What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[gblake]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

Gentlemen! Congratulations on a fantastic thread so far. ...

TL,DR: Teams that struggle to build a sound robot will be best helped by practice before the build season, and the ability to reuse what they accomplish, not a by longer build season for all of FRC.

I'm at the LOL stage. Not the beating my head on a wall stage, and certainly not the thunderous applause stage.

Every argument you (PT) listed has a decent counterargument, and every one of those counterarguments has a decent counter-counterargument,. A few from one side or another have been left out, but most are here somewhere.

What comes to mind most often for me over the last couple of days are these thoughts:

• That someone in FIRST didn't set the 44 day limit because of shipping deadlines. That would only be possibly true if the build start date were a law of the universe. It's not. So, does it make sense to drop that line of reasoning? From day one FIRST could have kicked off each season in the Summer/Fall, if they wanted to, and could have created a 6 month build season.
• That while the length of the build season is creating a lot of virtual smoke and thunder now, some time in the future I'm confident that robot weight limits, or the number and types of allowed motors, or the rule(s) about restarting from scratch each season, or mandatory bumpers, or ... will be the bete noire and cause celebre. ALL of those cause struggling teams to struggle more when building an FRC robot. ALL of those are arbitrary decisions someone took when they were explicitly deciding what challenges/constraints the FRC annual challenge would entail. But! They were/are arbitrary only in the sense that they involve some judgment/wisdom. I'm 100% sure that their current settings were not chosen capriciously. FRC isn't about building the best robot that can play each game. A part of FRC is about the learning experience of satisfying lots of constraints to build a compromised robot that can do well at the game. Time is simply one of those constraints. This (and the previous bullet) is my observation for Ryan D. and others who rail against the imposition of a time constraint.
  
• That helping struggling teams have a successful build will be best done by helping them practice the construction, programming, and project management before the build season. I say this in the sense of helping them learn to fish, instead of giving them a fish. I suggest adding an inexpensive, Fall, annual, robot-building & project management curriculum, and KOP/BOM, and letting the simple robots built during the Fall compete unmodified (maybe allow some modest changes) in the Winter/Spring (think of plowie in Dave's animations). There will be plenty of devils in the details, including avoiding letting too much of the game cat out of the bag, but the intent behind the current 44-day time constraint will be preserved (won't be circumvented further) in a useful sense; and struggling teams will have a valuable safety net. Siri asked earlier what my idea it's. This is it.

Blake

PS: My suggested Fall curriculum would contain a double-dose of mentor training to dislodge the instinct that "It is about the robot/banner"; and to help them learn how to inspire students to try STEM activities and careers without falling into the trap of letting their team's year in FRC be overly influenced by the few hours they spend at a tournament.

PPS: Did anyone notice what I tried to do in that 3rd bullet? I suggested giving struggling teams a much longer build season, and a way to increase the strength of their team's foundations; without giving non-struggling teams a free pass to over-invest (any more than they might now) in the robot-building part of FRC.

[EmileH]

Brace yourselves, reality check incoming.

I would first like to preface this response by letting everyone know that a bag and tag discussion as intense and "bloodying" as this one was not my intention when creating the thread. I also did not think it would morph into an argument this strong.

Before we address the topic of Bag and Tag and whether or not it leads to more sustainable teams, we should define FRC team sustainability itself.

What is FRC sustainability?

Sustainability, by Wikipedia definition, is the capacity to endure. I will alter this definition slightly for the purposes of future discussion in this thread:

Sustainability, in an FRC sense, is the ability of a team to have a good enough foundation to stay as participants year after year. This foundation is comprised of a team's community support, mentor (technical/business knowledge) support, monetary support/sponsor relations, and finally, a school/student partnership (an incoming stream of students). This foundation should be strong enough that if there is mentor or student turnover, the team should be relatively unaffected in its' ability to continue to participate in the program.

We do NOT need to define sustainability as a level of competition. Being competitive doesn't necessarily mean that a team is sustainable. However, the key here is that when teams improve sustainability and build up their foundations, increased level of competition will come as a side effect.

On the topic of B&T...

Short and simple, Bag and Tag will help improve team sustainability indirectly by allowing lower resource teams to have a longer build season, but it will increase teams' level of competition more than it would increase sustainability. For this reason, I believe that Bag and Tag would be a nice thing to eliminate, BUT building foundations for weak and unstable teams is FAR more conducive to sustainability than getting rid of Bag and Tag.

