Lessons Learned - The Negative

[MikeReilly]

I agree with my 1771 mentors on their points. Want to level the playing field? Unlevel the surface. That is, let's get away from building a pizza box bottom, let's make these things crawl over something for an advantage, but still allow the common pizza box to go around. Something like that.

I now know that you can't be truly competitive without massive hours and generosity by mentors and sponsors, and enough money for a twin robot and preferably a second regional. If I calculate the volunteer mentor hours as cash donations, we probably spent over $50,000 this year. Heck, two regionals, the Nationals and a twin robot will bring you to $20,000, and that doesn't even include pizza on build Saturdays. The BEST competition is much more fair in this resolve.

Is it time for FIRST Elite, and keep FIRST FRC for those that can't get the cash? Maybe that's IRI? I'd like to know the average budget of other teams like the ThunderChickens, etc. Not to point fingers, but to bring reality to what exists. My guess is you can't get to the top without amazing dedicated volunteers and resources (material, financial, etc.).

On an ending positive: after only a few years, I have students disappointed that they didn't make it to the World Championship Finals of an engineering contest. Pretty cool.

[sdcantrell56]

I guess my question then is why do we even need to impose rules to try to level the playing field. No matter where you are in the real world there will always be people or companies with more or less than you. I know our team budget does not even come close to many other teams but that is ok. It makes the accomplishment that much sweeter. Additionally, those teams who do have more should feel great for achieving all that they have. It takes a ton of work to obtain funding and tooling to be able to get to the level of some teams and that should be applauded. I think the FIRST model is fine and instead of trying to force the field to be "level" through a rule (G14), we should just embrace that some teams have more and some have less and no matter the situation you can build a very good robot. I know that I will be pushing and motivating our team to seek out more sponsors and such and to way day grow our program into one as incredible and efficient as 217.

[Chris Fultz]

while is is disappointing to have a no-show robot on Friday, doesn't it provide an extra incentive for you on thursday to make sure every robot is ready to play? the team you help may be your partner in the first match.

if the easy solution to a no-show robot was to grab a replacement from the field, then there would be less incentive to help the struggling teams and eveyone would be "more likely" to focus on themselves. the struggling team would continue to struggle, and miss the inspiration that comes from being part of the competition.

[sdcantrell56]

I guess I dont really think that teams need the incentive to help teams fix there robots. For me if I have time at a competition I would rather help a struggling team fix there robot than sit around and talk about nothing. Most teams would help each other out whether they were allied with them in the future or not. That is just the FIRST spirit I guess, so I don't see how adding a filler line would hurt that aspect of FIRST.

[Francis-134]

Originally Posted by Doug G

1) The game this year was really hard to follow and not that fun to watch. Most of the time, especially in elims, you could not tell who was winning. In a couple of elim matches all the bots were pinned in the corners for most of a match. Boring. Games need a couple of central places where scoring happens. 2008 had two hurdling areas centrally located, 2007 had the rack, etc..

2) The playing surface really leveled the field and G14 was not required at all.

3) 40 lb allowance was great, THANK YOU!! However, 6 week build season now becomes an 8-10 week season for some and since some teams basically redesigned and rebuilt devices between events; we are treading into more sticky situations in future years if this continues. I attended 3 events (2 as a coach, and one as a spectator) and none of them enforced / checked the 40 lb allowances. I know GP was in place and can't think of any exceptions, but I know the GP boundaries will be pushed further in the future.

4) The DS seems a bit delicate and could use some improvements to beef it up. Don't get em wrong, what WPI has done is really amazing - but it could be a bit more durable.

WPI did NOT make the driver station, Quikbyte did.

[davidalln]

Originally Posted by Chris Fultz

while is is disappointing to have a no-show robot on Friday, doesn't it provide an extra incentive for you on thursday to make sure every robot is ready to play? the team you help may be your partner in the first match.

I agree with you completely. FIRST is a collective learning experience, not an isolated one. If it were, almost every team with a number over 1500 would not be at the level they are today. I know we wouldn't be around if it weren't for Kell Robotics (1311).

And on the <G14> issue, I thought that it was gentle enough that the "punishment" helped more than it hurt. In all honesty, if any team quadruples another team's score, they probably don't need their super cells to win. Yes, there are some exceptions and it isn't perfect, but it was an OK system with good intentions.

That said, I wouldn't be the first one to bring it up at a GDC meeting.

[MikeReilly]

Completely agree on assisting other teams. Our first match last year we helped a team from another country (with no common language) get past inspection and onto the field. While I may be incorrect, a team this year refused assistance, and did not show. It is also the professional thing to admit the need for assistance, to help your alliance by acknowledging your true state.

