paper: Stop the Stop Build - Counterpoint

[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.