COVID-19 has dealt us a short season. Let’s turn the tables and make it a Long Season instead.
Proposal: re-use the Infinite Recharge field to play Infinite Refresh in 2021. Modify 2021 fabrication schedule rules so that robots built for 2020 remain legal, but make a new game for 2021 that uses the same field elements. Find a new game piece that is close to the current Power Cell’s size and weight, but less susceptible to damage during game play. Give 2020 seniors an opportunity to compete as drive team members in the new game.
The 2020 season gets extended seamlessly through off-season and into 2021. Build team has slightly less on their plate, and everyone else gets more time to do their thing: scouting, outreach, programming, marketing, CAD, drive teams.
I see your point, and Science Olympiad did something similar (they are repeating the 19-20 events for 20-21). Specifically, this would help rookie teams and underfunded teams. It’d also save money on fields. But:
-At this point, I am nearly burnt out. I am sure mentors are as well. An entire summer and fall of build season would be excruciating.
-Adding freshman or new members to the program would be difficult. They wouldn’t be starting from a clean slate - they would be trying to make incremental improvements on code or designs somebody else built. That would be difficult for new members.
-Some teams may be prevented for several weeks or months from accessing their building due to COVID-19.
Overall, I’d rather see large off-season competitions and a clean slate in 2021.
I have so many thoughts on this topic that I feel a little bad for brainstorming in the midst of this awful situation. Your idea is a good starting point, as is the idea for large off season events. There is much more to talk about soon. Right now I’m just trying to see if it’s possible for team to drive three miles to our regional next week.
No… Since next year will be my final FRC Season as a student, I would not want this to happen and would rather play a new game with a brand new robot.
This would just make the best teams better and the competitions would be absolute haydays for teams like 1678/148/118 who already have (seemingly) great robots.
I could see this happening in the off-season though, and would be completely for that.
I have a solution to the first and last issue you brought up. I call it:
Bag and Tag
Everyone thought that 2019 was the last time we would have to face the dreaded Stop Build Day. I never liked Bag and Tag, and I was quite glad when I found out that FIRST had decided to get rid of it. But, given the current circumstances, we might need to bring back Stop Build Day for one final hurrah.
Here’s what I’m proposing:
If things get bad enough that FIRST decides they need to cancel the rest of the season, they announce to all teams that they have 7 days to bag their robot. The bagging process will work just like in previous years: you put your robot in the bag, you put the tag on it, you record the time, date, tag number, and whatever else you have to record on the Bag and Tag sheet, and then a mentor signs it. This time, however, you won’t wait until a competition to unbag your robot: instead, everyone brings their robot to the kickoff event, where the Bag and Tag inspection is done following the kickoff broadcast, and then you are free to unbag your robot.
This prevents the issue of Infinite Build Season and the burn out associated with it, makes it more fair for teams that won’t be able to access their building and robot over the summer (which I’m pretty sure is most of us), while still allowing us to prevent this entire season from going to waste.
As for the issue of adding new members… I have no answer. But this is my last year of high school, so I’ll leave that challenge to the rest of you!
What do you guys think? Would you be in favor of Episode VI: Return of the Bag and Tag?
One logistical issue with that: Not everyone goes to an official Kickoff. Of those that do go, I can’t imagine many would want to bring their whole robot just to have it unbagged, as wall as being sure to have enough capacity in vehicles to bring students, a robot, and the KOP totes.
I feel like this would only be hurting the lower resource teams. Teams who regularily build more then one robot would continue to do and end up creating an even larger skill gap between the best teams (who will continue to work on upgrading, or even building a new robot, until kickoff) and the low resource teams (who will most likely just leave their robot as is).
If this were the case I know my team would be striving to design and build the best robot we could make all the way up until kickoff, and simply build it again over the new build season (assuming you don’t allow previously fabricated components unless they were in the bag), discarding the old bagged robot.
The trio you named are already very close to physics-limited performance ceilings in regular seasons.
