What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[jgerstein]

Originally Posted by rwodonnell

This is great, thank you! (How do I read it?)

I'm glad I can help!

Sheet 1 (% of active teams by rookie year): Each row represents a rookie year (there were no 1993 rookies, so I left 1993 out). Each column is a year from 1992 through 2016. Each cell contains the percent of teams from that rookie year that were active in the given year. For example: Cell V12 indicates that in 2011, 45% of the teams that were founded in 2004 were still active.

Sheet 2 (# of active teams by rookie year): Each row represents a rookie year (there were no 1993 rookies, so I left 1993 out). Each column is a year from 1992 through 2016. Each cell contains the number of teams from that rookie year that were active in the given year. For example: Cell V12 indicates that in 2011, 75 of the 403 teams that were founded in 2004 were still active.

The other sheets are not particularly useful for looking at directly.

Originally Posted by rwodonnell

By the way, if I understood how to give the little green dots, I would give you some for this...

Thank you! If you do want to, there is a scale icon next to the post number where you can do that.

[rwodonnell]

Originally Posted by jgerstein

I'm glad I can help!

Thanks for the explanation on the google sheet. I hope you don't mind, but I created a copy of the sheet and added a column in the "raw data" tab with this formula:

=if(D2 <> 2016, E2, "")

What I wanted to see was, for teams that were not active in 2016, how many years were they active.

Here's the histogram of that:

[marshall]

Originally Posted by rwodonnell

Thanks for the explanation on the google sheet. I hope you don't mind, but I created a copy of the sheet and added a column in the "raw data" tab with this formula:

=if(D2 <> 2016, E2, "")

What I wanted to see was, for teams that were not active in 2016, how many years were they active.

Here's the histogram of that:

Srsly? 600 teams have dropped out after 2 years?

[rwodonnell]

Originally Posted by marshall

Srsly? 600 teams have dropped out after 2 years?

The number was 599, but when you add in the 169 that dropped after 1 year, then you have 768 teams that lasted 2 years or less. When you add in years three (459) and four (304) dropouts, you have 1531 teams that have lasted only through one cycle of high school kids. That's roughly a quarter of all teams ever created.

[adammiller3122]

Originally Posted by rwodonnell

This is great, thank you! (How do I read it?)

By the way, if I understood how to give the little green dots, I would give you some for this...

Just click on the "balance" icon in the top right corner of the post.

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by jgerstein

I was curious about this too, so I pulled some data from TBA. A few teams show up a year or two before their rookie year because of off-seasons, but not enough to have a major effect on the numbers.

The last two tabs are the raw data I pulled from TBA and an expanded table showing which years each team was active in.

Team Survival
...

Hope no one minds, but I took the liberty of making a copy of that spreadsheet and adding a few more tabs to compare rates of team loss, as well as some graphs for showing team retention by team age. Thought the results were interesting, so I figured I'd share it...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15ys5j6c2QXwaIhTeKTSLQ5TfnfIJy1ee-8FHf0RXUS4/edit?usp=sharing

Sheet Tabs underlined in Green are either new or have new content in them.

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

What years are FRC teams most likely to fail? I would guess something like years 2 & 5, but I'd love to know the actual answer. Can someone generate those numbers real quick?

Without any hard numbers to back it up I would agree with your guess. I would also think that year 3 could be difficult. We just came off a pretty amazing first year and next year I feel we will be under pressure to "do it again". We managed to be alliance captains at both our regionals after seeding in the top 10-12 in quals. We worked hard to find all the sponsors we needed and they were impressed with the outcome (not that winning is THE outcome, but it's certainly a useful metric to show sponsors).

With next year will come the first loss of students who graduate out of the team, and an influx of fresh recruits who saw us last year. There will be more work to train these students up and make up for the knowledge transfer that will need to occur.

Then we will either "do it again", establishing our reputation as a team who can "perform", and put increasing pressure in year 3 to do it a third time, ...or not, and put increasing pressure in year 3 to "recover". I also suspect the push to fundraise, to find and renew sponsors will start to wear on people.

How can FIRST increase team sustainability? Honestly it may come down to "they can't do much without changing the culture". It's very competitive and we see that as a good thing. Every team wants to win. But how do you ensure more rookies succeed? Either you find ways for them to "win" more (more, cheaper, closer regionals/districts?) or ensure that they know that "a winning team" does not necessarily mean "blue banner".

Remove bag day? Sure, that increases the rookie team's chances of fielding something, but that also gives powerhouse teams more time to build something that will wipe the floor with everyone else. It will increase the perceived divide.