Edit: To summarize: Help teams build foundations and that will lead to infinitely more sustainable teams.

Now, everybody take your mind off sustainability for a while and go read 254's technical binder. It's awesome.

Remember, the majority of participants in this thread are members of sustainable teams. We should be thinking about several of the new teams in the 5-6000s that had no foundation and will not be participating next year, and how FIRST - the community AND the organization in New Hampshire - can save these teams from going defunct and help grow all of FIRST as a result.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by gblake

...

I frankly couldn't give a toss about counter-argument vs argument in the way that my post wasn't really there to take a side on any opinion on B&T; I just wanted to make sure I was not alone in witnessing a stunning lack of awareness of some posters.

On the topic that you were pushing in to, I have a loosely developed idea of how a Division II of FRC could work in some areas but it's not hammered out really well right now and is part of a larger post that this thread at the moment would not benefit from...

Essentially a Division II FRC would take place from August to December, playing a modified version of the game Division I experienced from January to April.

Targeted benefits of Division II
-Cheaper registration fee: Division II events would essentially be FIRST sanctioned offseasons in their structure and venue. You are playing on a worn field. You could/should be able to register a team for $1000 and get two district events?
-Allow Division I teams to mentor Division II teams: it's out of season for potential division I teams so they can use some outreach efforts just by taking their robot to a division II team shop and showing them what they did, or they could invite a division II team in to their shop.
-Train up new volunteers in new roles: pretty much moving a benefit from an offseason competition into a "second season" competition.
-Try out new higher-level rules like no bag and tag, motor allotments, bumpers.
-Give COTS manufacturers time to develop and stock relevant items to lower the cost for these teams
-Probably more benefits

I could also list the drawbacks that I have already considered but frankly I'm interested into seeing how people try to rip it apart. At the administrative level it's hard to see how this can work in anywhere that isn't Ontario, Minnesota, California, or Michigan, and these teams likely would not go to a postseason exposition like Division I has, but the idea is that they might not be able to afford it anyway.

[frcguy]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

...

+1

[gblake]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

... I have a loosely developed idea of how a Division II of FRC could work in some areas but it's not hammered out really well right now and is part of a larger post that this thread at the moment would not benefit from...

Essentially a Division II FRC would take place from August to December, playing a modified version of the game Division I experienced from January to April.

...

When I thought about creating a division-style split among the teams in order to help struggling teams, I thought of some reasons that discouraged me from suggesting it

A) It would definitely have an effect on struggling teams, but I think the change doesn't directly attack a root cause of teams' struggles. I think those root causes are being ill-prepared for starting the build season part of FRC, plus a few others.

B) I think that struggling teams need a foundation of being better prepared, and need a safety net. Competing in a lower-performing division is still competing (that will include some learning), and competing is distracting. To me creating two divisions didn't shed enough of the problems teams encounter in the current annual rhythm, and didn't focus enough on zero-risk education and practice (that would carry over as a safety net in the Spring).

Blake

[EricH]

Caution, long post.

If I can summarize the B&T debate succinctly so we can get back to increasing sustainability, and be advised that the numbers are just to identify, and assigned in no particular order:

Side 1 says that eliminating B&T makes more sense, would help them more, and teams can still choose to follow B&T if they want to. Side 1 says Side 2 just doesn't get it (and rather openly, I might add).

Side 2 says that keeping B&T makes more sense, and would help them more, for usually opposite reasons than Side 1. And Side 2 also says Side 1 doesn't get it (also rather openly).

Side 3 (a very small minority, generally landing with side 2) says that Side 1 and 2 are both wrong and we should still be operating under robot shipping rules as far as withholding goes.

And no side is willing to back down. I guess Side 4 would be "It doesn't matter what we say, we'll see what FIRST says, now can we get back to discussing sustainability?"

So how about we agree to disagree on that topic (at least for another six months or so, when FIRST announces whether or not B&T is back), assume that at least as far as sustainability is concerned it's a wash either way, and continue on?


