2013 Lessons Learned: The Positive

[fb39ca4]

Originally Posted by Robby Unruh

I just want to echo how great the wild card system was. There were some situations where it seemed almost magical. ie. Crossroads finals, due to wild cards ALL finalists were able to get their tickets to worlds. This was also the case at the Spokane regional.

As a member of a finalist team at Spokane, I am really grateful for it too.

[Bongle]

Game was great. There weren't any truly game-breaking strategies, and there was enough to do (and appropriate numbers of points to do each thing) that a team could be successful doing anything as long as they did it well.

Wildcard change was amazing. No more whiny threads of "BUT THEY ALREADY QUAAAAALIFIIIIEEED, THEY'RE JERKS FOR STEALING OUR SPOOOOOOOTS". I also noticed much more cheering for our local unstoppable robots at the regional I attended. probably because the horde of stoppable teams felt like they finally had a fair chance to qualify for championships.

[Mark Sheridan]

1) The game was awesome this year. I loved the variety of robot designs and strategies. I thought the discs was a really good game piece. It had really good flight characteristics and was very durable. I like that the GDC choose to have a large amount of dics and avoided having scored discs returned to the field. It really helped keep the flow of the game fast. I also like the ranking system was nice and simple. My team loves this game so much, we don't want to stop playing it. We are going to have to go to as many off season events as we can.
2) kit voucher: It was great to get exactly what we needed. It really reduced our budget this year
3) Motor variety: it seems there is a motor in the kit for any application you can think of.
4)I was really impressed by the lack of zero score matches. There was a big reduction in non-competative robots. I think a big thanks goes to the 3 day robot. It gave teams a template that they could start off of. It also gave many teams a standard of competitiveness. I think the whole field of robots are more competitive this year. It seemed the bell curve was smoothed out a bit.
5)FIRST's transparency this year made their decisions a lot clearer.

[PVCpirate]

1. Frank. The guy really listened to teams, the blog posts were always clear and well-written and he explained the information very well.
2. Ultimate Ascent - Both tasks(shooting and climbing) required mechanisms near the top of the robot. This made every team make design decisions, rather than elite teams "doing everything".
3. Wild Cards - The best teams deserve to go to championship, and this is a great way to accomplish that for non-district teams. They just need to make it possible to get them from performance at earlier regionals.

[MooreteP]

The game. 'Nuff said.

The Coyotes and Theory 6 achieving their due respect north of the border was sweet.
Texas Torque had a great game and the coolest logo. I so want one of their shirts.

The only number one seed on Einstein was from the Curie division.
The Citrus Circuits got little respect but their scorched earth policy was validated.

Las Guerillas and Killer Bees had never allied together before this year. Mechanical Mayhem was finally noticed.

Code Orange, Sab-BOT-age, & TEST teams were brilliant in their upset on Newton.

The District model, it is where we are all headed.
We are starting it in New England next season.
Get used to it. 5 out of the 12 teams and Einstein were from the districts.
Teams will spend less money and get many more matches.
The opportunity for teams to refine their designs is invaluable.

The St. Louis Cardinals game on Friday night was wonderful. The rain held off and there were a lot of fireworks.

[NaomiCS]

The game this year was amazing!
The student ambassador-ing was well organized (though i dont have anything to compare it to)
The matches were relatively on schedule
LOTS of gp

and much more that im sure ill think of later

[Nemo]

I'm mostly echoing other people, but these things were all such great things that I want to add my voice.

1) Amazing game that forced trade-offs and made us want alliances with different types of robots and allowed matches to play out in a variety of ways (contrast with 2011)

2) Transparency from Frank and quick responses to some concerns raised during the season - this has been great.

3) KoP vouchers and AndyMark voucher in particular were really great. Having choices is a very good thing since teams have different needs and different plans. FIRST Choice can be a very good thing as long as some common sense changes are put in place - please keep doing FIRST Choice.

4) Wild cards are great. I'd love to see this expanded a little bit to cover some situations when teams deserve a wildcard but don't get one.

5) Early availability of the Championship match schedule was great.

6) Apart from FIRST HQ stuff, we have great new robot COTS product offerings this year. VexPro's launch was great. I'm thrilled by the Talon and Victor 888. AndyMark has great new stuff (like 4" FIRST wheels) and lower prices. Options are up and costs are down, and competition is good for FRC teams.

7) Simpler bumper rules.

8) Pneumatic rules continue to gradually open up, after years of only being allows to use one certain component by one certain manufacturer.

9) Frame perimeter instead of 28x38 constraint has been great.

10) The ranking system makes sense and offers no bizarre incentives to score points for your opponents.

11) Running practice matches prior to Einstein was smart.

12) Getting information about what would be in the Kit of Parts before the season was helpful. And being able to order some of the materials before the season started was very nice. Having generally useful items on hand for the first day is great.

[JohnFogarty]

The southeast isn't big enough that the district system would work very well.

The volunteer section for Einstein was awesome.

[dag0620]

Time for the positives, and there is a lot!

