help the mid-pack and rookie teams tremendously. And I mean a really in-depth manual. Maybe they could put it on a DVD and include video of a design meeting at both student-run and mentor-run teams. 1281's design process is a bunch of people in a room talking until we kind of come to an agreement. There is obviously a better way to do this, since we had a few design showstoppers actually come up in meetings and get dismissed out of hand, only to rear their heads again in competition. I can probably think of tens of other ways to go about the design process, but I don't know if any of them would actually work.

I'm sure there are team organization and design whitepapers on CD, but something official straight from FIRST would be much more credible to rookie teams that are new to the competition.

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by Bongle

It can't simply be desire, there is something else (I really don't know what) seperating the best from the rest, and I think it would be good for FIRST to figure out exactly what that is.

Experience
initiative
off seasons
cooperation, collaboration, being open
stealing, oops, borrowing from the best
fluid and constant exchange of ideas, communication, fun, expertise
team development during the year
Experience

FIRST can design the challenge, provide the KoP & rules manual, set the time frame for robot development, application, ship - and then set the schedule for competitions

After that, the teams take over and do their thing.

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Jane

Experience
initiative
off seasons
cooperation, collaboration, being open
stealing, oops, borrowing from the best
fluid and constant exchange of ideas, communication, fun, expertise
team development during the year
Experience

Experience - There are many rookie teams who exhibit truly amazing design and construction. For example, team 1114 in their rookie year was stunningly effective.
Off seasons - This doesn't really explain how a given team becomes better at designing and constructing something effectively. It makes them more effective in regionals, but it doesn't explain the gap in robot quality between consistently high-end teams and others.
Cooperation/Collaboration - This seems probable. Allowing each team to only concentrate on making the best drive/shooter/whatsit they can allows them to figure out more of the hairy details.
Borrowing from the best - Is exactly what I want FIRST to help out with by determining and distributing the best practices of the most succesful teams. Not every team knows the best place to go for their borrowing needs.
fluid and constant exchange of ideas - Easy to say, harder to do. How do you structure a meeting so that everyone gets their say? How do you have a constant exchange of ideas when the design is generally finalized after week one or two?
Team development - This is a biggie I think. One idea I had after the season was over this year was to have mock design periods to build robots for past games in sept-dec so that a team could iron out their design process, get an idea for what worked/didn't, and have something productive to do besides fundraising. There are obviously many other team development things to do: what are they?

Basically, I want a book distributed with the KOP that has your post, but with enormous elaboration on what the best teams do. It'll allow ALL teams to learn and improve themselves, which is what FIRST is about.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

I guess I have asked for too much to try to focus on coming up with ways to make the FIRST competiton more fair than it is today.

Indeed you have.

Before you can start working on ways to improve the situation, you must first define the problem. The trouble here is that there is no common definition of "fair", and I don't think there can be. Your proposal seems to be about equalizing the quality of the robot, and letting the quality of the drivers determine the outcome of the matches. For FRC, I think that's the wrong emphasis on many levels.

If you like the idea of constraining the designs so they can be matched up into predefined classes, there are other organizations out there that do what you want. But they do it that way because they are robotics competitions. FIRST uses robotics competitions as an incentive, not as a goal.

but as they say, seeing the problem is the first step. If you cant recognize there is a problem, then nothing can be done about it.

If your target is "fair competition" along the lines of the one design sailboat races, I suggest that the problem is that you have chosen the wrong target.

[Andy Baker]

(dag nabbit... I broke my concise rule again... please bear with me as this is loooong)

FIRST is working hard to make ALL teams better, and provide ways for teams with less resources get on-the-field wins and awards. However, FIRST will never be exactly fair for all teams. I agree with the majority of the posters in this thread, as FIRST should not make more broad changes to make things more fair. Often we hear Dean and Woodie say that "FIRST is not fair". This is said each year at Kickoff.

We can tell that FIRST listens to teams and tries to lessen the gap between the high resource teams and the lower resource teams. Let's look at what has been done to improve FIRST in this area.

Here are some history and facts:

1. Alliances
From 1992-1998, there were no alliances. There was no collaboration, no sharing of designs, no co-opertition. In order to win, teams ganged up on 1 team at times. It was rough. Students were not encouraged to show off their efforts to other teams... heaven forbid they give away a strategy secret.

In 1999 the brilliance of the game was the insertion of alliances. Powerhouse teams had to depend on a partner. Lower resource teams could win with a strong partner.

