[FVC]: Longer competitions

[ManicMechanic]

For those of us who are hooked on FIRST, a 2-day event is very appealing. However, for rookies, I believe that a longer tournament would be a deterrent to participating because of the cost and time involved with a 2-day event. It is my hope that FIRST would keep its Championship events one day (except Atlanta) for the benefit of newcomers, at least until the program expands to the point of having regional qualifiers

When we told our school that we had qualified to go to the World Championship in Atlanta, they asked, "You're not planning on missing any school, are you, because we can't make that an excused absence." We assured them that it would be during spring break. I think they had no concept of what an honor this was, because the idea of a robotics team is still foreign to them (even though we've been affiliated with the the school all year). I can see other teams having problems getting time off from school if this is a Friday/Saturday event (and some, including myself, prefer to avoid competitive events on Sundays if possible). Having a hotel cost for Friday night is also a deterrent to some teams.

For bonding purposes, I highly recommend having one or more informal one-day scrimmage events prior to the tournament in your region. We went to 2 scrimmages and felt like we got to know 3 teams well enough that we are planning to get together in May and during the summer. We did a lot more bonding at scrimmages than at tournaments, because there was less pressure.

Because of the potential volume of teams, I think it's likely that eventually, FVC will more closely follow the model of FLL, where nearly all the teams attend regional qualifiers, about 1/3 advance to the Championship (formerly State) event, and only 1-2 % of those advance to the World Championship (Nationals) in Atlanta, rather the FRC model where most teams attend a regional event, and about 1/3 of those advance directly to Atlanta. If this is the case, a 2-day (State) Championship would be more palatable, because all the rookie teams could attend a lower-cost regional qualifier, getting the spirit of the competition, while advancing would require a higher level of commitment.

[Rich Kressly]

Good discussion.

From a programmatic standpoint, FVC has been committed to being more affordable and accessible up to this point. If that holds true in the future, I wouldn't expect to see multiple day regional events soon. Missed school and overnight travel, while a foregone conclusion for some, is a deal-breaker for many underserved, inner-city, and rural schools and teams that have scarce resources.

If I had to take an educated guess now, I'd be putting my energy into how to improve on the one-day format.

[ManicMechanic]

Originally Posted by Rich Kressly

If I had to take an educated guess now, I'd be putting my energy into how to improve on the one-day format.

One way to make room for more matches is to interleave the interviews with matches. I've attached a spreadsheet that shows how a tournament of 24 teams (one field), 6 matches can be run with interviews conducted simultaneously with the first 2 matches. I'm sorry to say that it makes interviews even more stressful, but it does shorten the day. Perhaps some interviews could be spread into Round 3.

One feature of the match set-up is that any given team sees no repeat alliance partners and no repeat opponents (to my knowledge) across matches. This is one improvement that I feel would help the match-ups to be more even, lessening the need for more matches, as our team faced the same opponent 3 times at regionals and the same opponent twice in Atlanta.

The algorithm used to satisfy this condition is based on modular arithmetic. Basically, Round 1 moves from one slot number to the next in increments of 1, Round 2 uses increments of 2, Round 3 uses increments of 4, then inc 5, inc 7, and inc 11. If you have more or less than 24 teams, you can still increment by these values but lengthen or shorten the team list. If you have a number of teams close to a multiple of 24, (48, 72, 96), just change "n" from 1 to 25, 49, or 95 and repeat the blocks. Also, to shorten the day, one or 2 matches could be eliminated.

[rswsmay]

Funny you should mention that particular method for conducting interviews during matches. We considered this early on in the planning of our tournament and came to the same conclusion. That it is a good idea but....

Interleaving the interviews with the matches did not seem like a good option for us because the scoring software generates the match schedule which may conflict with the interview schedule. We generated the interview schedule a couple of days in advance and e-mailed it to teams so they would have advanced notice of when they should be ready. We purposefully pushed some teams toward the end of the interview time period because some were traveling from out of State that morning. There was also the issue of no-show teams to the competition. When that happened and it did at 2 of the 3 state tournaments I attended, a new match schedule had to be generated which again threw off the time slots for teams to compete.

This issue of teams meeting each other multiple times during the matches is one that I saw repeatedly at all the events I attended. This is a "must have" needed improvement on the software. If we could have figured out a way to manually schedule the matches ourselves and then work the interviews around them (or vice versa) we would have been ahead of the game.

