2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

This strikes me as a kind of optimization problem. Given the current composition of the Championship, can it be demonstrated that the value of admitting an additional merit-qualified team in lieu of a waitlisted team will be positive?¹ And how does this relationship change as you tweak the proportions and quantities of qualified teams? Is this relationship different for teams that only won judged awards versus the ones with more competitive robots?

I suspect that to answer that, we'll need to discuss the purpose of the Championship, and the criteria used to judge merit and calculate value.

¹ Or, given the distribution of likely outcomes, at least a positive expected value and a low likelihood of drastically negative values.

I think there needs to be an algorithm that balances the merits of the team under a traditional points system with some leverage in times the team attended championships in its history/veteran status. I can't tell you what it should be, there should be some sort of consensus met by teams and HQ of what does merit a championship caliber team, but I think it should be pretty easy to reach the consensus that a fastest-finger competition isn't that.

[JackN]

I was personally not involved with any team for Build Season this year. I did help work with Team 70 during the competition season, so these observations and issues that I have noticed/felt this season and there are some potential solutions:

1) The number of qualification matches at Championship was too low. Everyone agrees with this being an issue, I don't think anyone is going to disagree with it. There are several proposed solutions that I think could solve it. FIRST needs to decide who they want to appeal to when it comes to Championship. Removing the wait-list will make it a more competitive and maybe a more positive experience for the teams that qualify. Expanded the divisions/adding another will certainly decrease the quality of play, but gives more students the opportunity to attend championship.

2) Third event teams at the Bedford District Competition. This is obviously a Michigan centered issue, but the fact that 22 of the 24 teams that were playing in eliminations were competing in their third event left a sour taste in my mouth. I am generally a fan of teams being allowed to compete in extra events to fill up the spots, but I really wish that there was a better distribution of teams at the events from earlier weeks to make it less likely something like this might happen.

3) Real time and Autonomous Scoring issues. I am not that mad about the real time scoring. For better or worse I have more or less given up expecting to see a quality real time score. One thing I wish they would have done is added in a pause following the end of Autonomous mode, similar to what was done in 2006 to give counters the ability to verify and accurately count the discs.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Jared341

.....

I really hope FIRST HQ sees this. I agree 100% with this!

[GBK]

The camps were amazing and we were honored to be there.
That being said some adjustments need to be made to make it better for everyone.
Too many teams in a division and too few matches. The speeches are way too long. Too few good seats for Einstein.
If the Einstein speeches were cut way back there would be time to do a normal QF, SF, and finals match set up. This would require more divisions. More divisions means less teams for each division. Less teams per division means more matches.
Einstein needs to be setup on one of the long sides of the dome like it was in Atlanta. This would allow for better seating for Einstein.
Some people don't like the paper airplanes (I think they are just fine) if the speeches were shorter and more matches were being played, there would be less students and mentor bored and maybe less airplanes.
Some might ask where would you put the extra fields for the additional divisions... Why doe FTC need to be at the same championship. FTC is being limited at the championship by FRC just as much as FRC is being limited by FTC. Michigan has adapted FTC as a middle school program and the season as been adjusted so it does not interfere with FRC. This allows us coaches/mentor to do both teams. Makes for a great feeder system for FRC and allows 7th and 8th graders to be involved in something more challenging than Lego. Most of that age group is not interested in Lego any way. Michigan is still only allowed to send 2 teams to camps. This limits the growth of FTC in our state. If FIRST is going to continue to grow the way it should, some hard decisions need to be made.

[lanna.stars]

Far too many teams for Championships... perhaps getting rid of the wait list would narrow down numbers? Also switching to districts would also make for less teams at the world's. I'm not sure but just a suggestion.

Another issue I came across was the screens for each division were TOO small for those in the stands to read everything. Kind of pointless if the only ones who can read it are those on the playing field and they aren't paying attention to the screen anyways.

Scoring issues in real time. Kind of embarrassing to watch in all honesty... specifically in autonomous mode.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Jared341

Please let me clear some things up.

I said that we need to make hard choices about who gets in. This does not mean that I think you must be an elite robot to be invited. If it did, well, then 341 would not have been at the Championship many of the years we have been, and we would not be the team we are today. It means exactly what I said: we have to make hard choices! The best system I have seen for making these choices is the FIM/MAR system, which uses points accumulated over the course of a season (incorporating BOTH robot performance and off-the-field accomplishments, with automatic advancement for the highest culture changing awards) to select the most deserving teams in a given year.

