paper: Stop the Stop Build - Counterpoint

[mathking]

The two papers got me thinking a little bit differently than I had been about this issue. Some of those thoughts have given me enough clarity to want to post them.

The reference to the Olympics got me thinking about the ways in which FRC is like a sport. I am a track and field coach, and one of the things track coaches have learned over the past couple of decades is how too much competition can lead to poorer performance. Because it gets you thinking about how to get better in the short term rather than the long term. In track and field long term performance is almost always the key to objective success. Whether you are coaching elite athletes who have to wait two years for another World Championship or four for another Olympics, or you are coaching high school athletes who have one meet to decide their conference championship and then maybe one or two qualifying meets to their state championship. It used to be that world class athletes would run a dozen or more races in the summer leading to the Olympics, and high schoolers would race two or three times a week all spring. Now elite athletes may only run four or five races leading up to a championship, and high schoolers are much more likely to only run in one meet a week.

None of this is directly applicable to analyzing performance for FRC, but it got me thinking about another idea. Much of the debate about stop build day seems to be of the "getting rid of it will lead to better robot performance" versus "robot performance shouldn't be the metric we use to measure the success of an FRC team." I know this is an oversimplification, but bear with me. Thinking about FRC in the context of track coaching made me think "Maybe getting rid of stop build day won't actually lead to better robot performance in the long run?"

I am pretty sure that my own team would have better robot performance on the average in any given season. Largely because the three lead mentors are all teachers, and for two of us the robot is/can be something we do in class. So we would be able to keep building and adapting. I even think the students in my class would benefit from seeing other robots and copying/adapting to improve ours. I am also pretty sure that my team would be a fair amount smaller. I would actually be surprised if getting rid of stop build day didn't have a noticeable impact on the total number of students participating in FRC. As well as an impact on the number of mentors.

So we would have fewer kids spending more time making tweaks and improvements to that year's competition robot. Which means less time available for general improvement like learning new skills. In coaching that is focusing on improving your strengths rather than focusing on improving your weaknesses. This has a very seductive pull for coaches. Because it often means winning more games that season. When you take classes on coaching they caution you against it because it often means a worse experience for the athletes as well as fewer wins for them in the long run.

One of the beauties of FRC is that it only takes a few (or sometimes even one) kid developing a skill to make that skill part of a team's repertoire. We use the spring, when some of the kids are really fired up about FRC, to get the kids to stretch themselves and learn new skills. I worry that we would end up with better robots but fewer new skills.

[gblake]

While looking for something else, I stumbled upon this interesting thread: Best simple robots based on kit chassis?

[Richard Wallace]

There is a spotlighted post I recall seeing here that says (my paraphrase from memory), "The secret to this whole thing is that robot builds the team."

You don't have to build a winning robot to build a team, but you won't build a great team unless they are striving to build a winning robot.

[Rich Kressly]

Lots of folks in this conversation I respect deeply and I know I'm the old head that doesn't spend much time here any more. However, with the escalation of this conversation and the growth of the district model, I can't resist making a few obvious (at least to me) points:
1. The overall goal here is about the type of person that is produced from the program, nothing else.
2. Until these type of conversations are centered around real historical and current data on graduates (not on-field play, points, or trophies), it's all just noise - sorry.
3. My personal history and experience would indicate blue banners have very little (if anything) to do with producing graduates with certain qualities.
4. While I understand certain other arguments I've heard, anything that leads to more work, more days with a team, "more" of anything is going to reduce the number of willing adult and student participants globally. Locally, there may be some exceptions where you see exceptional people and support, but globally it's a loss.
5. I get the idea for wanting better robots on the field, but does that ACTUALLY produce more of the graduates we desire? If so, where's the data?
6. If the overall vision were to be, "Let's make FRC the elite program only for the top end" then I'd be willing to scrap most of my thinking for 1-5 above. Of course, to do that, then FULLY embracing, pushing, and supporting intermediate programs (regardless of logo) like VRC and FTC as the way to engage and create MOST of those future graduates we are trying to create has to be part of the plan.

I really don't mean to pop anyone's balloon. I really do "see" the arguments being presented, but my 16 years of experience around this stuff says that, in large part, we may be entirely missing the point.

[Siri]

So FTC kickoff was yesterday. This is the FTC season setup. Granted, it's stretched out more than FRC would be even without SBD, but I really don't understand this argument that every team is going to do more and push harder longer or worse. The counterarguments to SBD seem to be both:
- People will procrastinate and end up rushing as much as they do now over a short time at the end.
- People will not procrastinate and will push as hard for the entire season as the do for the 6 week SBD version.

I don't get that. I don't buy this idea that the net is 'more'. Is it longer? Yes. Will that make some teams struggle with the transition? Yes. But I find it much more likely that:
- Some teams will procrastinate and rush to finish at the end. People do this now, and they do it in every aspect of their lives. No rule can save it; no rule does. Some subset will catch on and fix themselves every year/between years, some not. I'll posit SBD won't fix this, and I can't predict the rate as more less than historically, both at the transition and at the new steady state.
- Some teams will go whole-hog for the entire season. These are likely to be teams that already go whole-hog for the entire season plus teams that think they can and rapidly realize they can't. I'd expect most in the latter will just stop doing that rather than quit, because this also happens now. But again, I'll posit some loss. (What I can't posit is this confidence that the net will absolutely be worse than now. I don't get how you know this.)
- Some teams will slow down their schedule. I don't understand why this seems so weird to people. Our FTC program does not have an FRC schedule. Our VEX kids don't. Our FLL kids don't. Our sports programs don't. That hypothetical year-round official FRC training system doesn't. Nobody does. People know how to do this stuff. Do they procrastinate? Of course, we're human, and mostly teenagers at that. But do they procrastinate entirely to the point where the time to distribute their workload is not valuable? I guess there's one in every barrel, but I haven't seen it. This net retention rate--though I'm happy to admit all of the cohort sizes are unknown--is likely to improve.