Hey.... what do you know!

Did we just come up with another suggested improvement on the scoring software? To be able to manually schedule teams into certain matches in order to facilitate the interviews or at least avoid the same teams matching up repeatedly.

Originally Posted by ManicMechanic

One way to make room for more matches is to interleave the interviews with matches. I've attached a spreadsheet that shows how a tournament of 24 teams (one field), 6 matches can be run with interviews conducted simultaneously with the first 2 matches. I'm sorry to say that it makes interviews even more stressful, but it does shorten the day. Perhaps some interviews could be spread into Round 3.

One feature of the match set-up is that any given team sees no repeat alliance partners and no repeat opponents (to my knowledge) across matches. This is one improvement that I feel would help the match-ups to be more even, lessening the need for more matches, as our team faced the same opponent 3 times at regionals and the same opponent twice in Atlanta.

The algorithm used to satisfy this condition is based on modular arithmetic. Basically, Round 1 moves from one slot number to the next in increments of 1, Round 2 uses increments of 2, Round 3 uses increments of 4, then inc 5, inc 7, and inc 11. If you have more or less than 24 teams, you can still increment by these values but lengthen or shorten the team list. If you have a number of teams close to a multiple of 24, (48, 72, 96), just change "n" from 1 to 25, 49, or 95 and repeat the blocks. Also, to shorten the day, one or 2 matches could be eliminated.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by rswsmay

This issue of teams meeting each other multiple times during the matches is one that I saw repeatedly at all the events I attended. This is a "must have" needed improvement on the software.

You need to bring this issue up with the people running the events you attended. The organizers of the event control the amount of duplication seen by teams when they generate the schedule by choosing the "minimum match spacing" (which is the minimum number of matches a team has in between matches they are scheduled to play in). When this number is set too high, duplication will occur (due to basic math constraints). This is documented in the manual.

[rswsmay]

Dave,

We could not find a happy medium when generating the match schedules. When we tried to set a lower minimum match spacing, we sometimes ended up with teams competing in a match while needing to be queued up for another match.

It is possible that we just didn't go through enough iterations to ensure that we didn't have duplication. It also didn't help that we had to generate the match schedule three times because of teams being initially on the list, then not showing up, then finally showing up during opening ceremony. We didn't have enough time to go through the list and check for duplicate matchups. Some of those issues may have contributed to those other events having similar duplicate matchups.

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

You need to bring this issue up with the people running the events you attended. The organizers of the event control the amount of duplication seen by teams when they generate the schedule by choosing the "minimum match spacing" (which is the minimum number of matches a team has in between matches they are scheduled to play in). When this number is set too high, duplication will occur (due to basic math constraints). This is documented in the manual.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by rswsmay

Dave,

We could not find a happy medium when generating the match schedules. When we tried to set a lower minimum match spacing, we sometimes ended up with teams competing in a match while needing to be queued up for another match.

It is possible that we just didn't go through enough iterations to ensure that we didn't have duplication. It also didn't help that we had to generate the match schedule three times because of teams being initially on the list, then not showing up, then finally showing up during opening ceremony. We didn't have enough time to go through the list and check for duplicate matchups. Some of those issues may have contributed to those other events having similar duplicate matchups.

Here is a suggestion for whomever is listening:
Instead of putting the information about match spacing's relationship to duplicated encounters in a manual, and then apparently leaving it up to a harried user's eyeballs and brain to scan the freshly created match listing for "problems"; why not have the software display/print out some statistics (along with each match list it generates) that identify the extent to which those problems actually exist in the matches???

In addition to creating the match list, the software should report any/all things in that match list that a human should assess before that human actually uses the list..... I give myself this sort of help in the Excel spreadsheet that I use.

Blake

[Ben Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Rich Kressly

Good discussion.

From a programmatic standpoint, FVC has been committed to being more affordable and accessible up to this point. If that holds true in the future, I wouldn't expect to see multiple day regional events soon. Missed school and overnight travel, while a foregone conclusion for some, is a deal-breaker for many underserved, inner-city, and rural schools and teams that have scarce resources.

If I had to take an educated guess now, I'd be putting my energy into how to improve on the one-day format.

The one day format I feel worked great for the smaller tournaments.