[pentau]

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but I think it would be great if FIRST could return to hanging the enormous "sponsor logo" banners on the black curtain at the regionals instead of just a banner with the FIRST logo. It seems to be an easy way to give recognition to sponsors that support the event.

[bigbeezy]

I have been with FIRST since 2005, was a driver from 05-08 and a spectator this year. And i have to say I thought last years game was boring to watch, but this one was bad. As a driver this game is sweet, but as a spectator theres no real excitement. I mean sure when your bot is out there or your rooting for certian teams to win its a little more fun, but still theres no "wow" factor. Like in 06 and 07 there were ramps teams would climb in the last second, which made it exciting; 05 the line; 04 hanging on the bar. The Supercells were rarely scored and most of the time it was scored by the alliance that was winning anyways.

I would like to see a game where more than 3 designs would be present. maybe have 2 different shapes or sizes of element to manipulate.

Another thing, on Archimedes the DJ had like 10 songs he would play over and over again. They are good songs but they get old real quick.

[FRC4ME]

Let me say something about the uneven resources issue.

I've been a student member of Team 339 for three years, and we've always considered ourselves one of the "small teams". We get a reasonable amount of money each year (enough to attend two regionals, but not for a second robot or Atlanta most years), but we have to work for it. We don't have a large corporate sponsor; instead, we have many smaller sponsors for whom we must perform demonstrations to keep the money flowing in.

In terms of volunteers, we are very limited in that regard. We have no engineers on the team; just a mechanical mentor (who is a social studies teacher), a programming mentor, and an animation mentor. We are also limited in our number of students; this year we took sixteen total to Atlanta.

This year, we decided we wanted to attend Atlanta and performed extra fundraising efforts. Every single person on the team participated in the process, sending letters and talking to local businesses, trying to raise the necessary cash. We also had to make other sacrifices; for example, to save money, we were unable to buy a second cRIO, let alone build a second robot. In the end, though, with $100 donations here and $500 donations there, we raised enough money to go. That experience alone provided us the satisfaction of working together to ultimately achieve a goal as much as building the robot itself.

Our competition season was great. We led the #4 seeded alliance and won the Delphi Driving Tomorrow's Technology award at DC, and won the Autodesk Visualization award at Chesapeake. In the end, we all felt very satisfied with our achievements, and considered 2009 a great year.

As I said, thanks to our fundraising efforts, we were able to attend Atlanta this year. We went knowing that we had no chance against the larger teams with their own practice fields and practice bots and professional engineers, but that was okay. It did nothing to dampen the excitement of our own experience; we had a great time in Atlanta, and though our record was 4-3, we were very satisfied with the performance of our robot. We didn't expect to win, didn't win, and still had a great time.

Then, five minutes before leaving to catch our flight home (since we couldn't really afford to stay another night), we won the Delphi DTT award at the Championship level. Needless to say, the team was ecstatic. Now in our tenth year, we won our first ever national recognition. Who knows: maybe this will make fundraising easier in future years.

But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that not having the resources required to "be truly competitive", in no way dampens the FIRST experience and in many ways actually enhances it. Winning a national engineering award with no engineers on the team - meaning the work being recognized was 100% the result of us students' efforts - is really an indescribable feeling. FIRST doesn't need to do anything to "level the playing field", because its unevenness only improves the challenge for some of us. The big teams should be happy they can perform so well and win with consistency, while the small teams should be happy they can perform as well as they do with their limited resources. This way, everyone has a great experience, no handicaps required.

But to get back on topic. I think they need to do something about the way Einstein is run. They are the international finals for pete's sake; they ought to be at least as exciting as a regional, if not more exciting. Instead, as everyone worries about whether they are going to make their flight and/or the wrap party, no one except the team competing really cares about what's going on on the field.

[RoboMom]

Originally Posted by pentau

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but I think it would be great if FIRST could return to hanging the enormous "sponsor logo" banners on the black curtain at the regionals instead of just a banner with the FIRST logo. It seems to be an easy way to give recognition to sponsors that support the event.

The sponsors "banners" were put on the screen as video banners this year. I believe this change was due to finances.

[BurtGummer]

Well, being a rookie team, it was our first year in Atlanta.

But once again I will bring up the topic of a rookie team. From this weekend, I see FIRST defining a rookie team as a team with a number from 2700ish to 3100ish. AKA a number chosen this year. So I have a question. Is team 2753 a rookie team who has never participated in FIRST? What about 3091? 2753 was almost exactly the same as 399, and 3091 sounds like several teams just recombined into one, making them a rookie team. Can anyone clarify this for me? If they are in fact rookies, who have never done FIRST before, then who built the robot? I can guarantee it wasn't the students. I am not saying that we should of won by an means......I would have been happy if any real rookie team won.

