Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative

[Wendy Holladay]

Originally Posted by orangemoore

FYI,

This was the same range as it was in 2014 except it is 2" higher off the ground.



Also things might be in the works for the website. I can't say much here but from what I know expect things to get better.

If anyone has any suggestions for the website let me know. I can send those on to a person who is working on it.

for website suggestions or comments, see this post

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...t=inspire+blog

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by Carl C

I was disappointed to see that the Championship Chairman's Award was presented yet again after a long delay at a different part of the arena. If it truly is the most prestigious award in FIRST, I believe it deserves better treatment than that.

Originally Posted by natejo99

I totally agree. Our team voted not to stay around for closing ceremonies and left immediately after Einstein finals. Personally, I was looking forward to the announcement of the Chairman's award, and was disappointed that it was presented so late.

Originally Posted by Rombus

Long delay after the end of Einstein - yes I can agree to that, but it was on the main stage right behind the Einstein fields. Personally, to have all the top awards given out like that for each program along with the Founders Award felt like a proper treatment of the seriousness of the awards.

Originally Posted by Drakxii

Finals/Einstein still have far too much dead time. FIRST need to fill this with something awards, speeches, whatever, instead of just saying "we will be back in 5 minutes or so".

It wasn't that long ago that CCA, FTC Inspire Award, and FLL Champion's Award used to be given out right before Einstein started, and perks of the award were field side seats with Woodie, Dean, and the rest of FIRST brass. I vote we bring this back. It ensured that the biggest audience possible saw the teams that we all should idolize and strive to be like. I vote we bring this practice back.

Originally Posted by Rombus

2. Championship conferences: these REALLY need to be recorded if possible, I missed out on just about everything i wanted to see since I was not there Wednesday, and had to make choices between ones in the same time frame.

Originally Posted by Drakxii

Stream & record the champ conferences and put them up on youtube and the first website.

Supposedly they were recorded. I have yet to see where said recording has surfaced yet though.

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

And the great news is that all Championship Conference talks will be recorded this year, so you don't need to choose between this session and Karthik's...you can have both!

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

There is no saving of seats. Nothing beats being yelled at by 8 people saving 30 seats when you're trying to find 5 together for your team that just got eliminated from Carver playoffs. Nothing beats the new black mom on your team being told "you don't belong here" when she's looking for a seat to watch her son in a match.

Pardon the language, but JFC about that last bit. Sometimes I'm halfway tempted to actually print out the rule in the Administrative manual and carry it around to competitions. I understand that teams want to sit together, but when I'm just one person looking for an open seat, have a freakin' heart.

[JohnFogarty]

I don't like a website that I have to to click through 3 pages of content to find what I'm looking for. They need to fix the website to have sub-menus to navigate to content faster from the homepage. Like, I dunno, the old website had.

[efoote868]

Please stop basing rules on intent. This includes "strategies aimed at"... Things either happen or they don't. When you have to ask "did they mean to do that?", controversy often ensues.

[NLake]

Originally Posted by Drakxii

Stream & record the champ conferences and put them up on youtube and the first website.

THIS. Absolutely. A central repository of all videos of previous matches, so that I have something that I can show to parents of new/prospective recruits.

Also, there should be a curated DVD of the winners of the regionals/divisions, and championships. A DVD because...I don't have solid network at my site, nor am I allowed to offer access to visitors, so there are times when physical pieces of media are best.

Originally Posted by Drakxii

Final score screens should have team names.

This.

EDIT: I originally posted my own contribution, but I'm now splitting that as its own response to this thread.

[Oblarg]

I should probably start a new thread for this, but I am increasingly convinced that the "safety inspectors" at competition are not actually interested in team safety, and moreover a few of them seem to actively enjoy making students feel uncomfortable by asking questions that have little to do with safety, or nitpicking answers in ways that has little to do with safety. I observed several interactions like this this year, and it was disheartening.

To be frank, a lot of the safety standards FIRST puts emphasis on are completely orthogonal to effective safety, and a lot of FIRST's own practices at regionals are rather unsafe.

The safety inspectors repeatedly make a stink about maintaining an MSDS folder - can anyone think of a single time that a MSDS has actually been needed in FRC? For sure, in some work environments they are important. This is not really one of them.

I have not once heard a safety inspector ask a question that was particularly relevant to pragmatic pit safety. They ask about your fire extinguisher and your procedure for dealing with battery spills (and, as I mentioned, some of them seem to delight in finding students who can't list off precisely the steps they're looking for for dealing with a spilled battery, in precisely the right order ), which are marginal concerns, at best. What is actually relevant to pit safety at competition is keeping your pit clear, organized, and not over-crowded; having a good system of communication so people working in the pit know what everyone else around them is doing (especially when power tools are being turned on); ensuring that the robot is never enabled while people's hands are in it (by far, this is the one that I think is easiest to overlook and most dangerous). These are all things that can and do cause injuries at FRC events.