I personally would rather see more numerous smaller events than a fewer number of larger events.

Really its an issue of limiting the number of teams in order to give the teams at the event a reasonable number of matches.

That being said, FVC has had this year a quick match-to-match turnaround (2 fields is a must) so we were able to play more matches much faster than FVC in event.

At this point, I would very much agree with Rich - Keep it to one day. With more events held with fewer teams, multiday events arent needed.

[KathieK]

Originally Posted by Ben Mitchell

At this point, I would very much agree with Rich - Keep it to one day. With more events held with fewer teams, multiday events arent needed.

More events with fewer teams = more tournament sponsors needed to help underwrite the costs of holding the events.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Ben Mitchell

I personally would rather see more numerous smaller events than a fewer number of larger events.

Originally Posted by KathieK

More events with fewer teams = more tournament sponsors needed to help underwrite the costs of holding the events.

Pushing the system in the direction of more, but smaller, events is certainly an option. I see a few things that would need to go with it.

1) Less whoop-tee-doo for each small(er) event.

Finding the right balance between non-robot entertainment, ceremony, decoration and marketing eye-candy, and making the events attractive simply because the students' competing robots are interesting; is a tough judgement call. However, most local sports leagues manage to attract participants and crowds with the action on the field, not with other trappings. FIRST may want to adopt revised tournament standards (beyond the revisons already suggested during this last season for inexpensive events) for these proposed smaller events.

I presume that if FIRST competitions expand into the majority of the US' schools, then those schools and related organizations will take over determining how much of those marketing expenses are important to the program. If FIRST continues to be responsible for regional and world championships, then I presume those would still have budgets similar to their current ones.

2) Teams will need to have opportunities to attend these events throughout the 6 month FVC season (or whatever length it evolves into) at times that match their local calendars.

Offering a team two or three small events nearby them does no good if the events occur too early or too late in the season to match their local needs.

People in the small regions or counties/cities these proposed smaller events serve will need to be (trained and) entrusted with running them, or the formal FIRST organization will need to expand enough to supervise all of the events at the times the local areas need the events. The events final results will need to satisfy a globaly enforced standard. Their fanciness (and expenses) will not.

3) If the number of teams increases dramatically and if tournaments are small, then winnowing the teams down to a managable number for an (assumed) eventual world championship will require a few levels of competition.

Attending these levels will be an expense, and as the lucky/better teams move up this ladder they will have to travel farther and farther from home.... For these teams, this might cause a net increase in time and expense, not a decrease!

------------------------------------------

So... While I understand and agree with Kathie's point about funding more instances of the current style of tournament, I suggest that additional sponsors aren't needed so much as events that are less patrician and are more plebian. As the program becomes successful, more widely adopted, and more engrained in the culture, there is less need to make each event a perfect, do-or-die showcase that "hooks" first-time participants. Managing the transition from now until then is the tricky part....

Blake

[Ben Mitchell]

Originally Posted by KathieK

More events with fewer teams = more tournament sponsors needed to help underwrite the costs of holding the events.

Two words: FIRST Alumni

Often, student organizations at colleges can get the use of college facilities at free or reduced cost.

Reaching out to FIRSTs best resources: its people, is the way to alleviate that particular problem.

By small local events, I mean like 35 team events - not small but at the same time, small enough everyone can get their 6-7 matches in.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Ben Mitchell

By small local events, I mean like 35 team events - not small but at the same time, small enough everyone can get their 6-7 matches in.

35 teams x 7 matches / 4 teams per match x 6 minutes per match = Approx 360 minutes = 6 Hours.

This is 6 hours if everything runs like clockwork. This doesn't include a lunch break, opening/closing ceremonies, etc. Also, only a single field is implicit in the time per match.

I agree that this can be done, but you can safely bet that many events that attempt to stick to a schedule like this will run long.

Of course I'm in the camp that likes longer (multi-day) FVC events....

Blake

[ChrisH]

Originally Posted by 1885.Blake

35 teams x 7 matches / 4 teams per match x 6 minutes per match = Approx 360 minutes = 6 Hours.

This is 6 hours if everything runs like clockwork. This doesn't include a lunch break, opening/closing ceremonies, etc. Also, only a single field is implicit in the time per match.