To be clear, I do not think we were we impacted at all by unlucky alliance pairings (heck, we had the 5th easiest schedule in Newton by OPR). There were a couple of other specific teams I had in mind when I made the second part of my statement, which I concede was not tactfully articulated. It is not FIRST's obligation that the best robot seeds #1. But, on the other hand: There is a C in FRC, and the C is the biggest reason we are as popular as we are. The C is also our best shot at actually transforming the culture on a macro scale, because the sports model is something the public actually gets.

There is a knob we need to tune. On one end, every FRC team who is able to, comes to Championships and plays a single match. On the other end, only the 24 best robots in the world show up and they play 20+ qualification matches each. All I am arguing is that 400+ teams and 8 matches is not the optimal spot on the continuum, especially for $5000 per team. I do not think you should need to be elite to come to St. Louis, but when I know for a fact that there are teams who did not make the cut who can score lots of game pieces, who have done tremendous things in their communities and schools, and have changed lives and cultures - why are there still robots that can't score a game piece at the World Championships?

Thank you for the clarification; it seems much of the disagreement was, indeed, miscommunication. No, the current system is clearly imperfect and does indeed need work - I can certainly agree there.

I apologize if my post was overly-confrontational, and am glad that what I took offense at was not your intended message.

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by Smitty1707

The thing I haven't seen mentioned yet that definitely needs said:

Karthik needs to be given a larger space for his presentation. (More time would be fantastic as well). The number of people who came and were thoroughly interested and engaged throughout was incredible, but I am sure there were many more who could not get in to the room, or did not want to fight the crowds. There was something to take away from this presentation to teams of all resource and ability levels.

This may have been true of other presentations as well, but I believe Karthik's in particuar was probably the most blatant problem.

Agreed. With the conferences being free this year, this was a BIG problem. Shutting out almost as many people as were in the room?! Time for a bigger room. I don't think this was something they were ready for with the change in attendance policy. I have heard that they're looking at using the Ferrara Theater for the more widely-attended conferences next year.

My other thoughts:
-Fewer teams, more divisions, or both. 8 matches was completely unacceptable.
-The Hall of Fame setup. Embarassing. These guys should have a way bigger display space - after all, they're the FRC role models. It wouldn't be that hard to find a better, bigger, more advantageous space for them a la Atlanta's HoF display.

I've got more, but those are the big two.

[apples000]

I agree with many of the points in this thread, but I found the finale to be dangerously overcrowded. I watched several students fall down the stairs, and by the time the bus I was on arrived, all we could find to eat were the cookies. Also, while down on the field during elims, I noticed that the back up robots (there were four per division) and their teams needed to be in the center area where they needed to sit still and wait. The kids weren't allowed to watch the matches, and a group of kids who worked hard, built a great robot, ranked 12, and weren't picked were forced to sit where they couldn't see the elimination rounds for any division is not a nice thing to do to a dedicated group of students. Also, I agree that 8 matches is not enough. Teams that didn't build great robots ended up in the top 8, and bad robots were chosen for alliance partners(making it easier for us to get far in elims).

[Oblarg]

Yes, the finale planning all-around was atrocious, from the transportation to the event itself. That volume of people in that space was not a good idea.

[ScottOliveira]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

A couple of thoughts...

1) Championship Caliber vs. Wait List:
I suspect that part of the reason we accept robots from a waitlist to fill out the fields is financial. It costs a significant amount of money to rent out a facility such as the Edwards Jones Dome for a week and those wait-listed teams really help the bottom line. I have experience running select baseball tournaments. If I were to rent and prepare a facility for a 24 team tournament, but only got 16 teams, I'd be in a mess financially. However, were I to fill the tournament with 24, I'd make a pretty profit. Thought FIRST is not a for-profit organization, the concept is the same. The last thing we want is for them to be forced to raise the price on everybody in the event that the tournament does not fill.

I'm not certain how the financials for the Championship work, but having talked with some local organizers, many of the regional competitions have a very large percent (up to 100%) of the costs for reserving space payed for by sponsors. I would imagine that the Championship works in a similar manner, where most if not all of the facility costs end up being covered by sponsor donations, not team entry fees.