Meanwhile, giving the other 98% of teams enough time to develop and refine student understanding of profiled controls, drive handling, path following, etc (and of course more mechanical iterations!) would open up a window to greater technical understanding that remains closed under the weight of yearly logistics, retraining, and mechanical bring-up-from-nothing processes for many teams.
It would be far from a “normal” season - but it would definitely be far from stagnant, as long as the team leaders took advantage of the opportunity to press for technical achievements that were normally out of reach.
Don’t have a summer and fall of “build season”. This is where team leadership needs to step in and protect it’s members from themselves.
I actually found the exact opposite on my team this year - we had an accidental near-complete refresh of the student body, and working incremental improvements on last season’s robot was fairly effective way to train them up, while Building from a clean slate was a bit harder to get them going on.
It also has to be looked at from the perspective of pre-rookie teams. These teams will not be on a level playing field with a robot to iterate, and FIRST’s expansion/sustainability would be jeopardized. As previously said, lower resource teams are also deeply affected by the current situation. Building a bot that only competes once or not at all is not only discouraging but detrimental to the finances of these teams. I’m interested in seeing how FIRST handles it, and am certainly not envious of their position in doing so. We can only wait for FIRST and its respective districts’ announcements, and I think the best thing teams can offer one another is support.
Sure, but they would just have more time to get even better technically (software/hardware optimizations) and would get lots of practice with their robot. They also would have enough money and time to go full R&D and just try out lots of different designs.
Whatever the terms, this would be a bad idea if it was to replace the 2021 Season.
I would be opposed to this because I feel that it robs new members for the 2021 season of the full season’s experience. I believe that the best course of action for postponed events is to play them in early fall. While this might be difficult for 2020 seniors who have gone off to college, it’s incredibly difficult for many teams, especially low resource teams to get student involvement over the summer and this might cause issues with the schools as well. While there is no solution here that benefits everyone, I feel that this is the best course of action for the majority of teams.
I am opposed to this because it is literally a terrible idea; we don’t want to play the same game. I am basically just gaffing on this thread now trying to respond to the annoying response.
This ‘plan’ can be imposed during the usual Off-Season, but 2021 is probably almost halfway (at least) planned so there is no reason to ruin it now.
Currently I am very much in favor of this plan, or at least running this game concurrently with another one. This game is too good to waste, honestly.
Much like removing any restriction on build season (withholding, Stop Build Day), it makes everyone better, with proportionately less benefit going to those already close to the ceiling of play.
I like this game, but by January of next year it needs to be done. This years seniors will be gone and next years seniors need to have their own new game to build for and play without 2020 hanging over their head.
In response to the issues pointed out with the bag and tag plan (primarily that not everyone goes to the kickoff event and that bag and tag would unfairly benefit high-resource teams):
Let’s be real: Bag and Tag was not a hard system to cheat. If a team wanted to cheat and work on their robot past Stop Build Day, it wouldn’t have been that hard. Bag and Tag was mostly based on the honor system - and it worked. Sure, they may have been some teams that cheated the system, but the vast majority played by the rules, even though they knew they could easily get away with cheating. The issues @bobbysq and @juju_beans brought up are definitely legitimate concerns, so I would like to slightly modify my proposal in response:
Rather than use the old official Bag and Tag system, just tell all the teams to bag all of their robots - competition bot, practice bot(s), all of them. Tell them to not work on any new mechanisms, CAD, code, drive practice, etc. Build season comes to a complete halt for 9 months (or less if they are able to reschedule the events rather than extend the season into 2021). I know what you’re thinking: “That would never work! There’s no way to enforce it! Most of the teams will just keep working anyways!” In response, I ask you, “Then how did Bag and Tag ever work?” Talk about Gracious Professionalism and throw in something along the lines of “What would Woody think?” in the announcement, and every team with an ounce of self-respect, respect for other teams, or respect for FIRST and its mission will instantly drop their tools, bag their robots, and put their build season on hold until they get the OK from FIRST to continue working on their robot.
When it comes time to unbag the robot, each team just does it themselves, no inspection needed. Like I said, the Bag and Tag system would have been easy to cheat - if a team wants to cheat, a simple inspection of a form isn’t going to stop them anyways.