Sustainability. What I see there isn't necessarily something HQ can actually do much about. I mean, short of lowering the barrier to entry (anybody not want to pay $4K instead of $5K?), the financial side is always going to be problematic. (I figure a rookie team budget for their first year to be an absolute minimum of $10K--registration, robot, and maybe some cheap T-shirts and tools.) If a team can get that part taken care of, they might or might not be sustainable--let's go with they'd be 33% more sustainable if they can guarantee a revenue stream (and remember, 83% of all statistics are made up on the spot, including the last two.) Maybe Dean's Homework this year will help. Maybe it won't.

Mentoring can be a problem too. I've got a challenge for all ya mentors out there. I see that a lot of experienced folks move to a new area and end up with an established team. A team that's got mentors and has been around a while, and is sustainable. How many teams could you help turn from "maybe they show up with a robot" to "sustainable" by simply working to mentor them instead of the more established team? Think about it. (There's other considerations, I'm aware--for example, the team actually needs mentors because they're set on the rest but NOT mentors--but that's kind of been niggling at me the last 3-4 years.)

Nomadic teams tend to have problems too, I'd think. Imagine having to move every. single. year. Can it be done, sure. I've heard of those teams succeeding despite all the moves. But I think it can be argued that an established "home base" can do a lot more for a team's sustainability than overzealous parents can. At least they know where to find the team...

And then there's the dedicated student factor. As in, the students so dedicated that when they graduate the collective team knowledge is gone... Or not dedicated enough to bother showing up.

How many of those

What can FIRST HQ do? More seminars on team management (fundraising, recruiting and retention, finding places to build--that's a start, maybe include "replacing your primary sponsor"). Lower costs of entry. And more Senior Mentors to help teams find those missing pieces. That'd be my top 3 for things that FIRST can do.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by EricH

If I can summarize the B&T debate succinctly so we can get back to increasing sustainability, and be advised that the numbers are just to identify, and assigned in no particular order:

Tricky thing about sustainability - the two resources are time and money. If all of the members are stressed out and burned out at the end of the season, the team risks folding because low participation time the next year.

--- (my musings on this thread) ---

At this point, I'm of the opinion that most school-based teams would be better served if their finances were a split between a school district and an independent NPO. So many state and local legislatures screw with how extracurriculars are funded/allocated that, IMO, the booster club model is the only real way to sustain a team that doesn't have one large central sponsor. I wonder what FIRST would come up with if they analyzed creating a membership-based financial arm that served as that NPO entity for teams. This would allow GREAT fundraising by a single group of students/adults to really have an impact in later years - something that usually isn't possible in a school budget.

The B&T debate (for me, FWIW) isn't about competitiveness or challenge so much as it is about the stress of a season. As a team who has consistently made it to Worlds we know that our competition season extends the build season by another 8-9 weeks. Even take away all of the CA wins, we would consistently make it to DCMP's now, meaning the season is another 6 weeks after build season.

The 6 week season is a lie for participants who are held accountable for robot performance, and has been for about 8 years. B&T stresses every single one of my build team members - adults and kids - long after 'bag day'.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by JesseK

I wonder what FIRST would come up with if they analyzed creating a membership-based financial arm that served as that NPO entity for teams. This would allow GREAT fundraising by a single group of students/adults to really have an impact in later years - something that usually isn't possible in a school budget.

It should be informative to look back at this year's PNW funding structure and see the influence it might have on team sustainability.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

I frankly couldn't give a toss about counter-argument vs argument in the way that my post wasn't really there to take a side on any opinion on B&T; I just wanted to make sure I was not alone in witnessing a stunning lack of awareness of some posters.

On the topic that you were pushing in to, I have a loosely developed idea of how a Division II of FRC could work in some areas but it's not hammered out really well right now and is part of a larger post that this thread at the moment would not benefit from...

Essentially a Division II FRC would take place from August to December, playing a modified version of the game Division I experienced from January to April.

Targeted benefits of Division II
-Cheaper registration fee: Division II events would essentially be FIRST sanctioned offseasons in their structure and venue. You are playing on a worn field. You could/should be able to register a team for $1000 and get two district events?
-Allow Division I teams to mentor Division II teams: it's out of season for potential division I teams so they can use some outreach efforts just by taking their robot to a division II team shop and showing them what they did, or they could invite a division II team in to their shop.
-Train up new volunteers in new roles: pretty much moving a benefit from an offseason competition into a "second season" competition.
-Try out new higher-level rules like no bag and tag, motor allotments, bumpers.
-Give COTS manufacturers time to develop and stock relevant items to lower the cost for these teams
-Probably more benefits

I could also list the drawbacks that I have already considered but frankly I'm interested into seeing how people try to rip it apart. At the administrative level it's hard to see how this can work in anywhere that isn't Ontario, Minnesota, California, or Michigan, and these teams likely would not go to a postseason exposition like Division I has, but the idea is that they might not be able to afford it anyway.

