Design Period, THEN Build Period

[Steve W]

This discussion of more than 6 weeks came up at our team forum in Toronto. I will say what I did then. NO MORE WEEKS in build season. Many of us (older people) have work as well as robotics. By the end of "Robotics season" we are tired, burnt out and behind at work. By robotics season I am speaking of January to mid April. Our team also meets during the rest of the season much less frequently. There is also VEX and LEGO League. We have community outreach and fund raising. On top of all that some of us are still married with children.
In our discussions we came to the conclusion that the only way we could lengthen the season is by going into Christmas time (basically December) which for most is a busy family time.
Right now there is a 6 week time frame and somehow most of FIRST completes their robot on time for ship. There is still tweaking to do but when isn't there. You could go to an event in November, say Ruckas, and you will still be trying to better for that event. What I am trying to say is that there will never be enough time for anyone as we are always trying to improve. What will happen though is that the better teams will have more time to put their multitude of resources to work to build even better robots. Teams that have poor time management skills will still have poor time management skills.

I will give one short example. Another mentor on our team and myself have decided to build a robot for the ECRG competition to be held in November of this year. So far we have met once and spent 2 hours thinking of ideas and a basic idea of what we want to do. I have even ordred a part that we will need for our testing. We decided to enter in mid April and here it is June with the only physical work done was taking apart last years VEX robot that I built. As of now there is no urgency so we put other priorities ahead of this one. I believe that this will happen with most teams even if we extend the season.

What can be done before January? Test, design, teach, inspire, fund raise, promote, recruit, community outreach, LEGO, Vex and the list goes on. We are not without important FIRST tasks when we are not building. FIRST is a "Life" changing experience. Why do we try and restrict it only to the 6 week build period?

[DonRotolo]

Steve makes a good point - 6 weeks definitely stretches the resources of us non-students, 8 weeks (contrary to my original post above) would make it worse.

The spoiler text in Billfred's post* has a good is a in there: a 5 week build season, prefaced by a 1 week design season.

It's been said before, FIRST isn't advanced shop class, witness the teams whose student design is implemented by professional machinists, perfectly within the rules AND spirit of FIRST. It's about the design, and the finer points of fabrication (i.e., making it work), not running a milling machine or band saw. **

Keeping at 6 weeks, but putting an bigger emphasis on the design process, might pay some good benefits. (Alternative: Give an award for a well-documented design - submitted in week 2!)

Don

* Not sure where that spoiler text is from, didn't see it in a previous post, so I assume Billfred wrote it but then hid it. OK. (cool BBcode feature I wasn't aware of, too!)

** Our team does let the students do the fabrication as well, even though us mentors would like to play with the tools instead I personally disagree with the professionally-built robots. But, this practice does not appear to interfere with the mission of FIRST, and so I really don't argue the point at all.