Second.....rules. First off, regionals need more control. We fit easily into the measuring box at the LA Regional, but somehow our robot grew 3/8 of an inch between then and Atlanta, and the frame was not bent. In fact, I cut off a piece that was a little too high on Thursday morning just because I didn't like it sticking up. It fit that way into the measuring box at the LA Regional, but after cutting it off, it didn't fit in the boxes at Atlanta. If you are going to be so specific about something, the equipment measuring it needs to be precise as well.

Wiring colors? I'll be honest, I had no idea because I didn't have the time to sit down and read a rule book, and other students assigned the task did not complete it. But with that aside, why does it matter what color a wire is? Gauge is of course understandable, but the color? I've been working with electrical 'stuff's for years. IMO, it's a rule that is not necessary. Rules are normally for controlling the robot entries from having extra advantages (Size, Weight). But wire color? Come on. Don't pull the safety card on this either. Knowing a wire is ground or hot shouldn't decide how you work with it. You treat every wire like it's hot, just like you always treat a gun like it's loaded. On top of that, our wire coding was not correct at the LA Regional either, but none of the inspectors noticed. It would definitely help if we knew about it then, rather than at the Championships.

Third. Mentor involvement. Some of the teams I see have robots that you just KNOW that high school students didn't build, because when you go to the pits, you see a mentor fixing it, not a student. If your students are not capable of building a high caliber robot, then don't. Build a kitbot. They'll get more experience out of building that than some other complex robot. When awards were given out at the individual divisions, I saw several teams with parents/mentors getting handed the awards, with the students following behind them.

Match scheduling. If you want people to 'watch the monitors' make them visible! Being next to FTC, the only thing we saw was FTC. Being 8 minutes ahead of schedule, in my opinion, is unacceptable. If times are given out to the minute, then that schedule should be stuck to. Sure, fall behind, but getting ahead? We had to fix a bent frame from a match right before, which took A LOT of work, and then we show up at the field 8 minutes early and the match had already started.

Overall, I see a lot of unnecessary control in places, and not enough/no control in many others. I agree on several other things in this thread, like G14 and the control that human players had. Having a good human player could easily win the match for you, not the robot. But I won't elaborate that stuff.

I will say that I am glad I went to Atlanta and had the opportunity to experience it, because it will be much harder to get there after our rookie year. It had the fun parts.....and it had the parts that made me steaming mad. Some improvements can definitely be made though.

[rspurlin]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

[These all relate to the big screens in the pit.]

Not having the field video showing was a disappointment, and made it difficult to know how close to on schedule the matches were.

There was a sign by Pit Admin advising everyone to pay attention to the "dynamic" match schedule in order to know when to leave for queuing, but the displayed schedules always seemed to be the originally published times.

After the qualification matches were finished, it would have been better to show the alliance selection screen rather than the now-empty match schedule.

The Galileo screen had the Windows task bar hiding much of the match score information at the bottom of the screen for a while. Nobody in Pit Admin knew anything about where the displays were coming from or who could do something about the problem.

Perhaps the cost savings forced onto FIRST by the economy had something to do with not having video in the pits. They did have video last year.

The dynamic schedule should have shown when each actual match started. If you view the online results at FIRST's website, you'll see the actual times the match was started (for Galileo). For example, when Friday's opening ceremony ran long and forced us to start match 1 at 9:42 instead of 9:25 as scheduled, all the following match schedule times were moved. Three matches scheduled to begin before lunch were actually moved to after lunch. As far as I can tell, match times will never be moved back before the original scheduled time however. Much of Saturday morning we were running ahead of schedule. We did in fact wait until the scheduled time for one robot. I was not in the pit to verify what was on the screen, but I'm pretty sure that the display was the current dynamic schedule. This year FIRST had available an internal VOIP phone system linking the inspection stations, pit admin and the fieldside scoring tables. If that is available in future years, please ask pit admin to check with us.

I'll pass the suggestion about the alliance selection screen on to the software person. I know that was visible in the pit last year, but that might have been because there was a copy of the video feed which was showing the alliance selection display in the dome.

The pit display is run by a laptop in the pit area connected to the scoring server fieldside. Had you voiced this comment to one of us at the scoring table, we could have had someone look into it. In a perfect world, everyone who volunteers for FIRST would know the answer to every question. I'm sorry you didn't get a helpful answer.