2. Additional material freedom
From 1992 to 2001, teams could only use certain parts to build their robot. Only purchased mechanical parts and materials out of the Small Parts Catalog were used to build these complex machines. Did you need a gear reduction that was not provided as a gearbox in the kit? You had to make it from scratch from the list of additional raw materials. Did you need a gear or sprocket that was not available in Small Parts? You had to wire EDM or waterjet cut the gear.

Teams with excellent resources dominated back then. These teams had access to EDM machines and could design and create complex mechanisms that lower resource teams could not. Lower resource teams would see the exact gear they need at Martin or at McMaster, but they had no way of using it, since it was not available at Small Parts and they had a very hard time finding the resource of making the gear out of raw materials.

3. 2002 - 2003?
Additional awards were created for Rookie Teams. There was only the Rookie All-Star award. Now, there is Rookie Inspiration and Highest Rookie Seed in addition to the Rookie All-Star.

4. 2002: Kit drive train
FIRST made a great initial effort to provide each team with a workable drive train made from kit components. Before 2002, there were many events where robots were simply "boxes on wheels" that never moved. In 1999, 2000, and 2001, many alliances were doomed because it was 2 vs 1. 2 good robots could beat up on 1 good robot and 1 stationary box on wheels. The effort that FIRST put in to create the 2002 FIRST Kit drive train was commendable and provided each team with a workable chassis.

5. 2005: New kit chassis and drive train
In 2002, 03, 04... teams who used the kit drive train did move around the field, but they were still dominated (for the most part) by teams who made custom drive trains. In 2005, the kit drive chassis was a competitive base for a robot. Many teams who used this drive train won regionals. Sure, there are still teams with custom drive trains, but the advantage of one of these is smaller compared to years ago.

Now, for a story and some opinions from uncle Andy, so gather around the campfire...

I remember many years ago, sitting at the post-season FIRST forums in Michigan. All of the midwest teams were invited to voice their complaints to FIRST. Bob Hammond and KC Connor from FIRST attended this, posed questions, and took many notes.

They brought up the subject of fairness between teams, the idea of "divisions" of teams, separating the high resource teams from the low resource teams. Ken Patton, Joe Johnson, Raul Olivera and I were sitting together (for you new to FIRST, these three guys are some of the best robot designers and most inspirational engineers there has been in this program). We realized that we were these "high resourced" teams (since then, btw, each of our teams have lost resources). Lead mentors from the newer, lower resourced teams were giving their opinions. Of course, there was one guy who was really liking the idea of putting the higher resourced teams into their own division.

After some discussion, one quiet mentor from a rookie team spoke up, saying, "At the end of this year, we asked the kids what their highlight was. Our kids overwhelmingly answered this: when we beat Wildstang in a qualification match. I don't want that opportunity to go away. The teams who are new to this, or with lower resources must have the opportunity to play 'with the big boys'. While this surprised me, I understood it when it came from their point of view."

Of course, I am paraphrasing here, but something much like that was definitely said. The discussion ended right there. The one guy who was pushing for divisions was now quiet.

David needs a chance to beat Goliath. You want a way to inspire kids? Hand them each a little rock. Pour your heart into this program. Work side by side with them. Work late. Work through your problems. Get frustrated together. Let them see you mess up. Design that shooter for the 4th, 5th or 6th time. Don't give up. Tell them to go out and beat Goliath. They'll do it. No... that's not right... you'll do it together.

The propagation of the idea of making FIRST into a perfectly fair competition is just silly. Teams need to win, and they need to lose. People need to realize that the difference between winning and losing is HARD WORK. Woodie says this anytime he speaks... this is the HARDEST FUN YOU'LL EVER HAVE. It's not easy. This is life.


Andy B.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Bongle

The main thing I think FIRST could help with is figuring out why there is a gap between consistently mid-pack teams like 1141 and consistently successful teams like their anagram 1114. What are the practices of highly succesful teams? How is it that 1114/1503/1680 can so consistently come up with very highly effective robots year after year?

I'm inclined to say the difference is mentors, given the situation you've outlined.

Excellent teams often have very special mentors. They're the one thing that remains constant. Students can come and go, and hand down their knowledge from year to year, but eventually they all leave (or become mentors). The mentors are the glue holding everything together.

It's also a combination of everything else you've said. When you've been around as long as a lot of those guys have, you pick up tricks of the trade, so to speak. Experience brings a wealth of knowledge.