I agree that this can be done, but you can safely bet that many events that attempt to stick to a schedule like this will run long.

Of course I'm in the camp that likes longer (multi-day) FVC events....

Blake

If you have two fields side by side, and set up on one field while competing on the other, and have good crystal control, then you can easily make such a schedule. We did it here in Southern California in two events that had about 50 teams each. We had a third event where I assume they did the same thing a couple of weeks ago, but I was unable to attend.

This previous experience resulted in great disapointment for the Southern California teams that went to Atlanta. Only 4 matches over two days? They felt that the cycle time between matches was unreasonably long. Remember this was from teams that have RUN competitions (both Vex and FRC), so they have some idea what they are talking about.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by ChrisH

If you have two fields side by side, and set up on one field while competing on the other, ... then you can easily make such a schedule. We did it here in Southern California in two events that had about 50 teams each.

I don't doubt you for one minute, but.... The 2nd fields does jack up the expense (or logistics headaches) of each event and the number of volunteers needed by each event. This is a little worrisome if you are trying to promote a strategy of having many, "small", less-expensive events.

In my message I wanted to remind folks of the difficulty of pulling off a low-budget, 1-day event with 35 teams and 7 matches per team on a single field.

Your are right. Fetching and then later returning a borrowed 2nd field, and digging up volunteers to help with the extra duties of running a 2nd field, is one way (one that I like) to make it safe to plan on running 35 teams through 7 matches in one day.

Blake

[ManicMechanic]

Originally Posted by ChrisH

This previous experience resulted in great disapointment for the Southern California teams that went to Atlanta. Only 4 matches over two days? They felt that the cycle time between matches was unreasonably long.

I know that others feel differently, but we actually liked having only 4 matches in Atlanta. We attended the April 2005 Pilot, and there were 7 matches, 5 the first day, 2 the second, with a match about once an hour. That year, teams entered the dome from the far entrance, and the "commute" each way was about 15 minutes, counting time to collect gear and bodies. With 30 minutes travel and 10 minutes on the field each one-hour cycle, it left only 20 minutes to "relax" in the pit. We felt constantly hurried & harried; we never had time to check the robot and seldom had time to talk to alliance partners about strategy. Two matches, we had no-show partners who didn't make it to the field in time, once we were almost a no-show because we got there 10 minutes late (thankfully, they were 20 minutes behind schedule), and one match, we had a dead robot on the field because we didn't have time to check the batteries. This time in Atlanta, we were able to communicate with alliance partners about strategy, check the batteries before each match, and even change a bad motor before one of the matches. Quantity is not quality.

The distance between the pits and the field is a huge determinant in how desirable it is to have time between rounds. If the pit is in the same room as the competition field, minimal time between rounds is fine. If the pit is in the GWCC & field is in the dome, I would either prefer a very long break, or a very short one (10 minutes between matches is fine if you don't have to go back and forth). If the teams cycle once per hour, I would deliberately try NOT to have much minimum spacing so that some breaks are very short, which would make the next break very long. Much better to have one break of 10 minutes and one of 1-1/2hours+ than to have 2 breaks of exactly 50 minutes, most of which is eaten up in "commute" time.

Longer breaks this year meant we actually got to spend some time in the pit, whereas in 2005, we were so exhausted running back and forth that we sometimes just found a place to plop ourselves outside the intervening corridor. Our pit experience this year was very valuable -- we got to check out other robot designs, exchange funky drawings with other teams, talk in broken Mandarin about rules, procedures, and culture to the Chinese teams (they'd never done alliance selection), and generally connect to the community at large. Despite the fact that there were 100 teams this year vs. 53 in 2005, we had a much better sense of the abilities of the various teams and robots (and had our favorite picked out for the finals).

When we returned home from Atlanta in 2005, we divvied up the 4 (free) kits among the 4 students, and those kits went virtually untouched for over a year. Invitations to get together for building projects were politely declined, and three of the 4 students never returned to Vex. In contrast, when we returned home from Atlanta this year (4 rookie students, one veteran student), the rookies went scouring e-bay & Vexlabs for Vex paraphernalia and their wallets are now considerably lighter. They are talking about numerous projects for the summer. Inspiration comes from enjoying the ride.

If adding matches does not diminish the total experience, I'm all for it, but it's important to consider what is lost by adding matches, as well as what is gained.