Why do we bother bagging?

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I think the point is you're not guaranteed access to money and sponsors simply by dint of hard work. It'd be pretty naive to deny the roles of socioeconomic status of team members and luck in determining team resources.

I can agree with that and I don't deny it (much of my undergrad work involves studies in this), but implying that it is as easy as just asking parents to drop in money is also naive. Also, teams shouldn't be raising money during build season anyway. If that is a problem, they should raise money all year.

I guess I'm pretty biased on this issue, but my anecdotal evidence comes from helping teams from Philly, Trenton, Newark, Texas, Cali, Louisiana, Oklahoma, etc. all teams who thought they were in too tough of a place to raise money or find resources. It takes a long time and a lot of baby steps to create change. I think too many teams aim for too much too quickly and get disappointed when they can't acheive their goals.

[Racer26]

Originally Posted by Galaxy Knuckles

You know....except money too. Which is a huge issue for the poorer teams who can get no funding and whose parents aren't rich enough to supply them with money either meaning that to even compete or get tools they have to spend almost as much time fundraising as building.... It changes nothing as far as the time spent a majority of the time just the cost. Fairness was never the issue here I (outdatted logistics? maybe fairness...no)

Every team has equal abilities to fundraise.

There are many teams in poor areas of the country with big sponsors, and many teams in wealthy areas with very limited sponsorship.

Sponsorship dollars on most teams generally has little to do with the wealthiness of the team's location.

In my experience: The teams with little sponsorship tend to treat FIRST as "that thing we do for 6-12 weeks in the winter/spring", and the teams with big budgets tend to treat it as "a year round thing with off-season competitions and learning in the fall, and constantly fundraising and approaching companies"

Most of those big-budget teams? They worked hard for those dollars, during the off-season, so that when it comes time for build season, they don't have to worry so much about money.

Back to the original topic of this thread:

I agree with an earlier poster that because of how bag+tag is run, there is literally nothing but my honour saying that the robot was in the bag on stop build day and hasn't left its bag until competition. I'm certain that there are at least a few teams who cheat, and bag it the night before competition and lie about it. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I don't really care if teams do this. They cheapen the experience for themselves, but they don't really affect other teams by doing so, since big-budget teams just build a practice robot and achieve essentially the same result: more time to work.

The bags make robots unwieldy to move, and achieve nothing (plus add a whole bunch of headaches for inspection when transporting the robot tore a hole in the bag, etc). The same thing could be achieved by still having stop build day, and just making a mentor sign off that they've been hands-off since stop build day.

For that reason, I would be in support of abolishing the bag, but keeping a stop build day.

[EricWilliams]

Originally Posted by Racer26

Every team has equal abilities to fundraise.

There are many teams in poor areas of the country with big sponsors, and many teams in wealthy areas with very limited sponsorship.

Sponsorship dollars on most teams generally has little to do with the wealthiness of the team's location.

Disregarding everything else about this discussion, (I'll leave that to much smarter people) I just can't let this go without comment. Socioeconomic and demographic disparities between groups is something that will always exist - that's just the way it is. And while no plan/solution/method is going to make things "fair" for the (wonderfully) diverse teams that compete in FIRST or anything else, everyone certainly has a responsibility to understand how those disparities affect all groups to facilitate the greatest amount of opportunity available to everyone.

My personal observations after having lived in vastly different areas of the US: the biggest difference between (and I'll focus here on STEM extracurricular activities, but it's a fairly universal concept) affluent areas and struggling areas is community/parent engagement. Please keep in mind this a generalization required to investigate and solve problems, so counter-examples remain exactly what they are: exceptions to rules.

Things like lack of reliable transportation, inability to take time from work, and household responsibilities are not mitigated simply by "hard work" and "working in the off-season". They are real, persistent problems, and they directly relate to a team's ability to fundraise and prepare for success. When your parent base can't mobilize around and in support of your team, when you don't have the community connections to potential corporate sponsors, and when schools are more worried about simply keeping classrooms running instead of providing resources for extracurriculars, "hard work" becomes a fairly moot point.

FIRST has been smart in promoting lower-bar-for-entry programs (Jr.FLL -> FTC), but even at those levels the differences are clear. Not that there aren't a ton of examples of great teams from poorer areas or struggling teams from wealthy areas (Chicago FTC Qualifier and SBPLI FRC Regional are my personal examples), but simply identifying exceptions is not good enough. We need to find out what makes these exceptions possible and evangelize it.

If it's culture change and opportunities to succeed we (as the FIRST community) seek, sweeping these disparities under the rug of "you get what you put in" is not only unhelpful, it's downright damaging.

We're all passionate about great STEM education and enabling young people to be successful in life, but that passion has to be extended to all corners. And if there are problems in delivering those opportunities, everyone should be aware of them and work to overcome them.

[IronicDeadBird]

Consider the fact that this is a High School level competition and a lot of students procrastinate. Having a deadline that isn't right next to the comp's means that a lot of high school students can actually balance out the time they have. I know freshmen who have put too much into Robotics and not enough into doing things like homework and have had to get kicked off the team because of bad grades. I know from experience that this community is fun and you can get wrapped up in it. When I was a sophmoron I made the mistake of not properly balancing my academic life with my robotics life and my GPA took a solid hit. Grades went down, parents got concerned, questions were being asked like "Well are you really at robotics till 11 at night or are you off being a little hooligan?" it wasn't good.
First Robotics is a wonderful thing for highschool students to participate in but I do not imagine the founders would ever want to hear students were held back because they got too into robotics.
So yeah maybe bag and tag puts teams without the resources to make a second robot at a disadvantage, but the biggest disadvantage I could see is a team pushing too hard and tearing apart just because they didn't have a little time off.

