(Forced) Reasons to Stop Building

[mmcewen]

In Ontario most schools hold exams during week 3 of 4 of build season, and most school cancel all extra curricular activities (including robotics) for exam week. This means that teams like mine can lose a week or more of build season every year, which causes problems (you lose the workflow, have less prototyping time, etc.)
How do other teams work through/solve this (or a similar) problem?

[cpeister]

In my time on 781, exam week was one of our most productive.

[Dr.Gusta]

We work in a garage and just do what we can (programming CADing etc)

[gluxon]

Same thing happens at my high school. I actually agree with the decision as it's a nice break. I wouldn't be showing up for meetings anyway during midterm week.

[geomapguy]

Glad midterms don't exist in our parish

[Jay O'Donnell]

Originally Posted by mmcewen

In Ontario most schools hold exams during week 3 of 4 of build season, and most school cancel all extra curricular activities (including robotics) for exam week. This means that teams like mine can lose a week or more of build season every year, which causes problems (you lose the workflow, have less prototyping time, etc.)
How do other teams work through/solve this (or a similar) problem?

Remember school should be coming first, grades are more important than robots (although most people here will contradict that statement). We sort of set up our build season so that weeks 1+2 are for brainstorming, prototyping, and designing, and then week 3 can be more for preparing for the build and ordering parts, and then weeks 4,5, and 6 can be for build and practice. This makes it so that not having all of our kids during week three won't affect our design or build too much.

[cgmv123]

It helps when you have students from different schools/districts with different final schedules. My finals were last week, but many of our students have their finals this coming week, so we can stagger some of the work.