The goal of dropping SBD is not to make every team elite or even relatively* better. That's not what this is about. It's to let teams run their FRC lives the way they run the rest of their lives, sans arbitrary deadlines (but not sans real ones) and activation energies. This does not force anyone to do more; it just removes the activation energy for improvement to join those who already do do more. Does this mean the elite have it 'easier' and will get better? Likely. But (in the nicest possible way) who cares? It's not zero-sum; they're increasing their lead above the league average, not forcing everyone else down. Does it mean that some teams will overexert without that activation energy to stop them? Yes, some. And some will learn from it and some will leave. Does it mean that some will treat FRC like it's not an overwhelming N-week-crunch that sucks up our lives and then tries to make us stare at our failures with no way to fix them and inhibited room to learn from our experiences? I'm going with yes.


*Relatively better. The debate about whether overall quality matters and is affected by SBD has a different set of arguments, mostly 'there's already enough time for anyone to be good' versus 'it's a looong learning curve and no SBD means more inter-event improvement and community support'. The debate about whether overall quality affects inspiration is yet another debate entirely, centered around 'it's not about the robot' and 'sitting dead is really discouraging'. Still, the schedule control can be address independently as well to some extent.

EDIT:
I think I need to clarify what I mean by separating the debates: If someone agreed on the schedule impacts above but posited that quality or inspiration from it didn't change, the conclusion would be that dropping SBD is marginally good or a wash. (Marginally good because teams ability to time-manage 6 weeks versus N similarly doesn't excuse the imposition of an arbitrary deadline any more than it would elsewhere in life.) This isn't to say I don't have strong opinions about quality and inspiration or that these don't need to be addressed before a conclusion. I just want to call out the schedule separately because I get the impression that I expect an order of magnitude less positive change than I think pro-SBDers expect in the negative from burnout or mass procrastination.

[mathking]

Rich Kressly, you hit the nail on the head. (As an aside, congrats on 1712's excellent season last year.) For me the central question is how does any change affect the quality and quantity of students who experience the program. If means better robots and better robots means more kids or better experiences for kids, then we should do it. But I don't think that relationship is at all clear.

Siri, here is my perspective on the schedule. Which is based mostly on my experience with my team. I don't buy that there is any significantly large exodus of people from FRC because of the stop build day deadline. A well constructed survey could convince me otherwise, but in particular I don't believe that getting rid of stop build day will cause a lot of students to stay in FRC. I have had over 300 different kids in FRC over the past 15 years and while we haven't had many who quit, none have ever said the schedule being so short made them leave. On the other hand, we have a lot of kids who if the schedule extended build time into the spring would deepen conflicts with other activities. We already have a little over 40% of our students who don't go to our regional competitions because of conflicts with sports, plays or other events. There is no way a change like this would not cause us to lose more of those kids.

And as I said in my previous post, I am not convinced that ending stop build day would in fact produce better robots in the long run.

In spite of this I am fairly ambivalent on the schedule. If they ended stop build day we would adapt, the team would go on. It would personally change some of what I do, and my own schedule (born out of 15 years of this schedule) would mean I wouldn't be as available, but I would adapt too. If they found a middle ground, such as giving every team some number of hours of limited out of bag time, we would adapt. We are still going to strive to provide the best experience we can to the most people we can.

[ddg258]

We already have a default stop build day, we need to ship our crate within a week of stop build day. We attend a week 1 or 2 regional in California, then our home regional in Hawaii week 5. The crate is shipped right after the California regional directly to Oahu. We wouldn't be able to use the un-bag time between our events for improvements. A second robot is a stretch for us, but it may be the only way to get more practice in.

Our home regional is on another island, Oahu, we are based on Maui. I don't think we have enough teams for a district model, but even if we had districts, we would still need to crate and ship because we need to fly to Oahu, twice, three times if we make district championships.

We are trying to become more competitive, hence two regionals. Being competitive helps us get the word out(PR) and helps with student and sponsor recruitment. Which in turn leads to sustainability, which leads to program improvement. We run year round with FRC, Vex EDR and we also mentor a Vex IQ team at one of our elementary schools. We are trying to improve STEM education in our school community and robotics has given us a great conduit.

One thing that came up is, if they eliminate stop build day, maybe just go to our home regional. We could work on our robot until week 4, practice driving and make improvements and we may be better then if we went to another regional. I will be pushing for us to continue to attend two regionals.

I don't mind stop build day, but we will adjust to whatever happens, just wanted to share in the discussion.

[FrankJ]

Originally Posted by ddg258

...One thing that came up is, if they eliminate stop build day, maybe just go to our home regional. We could work on our robot until week 4, practice driving and make improvements and we may be better then if we went to another regional. I will be pushing for us to continue to attend two regionals...

Another solution would be to build two robots. Not a lot of cost difference than building a practice robot. Probably close to to a wash if you attend worlds and keep one robot land side rather than a priority shipment back to Hawaii.

Admittedly not a perfect solution.