So how would this fit into the existing offseason events? It might be more fruitful to modify the offseason events to emphasize the experiences for the Div II teams. Changing the draft rules to break up power teams could be one small step. Changing rules to increase the value of easier tasks is another. Other ideas?

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by gblake

[*]That helping struggling teams have a successful build will be best done by helping them practice the construction, programming, and project management before the build season. I say this in the sense of helping them learn to fish, instead of giving them a fish. I suggest adding an inexpensive, Fall, annual, robot-building & project management curriculum, and KOP/BOM, and letting the simple robots built during the Fall compete unmodified (maybe allow some modest changes) in the Winter/Spring (think of plowie in Dave's animations). There will be plenty of devils in the details, including avoiding letting too much of the game cat out of the bag, but the intent behind the current 44-day time constraint will be preserved (won't be circumvented further) in a useful sense; and struggling teams will have a valuable safety net. Siri asked earlier what my idea it's. This is it.[/list]
Blake

I think this is a potentially fruitful strategy. The question is how to got more experienced teams to find it in their best interest to reach out--incentives can be incredibly powerful. I suggest that FIRST announce in September that some form of team work will be needed to score maximum points in the upcoming game. In 2014 it was the assist, this year it was getting on the batter to capture. On the other hand, in 2015 a third robot too often became a liability. FIRST should be delivering a clear message about the benefits of coopertition before the build season starts.

[Knufire]

Originally Posted by gblake

That helping struggling teams have a successful build will be best done by helping them practice the construction, programming, and project management before the build season. I say this in the sense of helping them learn to fish, instead of giving them a fish. I suggest adding an inexpensive, Fall, annual, robot-building & project management curriculum, and KOP/BOM, and letting the simple robots built during the Fall compete unmodified (maybe allow some modest changes) in the Winter/Spring (think of plowie in Dave's animations). There will be plenty of devils in the details, including avoiding letting too much of the game cat out of the bag, but the intent behind the current 44-day time constraint will be preserved (won't be circumvented further) in a useful sense; and struggling teams will have a valuable safety net. Siri asked earlier what my idea it's. This is it.

SE Michigan already does something similar to this. A local robotics competition, called OCCRA, is held from September-November. Robots are slightly smaller (but on the same scale) as FRC. Games usually borrow elements from past FRC and VEX games. Some of the key differences:

• No direct mentor help
• No precision machining (bandsaw and drill press is about as precise as you can get)
• No B&T, build throughout the season

A rule book can be found here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/at...7&d=1410283204

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

I think this is a potentially fruitful strategy. The question is how to got more experienced teams to find it in their best interest to reach out--incentives can be incredibly powerful. I suggest that FIRST announce in September that some form of team work will be needed to score maximum points in the upcoming game. In 2014 it was the assist, this year it was getting on the batter to capture. On the other hand, in 2015 a third robot too often became a liability. FIRST should be delivering a clear message about the benefits of coopertition before the build season starts.

Yes & Thanks for the hopeful thumbs-up.

My suggested criterion/goal would be "Carry out this lesson plan, and you will build a simple robot (plus driver controls) you can (re)use. Additionally, if you fully take the lessons to heart you will learn how to plan and build a custom robot whenever you feel ready to take that plunge".

Because of the uneven nature of help from other teams, I would urge FIRST to produce a set of pre-season-build, how-to instructions/classes that FIRST standardizes. Experienced teams could become familiar with the instructions and supply valuable face-to-face help.

For new teams FIRST might even make completing the simple bot mandatory in teams' rookie years?

For long-established teams going through a rough patch, building the simple bot gets students' and adults' feet back on the ground, (re)teaches technical and/or project mgmt skills that might have been lost, defuses some arguing & churn, is inexpensive with an easy BOM, generally simplifies everyone's season/year, and ensures that the team will have something to show for their work.