• Overall amazing season!
• Frank Merrick and the transparency from HQ. Getting to speak Frank myself, he really does care about what the teams think. I too will add with Libby that I hope the acting get's dropped from his title and that he will become the permanent Director of FRC. He's taken FRC in such a great direction in just a season, and I think the program will be in amazing places under his leadership for the long term.
• The Game: At first I wasn't crazy about it, but I have fallen in love with Ultimate Ascent. Bravo to the GDC for making another amazing one.
• Champs in general! It was my first time ever going and I had an amazing time. I'm looking forward to returning in 2014 as a Volunteer!
• The Volunteers were incredible. I've always had amazing luck with FIRST volunteers, but this year they seemed extra special (I want to give a shout-out to the women who was working FRC Safety Glasses at Championships. I have never seen someone have so much fun working safety glasses before.)
• Getting to be a Volunteer! It was my first year as a volunteer in the on-season, and I loved it! I can't wait to get even more involved next year.

[MrJohnston]

My team and I had an outstanding experience at Nationals:

* Looking at some of the best robots in the world and learning from the kids and mentors how they were built.

* Competing with the best and realizing that there is nothing stopping us from joining them.

* The game itself was fantastic.

* The venue was wonderful - especially with the immediate access to our hotel and plenty of food options.

[jawebste]

My first trip to the Championships as well and the Safety Glasses lady rocked! And I agree the volunteers are wonderful. I was also very impressed with the Dome personnel and found them very helpful.

[AllenGregoryIV]

No need for major rules changes at IRI, means the GDC got it right.

[Nawaid Ladak]

1) From an outsiders prospective, this game was excellent: I've noticed that the games in the odd numbered years tend not to be as exciting for the spectators as the games in the even numbered years. (Triple Play vs Aim High, Rack N Roll vs Overdrive... etc). This year brought a pleasant change to that concept. For some reason, I thought this game would be boring and some teams would find it difficult to score and climb. Then again, I haven't played frisbee in a few years.

2) I still prefer regional events over districts. While districts are great for some regions. other regions simply lack the team involvement, quality of play, or volunteer base to implement a program similar to MAR or FiM. I do think that districts are great for the ares that may be able to support them in the near future (New England, Minnesota, California, Texas, DMV...)

3) This was the best Championship Event I've attended in St Louis. The program was really well put together. aside from the paper planes, everything went great. Sure Einstein was long, but you had nine matches with a recount for one of those matches, what else was there to expect?

4) I for one did not find any of the speeches too lengthy, maybe its' the ten years that I've been involved with FIRST. Maybe I've finally gotten used to this format.

5) Preliminary Schedules = AMAZING!, Please do this again, let regional events try this out if they can as well.

6) This was the first year I truly thought that the FRC portion was truly a World Championship. Three of the top six ranked teams on Galileo and Curie were teams from outside the United States. This really goes to show how much this program has grown outside our borders. I'm hoping this trend continues.

7) The FIRST Robotics Conferences being free this year was a treat. While I wasn't able to attend the seminar that I wanted to go to (I'm sure there were about 150-200 others that found themselves in a similar predicament...) Just seeing the buzz surrounding the conference halls Wednesday night around 6pm was something I didn't expect and was presently surprised by. I hope they give Karthik 3 hours and the auditorium next year.

8) Providing special seating for Volunteers was something new that was added this year. The seats were great and I'm sure a lot of other volunteers were really appreciative for this arrangement (As someone who was helping with handing our awards on Galileo as the main lights for the dome shut down, I'm happy i got the seats i got instead of being up in the nosebleeds or having an obscure view of the field somewhere else).

(DISCLAIMER I wasn't really involved with my team this season as I was busy trying to get my career off the ground)

[sanddrag]

Talon motor controllers - lower price and flawless performance
Frank Merrick visiting our pit at the Inland Empire regional - he really is a great guy

and the best:
the nVidia graphics cards on FIRST choice. PLEASE nVidia donate to FIRST again! Thank you!

[Ian Curtis]

I think Ultimate Ascent is the best all-around game since the turn of the century. It was very exciting, and there were tons of strategic choices, and the robots looked different! While 2004 will forever be a person favorite, I tried to sell it a bunch of newer mentors and they told me it was too complicated. Ultimate Ascent was easy to grasp for people that just showed up at the day of the competition.

The voucher & FIRST Choice were good additions, I'm sure FIRST has learned from this year and they will be even better next year. Getting additional free game pieces was awesome!

The level of play was definitely higher than I expected. Ri3D is probably partially responsible for this, but I think a big thing is that there were plenty of parallels back to 2012. Some of the lessons learned shooting in 2012 could be applied to this year. Frisbees are also a really spectacular game piece. Not very expensive, and very consistent to shoot and pickup.

FIRST can change a rule after the week zero scrimmages, and other than the immediate predictable "HOW COULD THEY DO THIS THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!1" thread on CD, the game still worked out fine. To be honest, I think the frisbee blizzard probably would have taken away from the game at weaker events where humans had a ton of frisbees to throw.

The bumper rules have gotten simpler while I've been gone, which is nice.

I also really liked the change to the perimeter rule. We came so underweight we put a bucket of lead onboard and still weighed less than 100 lbs. It will be interesting to see if lots of teams have weight issues next year, particularly if we switch back to a bigger size.

The Wildcard system is definitely an improvement as well. Nice to see the finalists get a ticket to the championship when the winning alliance has teams that already have spots.

It was a great year to be back after taking a couple years off from actively working with a team.