Hot topic for sure, every year. IMO:

1) For the most part life is fair.
2) Hard work doesn't have to be punishing to be rewarding
3) You shouldn't abandon your family for anything
4) We are building robots that shoot balls

[Christopher149]

I don't have a strong opinion about the bag, but I Need as stop build day. Us college mentors have homework to do (and sleep, and the FAFSA, and life in general). I'm glad it's "over".

[nxtmonkeys]

Well, even with the robot "bagged" one still has to work on the program. In fact, My team just got a Kinect for our driver station.


Something that I don't like about bagging is that I can't work on my robot anymore.

[DanielPlotas]

We (1948) would like to see the bag and tag go, because we only have 1 cRIO, (i know we're getting the new things next year, but we might not be able to afford another one) and in the rules the 45 lb of parts you don't have to bag cannot include parts of the control system (cRIO). Also, our robots aren't built to exact dimensions, its more of, "does it shoot too far? just bend this piece back and shorten that one.", so it would be very difficult to make two identical robots, even if we had the funding.

[Pault]

Originally Posted by DanielPlotas

We (1948) would like to see the bag and tag go, because we only have 1 cRIO, (i know we're getting the new things next year, but we might not be able to afford another one) and in the rules the 45 lb of parts you don't have to bag cannot include parts of the control system (cRIO). Also, our robots aren't built to exact dimensions, its more of, "does it shoot too far? just bend this piece back and shorten that one.", so it would be very difficult to make two identical robots, even if we had the funding.

Actually, due to a recent team update, you are allowed to withhold anything, or even everything, from the bag. This includes the CRIO. I hope that not knowing this did not affect your team too much.

About bag and tag: I think that getting rid of it makes sense. I have seen a lot of reasonable, logical arguments for why it should be done, but not many for why it shouldn't. Although I'm not particularly passionate about the subject, so next year if it hasn't changed I won't be too upset.

[Exla357]

I'd very strongly argue that team "lottery" or "fortune" or rookieness has not as much to do with bag and tag success as is being said. I'm going to bring up this build season as an example. As anybody familiar with my team knows, we have a close allegiance off the field with another FRC team in our city. I'm not going to name numbers. If you know, you know.

This team's rookie year was 2012. They're high school is in the wealthier part of our city and they have no shortage of money and mentors compared to us.

My team, 159, on the other hand, is a different story. We are run out of the more middle class side of town. We've been around since '98 which means no rookie grants or big cash donations for us. This season, we lost our biggest sponsor, Ottercares. Coming into the 2014 season, we had a shortage of both students and money.

We (the students) had to make changes in how things were run. We persevered, and finished our robot working and on time this year. That doesn't usually happen with us. We were able to bag our robot at 11:59 and were very proud of our accomplishment.

The other team had been sharing our shop this weekend, because theirs wasn't open. They had over engineered and their robot was 55 pounds overweight. This is Tuesday. They worked for the whole weekend and right alongside us till midnight, taking apart their robot, re engineering, drilling holes, doing whatever they could to cut weight. They reassembled and bagged with no time to spare and still overweight.

Now, I'm not trying to knock these guys in any way. But did their protobot and electronics testing kit help them? Did their many mentors and superior funding help them get bagged in time with a legal bot? They had fancier tools. They had more people. They had shinier wires.

I wish their team the best of luck at regionals this year and hope they can make things work.

In my experience, your team's success during build season comes down to your team itself. While I will certainly agree that having a nicer machine shop for example helps a lot, it is by no means the only factor in a successful build season. The bag date levels the playing field. Everybody gets the same amount of time to build. Life isn't fair. There's always luck involved. Welcome to the real world.

[Willyspu]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

I'm glad we went from shipping to bringing our own robot to competitions, but why do we even bag anymore? Many teams build nearly identical twin robots so that work can continue after build season and into the competition. Yes, generally there is less stress for students and mentors after the robot is bagged, but many teams will still meet to work on the "practice bot". Many teams, however, can't afford to buy/make two of everything, so they're really stuck with the robot in the bag. Why not make it fair for everyone to just leave it out so teams don't need to waste money building a second robot to continue work? Let teams manage their own schedules so mentor and student burnout doesn't happen.

Just my opinion.

Why would the 6 week limit on build time be relevant if you keep working on it or another bot?

I guess we have been pretty naive to figure it was an honor system of 6 weeks and not more. Our robot is in the bag. We will finish our bumpers and wait until our first competition to open the bag.

What value is gracious professionalism to your team? And what other rules is your team trying to skirt?

Jim

A shop full of 5 axis waterjets and Mazaks won't build a thing by themselves, to be long term competitive you need talented people. As the FIRST program stretches outward, fulfilling it's ultimate goal, the "unfair" factor will grow. As poorer schools from distresed communities become more involved, the disparity in technical assets will become even more clear.

[rben13]

This is my first year mentoring and I'm fortunate enough to be working with a very well established team. Personally, I think bagging is a bad idea that gives a huge advantage to veteran well-funded teams and penalizes new teams and ones without a lot of financial resources.

At the very least, it seems like exceptions should be made for first year teams and/or teams that have had trouble raising funds. I'd prefer everyone be able to work on their robots up until inspection, that way we can all bring our very best to the field.

[nxtmonkeys]

That is the best idea that I've heard so far. us rookies have such a disadvantage.

[Pretzel]

One thing to note is that not all of a team's funding is required to come from what would be considered as a sponsor in the normal way. Team 1619, over the fall, had a leaf raking business that was student run and organized to raise money. We got the idea from a previous Team Driven (1730) mentor who is now a mentor of us. They do lawn aeration in the falls to raise money, but that does require some equipment. Regardless of how you do it, every little bit of money counts! That lawn mowing is what is allowing us to attend a second regional competition this year.