[MikeReilly]

Originally Posted by BurtGummer

Third. Mentor involvement. Some of the teams I see have robots that you just KNOW that high school students didn't build, because when you go to the pits, you see a mentor fixing it, not a student. If your students are not capable of building a high caliber robot, then don't. Build a kitbot. They'll get more experience out of building that than some other complex robot. When awards were given out at the individual divisions, I saw several teams with parents/mentors getting handed the awards, with the students following behind them.

While I agree that there may be "mentor-only made" (MOM?) bots out there, keep in mind that mentors working with kids in the pits may actually be an instructional moment. It may be something simple too, allowing the kids to do other things. Of course, sometimes we do need to remind a mentor that they are not the student too, I had to do it myself twice on Saturday. I will always disagree that the design and concept and all construction should be student-driven, because the "I" in FIRST does stand for "Inspiration". Our team has grown by leaps and bounds because of inspiring ideas from our mentors.

[rspurlin]

Originally Posted by BurtGummer

Well, being a rookie team, it was our first year in Atlanta.

But once again I will bring up the topic of a rookie team. From this weekend, I see FIRST defining a rookie team as a team with a number from 2700ish to 3100ish. AKA a number chosen this year. So I have a question. Is team 2753 a rookie team who has never participated in FIRST? What about 3091? 2753 was almost exactly the same as 399, and 3091 sounds like several teams just recombined into one, making them a rookie team. Can anyone clarify this for me? If they are in fact rookies, who have never done FIRST before, then who built the robot? I can guarantee it wasn't the students. I am not saying that we should of won by an means......I would have been happy if any real rookie team won.

Second.....rules. First off, regionals need more control. We fit easily into the measuring box at the LA Regional, but somehow our robot grew 3/8 of an inch between then and Atlanta, and the frame was not bent. In fact, I cut off a piece that was a little too high on Thursday morning just because I didn't like it sticking up. It fit that way into the measuring box at the LA Regional, but after cutting it off, it didn't fit in the boxes at Atlanta. If you are going to be so specific about something, the equipment measuring it needs to be precise as well.

Wiring colors? I'll be honest, I had no idea because I didn't have the time to sit down and read a rule book, and other students assigned the task did not complete it. But with that aside, why does it matter what color a wire is? Gauge is of course understandable, but the color? I've been working with electrical 'stuff's for years. IMO, it's a rule that is not necessary. Rules are normally for controlling the robot entries from having extra advantages (Size, Weight). But wire color? Come on. Don't pull the safety card on this either. Knowing a wire is ground or hot shouldn't decide how you work with it. You treat every wire like it's hot, just like you always treat a gun like it's loaded. On top of that, our wire coding was not correct at the LA Regional either, but none of the inspectors noticed. It would definitely help if we knew about it then, rather than at the Championships.

Third. Mentor involvement. Some of the teams I see have robots that you just KNOW that high school students didn't build, because when you go to the pits, you see a mentor fixing it, not a student. If your students are not capable of building a high caliber robot, then don't. Build a kitbot. They'll get more experience out of building that than some other complex robot. When awards were given out at the individual divisions, I saw several teams with parents/mentors getting handed the awards, with the students following behind them.

Match scheduling. If you want people to 'watch the monitors' make them visible! Being next to FTC, the only thing we saw was FTC. Being 8 minutes ahead of schedule, in my opinion, is unacceptable. If times are given out to the minute, then that schedule should be stuck to. Sure, fall behind, but getting ahead? We had to fix a bent frame from a match right before, which took A LOT of work, and then we show up at the field 8 minutes early and the match had already started.

Overall, I see a lot of unnecessary control in places, and not enough/no control in many others. I agree on several other things in this thread, like G14 and the control that human players had. Having a good human player could easily win the match for you, not the robot. But I won't elaborate that stuff.

I will say that I am glad I went to Atlanta and had the opportunity to experience it, because it will be much harder to get there after our rookie year. It had the fun parts.....and it had the parts that made me steaming mad. Some improvements can definitely be made though.

Regarding 3091, they are not a 'recombined' team. Their students and mentors have some experience with FIRST through FLL and FTC, but this was indeed their initial adventure into FRC. I've seen some teams that go on a hiatus for a while. Though they cannot technically be a rookie team, there is often no one involved with any FIRST experience or memories from the team's earlier existence. There are in fact teams that are started by established mentors that move for jobs or other reasons. Perhaps the definition of rookie isn't perfect.

I'm not sure how the sizing boxes could have been very different. They are in fact the same sizing boxes that were used at the regionals. Of course there may be some small variation between them, but it's hard to understand the variation you're describing.