[mastachyra]

NASA has been supporting new teams for awhile with their grants. This is the type of large scale project that is not a waste of time for FIRST.

Maybe FIRST can garner similar support for 2nd, 3rd, 4th year teams. Like, let the a corporation grab that year and stick with supporting.

Imagine 3M or 3DSystems giving $3000 to 300 3rd year teams!

[Roboshant]

We actually talked about this on the first episode of F4. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/41J-ZPWeQjE.

[EricLeifermann]

Throw 2826 into the pool of teams that would only build 1 robot if bag day were removed. Our practice bOt is always better thay our comp bot because we get so much more test and run time on it. If we didn't have to redo everything that we changed on the practice bot on the comp bot talk about a financial and time save.

However bag day is not a leading factor in teams folding.

Team support is #1 I would say. Both from mentors but from FIRST HQ as a whole.
#2 is money, no way around it. There is 0 reason that the registration fee still needs to be as high as it is.

[Lil' Lavery]

Teams with the resources and dedication to build practice bots don't tend to be the ones that fold. Chipping in your $0.02 about practice bots probably doesn't mean much in this thread. With regards to mentor burnout and bag day, there are two competing schools of thought on that issue, and it likely wouldn't impact all individuals the same way. Let's save the bag day talk for the threads about bag day.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Let's save the bag day talk for the threads about bag day.

While the point has most certainly been beaten to death, I think there are a lot of us that feel it is relevant to the sustainability of FRC teams and that is what this thread is about.

[jman4747]

Originally Posted by marshall

While the point has most certainly been beaten to death, I think there are a lot of us that feel it is relevant to the sustainability of FRC teams and that is what this thread is about.

Yes.

Anything that helps teams get more competitive and advanced helps the sustainability of the team and the program.

One other point on curriculum...

Even before a full classroom ready curriculum is developed, the control system and programming documentation needs to be more robust and include more complete examples. Even something as simple as team 358's LabView example page which was maybe the single most useful document I've used for programming. What I would like to see is an example robot code for each language based on what a mid level team would actually field. Basically like when a team releases their code but with more polish. it's very frustrating as a new programmer to not know how all the examples you see for how to run a motor or how to initialize a sensor are supposed to work together. For a team that may not have access to an optimal programming mentor base you need more than a list of functions and a basic example often. Meanwhile looking at the software produced can be somewhat daunting. That I think would go a ways to improving morale and helping teams become more competitive early on.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Teams with the resources and dedication to build practice bots don't tend to be the ones that fold. Chipping in your $0.02 about practice bots probably doesn't mean much in this thread. With regards to mentor burnout and bag day, there are two competing schools of thought on that issue, and it likely wouldn't impact all individuals the same way. Let's save the bag day talk for the threads about bag day.

I still think that bag day is really relevant to team retention, but the reason why has little to do with practice bots. Many/most teams need the handicap of being able to change their robot after experiencing the game for the first time in order to have a rewarding season on the field. Rewarding experiences help "pay for" the difficulty of running and sustaining an FRC team.

Sustaining an FRC team is really hard! It requires raising money; gathering interest and support from students, parents, administrators, and sponsors; managing a project involving a large group of students of varying abilities, interest levels, motivations, and distractions; managing a group of volunteer mentors with different abilities, interest levels, motivations, and distractions; running a 6 week engineering design crash course; and orchestrating all of the logistics necessary to sustain a team through a build and competition season. I have never been on a team where any of these tasks were easy and without lots of frustration and many headaches. You'd have to be crazy to do this year after year without some sort of rewarding experience.

There are many types of rewarding experiences in FRC, but many of them are predicated on achieving some sort of basic engineering success. Not necessarily winning, but "the robot I toiled and built to accomplish some function has actually succeeded in doing so!", at least.

I can't say that all of the teams that fold would not have folded if only they had an open bag and could improve their robot...but I strongly suspect that some could have.

I do know that once you've experienced a handful of rewarding FRC moments, leaving the program becomes really difficult, even when life is calling.

[gblake]

If anything, simplifying the build goals, the build expenses, and the time spent attempting to carry them out is what a struggling team needs; not a double dose of each.

The first FRC seasons are big meals to eat in one gulp if you are a young/rookie team that didn't first cut your teeth on an simpler challenge.

Simplify and constrain, instead of pushing in the direction of increased complexity (veterans will use time to create complexity and consistency - rookies will have even more problems than they do now if they want to keep up - time won't solve those problems).

I know there is a strong community that wants to push FRC as far as possible in the Formula One direction (and use more build time to do it), but if rookies and veterans are on the same field, that's not the way to avoid overloading, overworking, and overwhelming the rookies.