Someone who has more insight, please feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Libby K

-The Hall of Fame setup. Embarassing. These guys should have a way bigger display space - after all, they're the FRC role models. It wouldn't be that hard to find a better, bigger, more advantageous space for them a la Atlanta's HoF display.

The HOF looked nicer than it has in a long while but it was too small and seemed sterile and disorganized (where were teams supposed to set up?). I didn't even hear anything about the HOF til I talked to Dan Green at Midwest and I was hoping to start designing our HOF setup during the build season since I am the lead mentor on the promotions team. Instead we had to scramble to throw something together at the last second just to put something in the HOF. If the Chairman's award is so important to FIRST they certainly have a funny way of showing it.

[tgraham_533]

As a mentor for 15 years, I have noticed that the field is becoming more and more complicated and more and more important to testing. This year's pyramid was expensive and required alot of space. Our team is limited to an active shop classroom to design, build and test the robot. We could not build the pyramid due to space. In addition, the low cost field was not truly representative of the actual field. The small portion of the pyramid we did build drove us to make certain design decisions that were not appropriate once we saw the actual field.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by TEAM1100soft506

I just want to say, as a member of a team who has been around for over 10 years now, the concept of a hall of fame is just plane rediculous. We are here to work and play and spread the message of FIRST. To me, the hall of fame recignizes the teams who have the most money and are able to do great extravagent things with it. Dont get me wrong, they worked hard to earn it, and I am most definitely not knocking philanthropy or the value of becoming a chairmans winning team, but the hall of fame shouldnt exist. It is not fair to have a team like mine who can barely keep afloat, is using old equipment for design, programming, and building our robot, to have to compete against a team like Ms. Daisy (no offence) who has multiple heavy hitter sponsors, is able to travel internationally to show off their robot in the United Kingdom, as well as other wonderfull things like that. I believe that yes these teams types of teams should be an example to others, But I do not believe that other teams should get less of a chance to compete due to financial reasons.

We aint rich.
We share a build site with two other teams.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by tgraham_533

As a mentor for 15 years, I have noticed that the field is becoming more and more complicated and more and more important to testing. This year's pyramid was expensive and required alot of space. Our team is limited to an active shop classroom to design, build and test the robot. We could not build the pyramid due to space. In addition, the low cost field was not truly representative of the actual field. The small portion of the pyramid we did build drove us to make certain design decisions that were not appropriate once we saw the actual field.

This really needs to be repeated until FIRST acknowledges it - the pyramid was a prohibitively difficult field piece to simulate accurately, and it added another hurdle for teams of limited means. Every field piece should be easy to simulate accurately for testing purposes.

[BHS_STopping]

Originally Posted by TEAM1100soft506

I just want to say, as a member of a team who has been around for over 10 years now, the concept of a hall of fame is just plane rediculous. We are here to work and play and spread the message of FIRST. To me, the hall of fame recignizes the teams who have the most money and are able to do great extravagent things with it. Dont get me wrong, they worked hard to earn it, and I am most definitely not knocking philanthropy or the value of becoming a chairmans winning team, but the hall of fame shouldnt exist. It is not fair to have a team like mine who can barely keep afloat, is using old equipment for design, programming, and building our robot, to have to compete against a team like Ms. Daisy (no offence) who has multiple heavy hitter sponsors, is able to travel internationally to show off their robot in the United Kingdom, as well as other wonderfull things like that. I believe that yes these teams types of teams should be an example to others, But I do not believe that other teams should get less of a chance to compete due to financial reasons.

You hold quite a controversial opinion, and I just want to let you know that this topic has been discussed time and time again.

The objective of the HoF and the Chairman's award is to inspire other teams to spread the ideals of FIRST. You are correct that some teams have a great amount of resources and have an "easier" time accomplishing certain goals. That being said, it's impossible ensure equal circumstances for all teams competing. Your argument doesn't apply to just the Chairman's award, it could be applied to the competition itself, and even to instances outside of FIRST as well (think high school sports teams, students applying to colleges, etc). Judges definitely do take things like economic circumstances into account when judging for all awards. An inner city school can certainly have many more challenges to overcome than an engineering academy might, which makes it that much more exciting and inspiring when they achieve their goals. What matters is how much your team does with what it is given. I promise that if you make the most out of what your team has, you will be rewarded for it.