These are not things you can gauge by asking a few questions off a list - these are only things that can be gauged by observing a team working in the pits and seeing what their actual practices are. What's more, often the atmosphere at FRC events is actively detrimental to safety - by far the most important thing to pit safety, in my mind, is communication. People must know what the other people around them are doing. This is difficult to do when the ambient volume is loud enough to cause hearing loss (it has been, at some regionals I've been to, though thankfully it was somewhat better this year).

I would very much like to see FIRST take some steps towards rectifying this, because right now a lot of their "safety" culture seems to be mostly safety theater with little regard to actually preventing injuries.

[Jared Russell]

* The game piece (boulders) was ridiculously expensive and changed quite a bit after moderate use. 2006 poof balls remain the best foam game piece we have been given.

* This was a really onerous field to build at home.

* Refs had a tough job this year, just as in 2014. There were many missed calls and missed crossings, and lots of judgement calls around physical contact. All season, we had opponents keeping >6 balls in their driver station, and there were never enough refs to check behind the glass more than once a match.

* No parity whatsoever in division or match schedule strength at the Championship.

* FIRST's website is worse now than it was a year ago this time.

* The Championship is too long and drawn out. It is asking too much for teams to wake up at 5-6 AM and leave the venue at 7-8 PM for 4 days in a row. There's a reason why half the mentors and students on my team have gotten sick after returning several years running.

* It would have been nice to have wooden goals scattered throughout the divisions, since dialing in shooters seemed to be the most common use-case for the (centralized) practice fields.

* I thought the scoring display was really confusing all season long.

* I did not think that the 8 division Einstein format was great this year. I would have loved to see 4 alliances that were deeper/stronger instead.

* This was the last unified FIRST World Championship

[Rangel(kf7fdb)]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

* The Championship is too long and drawn out. It is asking too much for teams to wake up at 5-6 AM and leave the venue at 7-8 PM for 4 days in a row. There's a reason why half the mentors and students on my team have gotten sick after returning several years running.

Especially for the scouters and I that try very hard to get good seats in the morning, I can attest to this. Not sure how to solve it though. I'm very happy that they got rid of opening only one door in the morning and went to opening all of them before letting people in. This allowed us to wake up a bit later in order to get good seats. I have to say it's still probably the closest thing to a Black Friday zombie breakthrough than anything I've ever been a part of. Perhaps assigned team seating is the solution to this?

Another idea I had is even though the split is happening, have 8 fields on the field still and just have two per division in order to speed up the flow of matches and maybe make qualifications last a shorter amount of time.

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

It was also terrible.

Eh. It's not the best, but did you try the app last year? I think it was a huge improvement, unlike the navigation on the website.

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

* This was the last unified FIRST World Championship

This still pisses me off, and will continue to do so until such a time that FIRST goes back to a single event. I want to rant about this, but I'll leave it alone for now.

[ElvisMom]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

The music for the highest awards (Champions, Inspire, CCA) was just bizarre and also more than a little creepy. Sweet Dreams is not celebratory music.

This. Totally agree. Honestly could not believe what I was hearing with most of the music selections. Most were songs I like, but not appropriate for this setting, especially Sweet Dreams for the Inspire Award winners.

***
Saturday is so drawn out, especially for teams who are travelling home after the event.

***
Would love to see integration of the major awards before or during Einstein matches. Seems like such an after thought.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

* No parity whatsoever in division or match schedule strength at the Championship.

Please no more attempts at creating parity in match schedule strength. I can't take another Scheduling Algorithm of Death.....

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I'm sure there's a minimum subset of things we could all agree on. Like not harassing people and calling them cheaters, or not cat calling folks. Something along the lines of "try to treat people as if your grandmother were watching"

Wait.

Sadly, people need more direction than this. On the other hand, comic conventions seem to do fairly well with their anti-harassment policies, and there's typical much higher potential for harassment there. I think FIRST could learn a lot from how other conventions handle these things, if they're willing to. Which is to if people make enough noise about it.

Originally Posted by ElvisMom

Would love to see integration of the major awards before or during Einstein matches. Seems like such an after thought.

They used to interleave the awards with the Einstein matches, but all the speeching and etc. seemed to make things take even longer. I think the real problem is just how big Champs has gotten.

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I think the real problem is just how big Champs has gotten.

I have an idea, we could...

*ducks*
*runs and hides*

[Jardanium]

One of the things I found particularly annoying is a couple of times I went to pit admin to ask a question I was told to "download the app".

I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly don't have the room or time to download an app I'll only be using for four days. Having the information available in other places would be very helpful next year.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Jardanium

One of the things I found particularly annoying is a couple of times I went to pit admin to ask a question I was told to "download the app".

I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly don't have the room or time to download an app I'll only be using for four days. Having the information available in other places would be very helpful next year.

It was also terrible.

[Mark McLeod]

It was odd to be playing a naval aviation themed song for the Air Force during her introduction for opening ceremonies.
I'm sure only the Air Force personnel noticed the service rivalry.