However, getting back to your points, help during the pre-season (wherever it might show up) from experienced teams would be a good thing, and coopertition points to make the resulting simple, consistent robots more useful on-the-field would be a good thing too.

Blake

[Oblarg]

What I think teams need, and which has only been mentioned a couple times in this thread, is institutional support from FIRST in procuring human and financial resources.

Teams fold because they lose mentors and/or money. There are other reasons, but those are the ones I've seen the most, they're the ones I've experienced myself, and they're the ones that seem to be most prevalent in the (limited) data we have. If FIRST wants to do something about team attrition, they need to do something to help with this. Everything else is just, to use a tired metaphor, rearranging deck chairs in the titanic.

[pianotech70]

As a newbie to FIRST and robotics in general, as this is my first season, and in a rookie team at that, I would like to offer a few observations. But first I must make a few qualifying statements. We are blessed with great machining facilities, several higly qualified mentors who are well versed in machining and engineering, and decent income. We are not connected to a school, which is a plus factor in some ways, and negatives in others. All in all, we have done well for ourselves in competition in several of the teams we have active. That being said, I look at a few things that have happened, and scratch my head a bit. I originally thought that B&T was a good idea, but since we were able to build a second bot to experiment and tweak and for practice purposes, I guess the B&T idea kinda stopped making as much sense. We did as others do, build a second bot and so recreate our comp bot to an extent because we had the ability to see where a measurement may be off a bit, a motor not tough enough, or a tolerence needing adjusted. SO, B&T was observed, and adhered to stringently to the rules, but we were able to work past that deadline using our practice bot. Not everyone has that ability.
Being that we are not school based, but area based, we don't have to seek permissions that schools ask to 1) travel out of state 2) arrange school transportations 3) deal with class time restrictions 4) beg a school for funding. But we have our own issues anyways as most of you already are aware can arise. Our local school systems are in very tight budget restraints and our independent status is a plus for us. Our money flow is different, and our mentor base is not restricted to a school system's requirements.
But.. as to mentoring needs, there is a goldmine of retired people out there who would love to mentor. There are people in nursing homes that would love to share their expertise with students in the areas of business, and mechanical talents. I personally know a man who was retired that worked for Ford making cars and R&D on rocketpacks!!! Perhaps some of these folks could be tapped? And some retired people have great shop facilities, by the way.
But mentoring can be a great financial aid where money is tight, to reduce the costs of prototyping a design and possibly wasting materials in experimentation, a mentor may be able to steer discussion to more usable directions and avoid obvious mechanical failures.
I guess what I am saying is, B&T is part of the game, but there are ways around it.... if you have the money and wherewithal to afford 2 bots or similar solutions. Mentors are out there, but maybe we need to look in unusual places to find unusual mentors. And utilization of our resources greatly depends on the individual constraints of each individual team. No silver bullet is going to fix all or even most of the problems. I kinda like the dual tier ideas being passed around.
Just my piddling two cents worth from a newbie.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

What I think teams need, and which has only been mentioned a couple times in this thread, is institutional support from FIRST in procuring human and financial resources.

Teams fold because they lose mentors and/or money. There are other reasons, but those are the ones I've seen the most, they're the ones I've experienced myself, and they're the ones that seem to be most prevalent in the (limited) data we have. If FIRST wants to do something about team attrition, they need to do something to help with this. Everything else is just, to use a tired metaphor, rearranging deck chairs in the titanic.

Allowing struggling teams to build in the Fall, and use in the Spring, a simple, inexpensive, standard, teaching robot (capable of helping win tournament matches); would allow them to need fewer mentors, to need less from the mentors they have, and to train new mentors.

It would also probably reduce costs (at least a little), while freeing up students and mentors for fundraising activities, instead of consuming them in a typical year's build prep, build, and post-build upgrade time sinks.

The suggestion isn't a miracle cure, but it does seem to help (at least in my head) on several fronts.

Established teams who choose to adopt the option would be consciously choosing to put the robot on the back burner for a year (it's not about the robot) in order to focus on other matters, like getting their funding and/or mentoring house(s) in order; without having to abandon participating in tournaments, etc.

If FIRST did implement something along these lines it wouldn't be the type of direct institutional support from FIRST HQ you had in mind Oblarg, but it would at least be indirect support in that it takes some pressure off struggling teams by putting an easily implemented floor under the robot part of their annual task list.

Blake