Just an idea I wanted to throw out there and see what people think.
There are many teams that have an adult drive coach because the person who best performs the on-field, in-match drive coach role is an adult. I think there are also teams that have an adult drive coach primarily just to have an adult on the field*. For the latter teams, there’s no reason why that adult should be forced into an important role, when the team might be happy with having that adult on the field, on the sidelines.
In most teams’ pits, there is an adult mentor around, but ideally they don’t need to do much. That simply isn’t an option for drive teams; the drive coach must coach. So, what if it were an option? The technician role has no required responsibilities. There’s nothing the technician is allowed to do that the coach is not.
The idea is that there would still be a max of 1 adult drive team member, but teams could choose to have an adult technician instead of an adult drive coach.
If your team has an adult drive coach, is it for the on-field, in-match coaching or is it to have an adult on the field to mentor students? Or something else?
Whether your team has an adult drive coach or not, would you be interested in having an adult technician?
Also, if anyone attempts to turn this into a standard-issue CD debate about adult coaches, I will be very sad. This thread is not about that.
*for the same reasons there are mentors in the pits and mentors in the stands: to be around the students and to mentor them.
The way that I’ve understood it is that most teams have an adult drive coach so that the driveteam can have that same voice behind them year after year. Often times (there are exceptions) you really don’t want to pick a drivecoach until their junior or senior year but it’s not unheard of to get a freshman or sophomore driver that drives for essentially their entire robotics career in high school. This creates the issue where the driver/operator stays roughly the same year to year but then each year they have to figure out how to work with the new coach
Another reason that i’ve heard is that teams keep adult coach that go back every year as the drive coach because of their experience. A lot of adult drive coaches out there have been drive coaching for like at least 5 years meaning that they know what’s going on and most importantly they know how to communicate with the drive team.
I know that on my team there has been a little bit of talk about having our current driver who is a senior come back and be drive coach for subsequent years so there is a chance that we may be switching. IDK if it’ll actually happen though.
Our team has always had a student drive coach, but for the past few years we have always had an adult as the media person. I think it is more of to keep the drive team on task and focused on the match at hand.
Interesting idea. Maybe the rule could be adjusted so an adult could assist in whatever rule the team decided was appropriate with the exception of controlling the robot. I like having a student drive coach on my team but there have been times that having an adult to help would have been nice.
An adult technician might not be a bad idea especially for times when dealing with annoying networking issues. Some of the network comms and IP issues I’ve seen on the competition field or in the pits are more complicated than the networking stuff I do at my software engineering job! :eek:
The technician can’t be in the driver station right before the match if there are comms issues (someone correct me if I’m wrong here) so an adult technician to fix the networking issues before a match wouldn’t help. I know as drive coach this year it was at least every other match I had to help the drivers either get comms, get the camera feed, get the Sendable Chooser to work™, or just get the SmartDashboard to open properly.
Right, but that’s the whole point of the discussion. We’re asking if the coach can do everything the technician can, and some teams have an adult coach simply to have an adult presence on the drive team, why not let the adult be a technician xor a coach? So if a team wants a student coach, but also wants a mentor on drive team just in case, they can do it.
It’s an interesting concept. Given that Technician is a new position this year, there will probably be some evolution of the role.
One thing that I could see being hard to enforce is knowing the ages of the participants. Right now you have a role that can be adult or student, and it doesn’t matter - the function of the role is the same whether an adult or a student. If you allow the one adult as either Coach or Technician, you’d need to be able to verify the team didn’t have 2 adults there at the same time. That could be hard to notice when the two individuals are in different places (behind the glass vs in the technician area). Verifying student vs adult for drivers and HP’s is generally easier to see. It’s not a huge thing, but something to be considered.
I agree with the idea of allowing adult technicians, and I agree with your point about it being hard to enforce one adult only. But I trust that, were it to be a rule, teams would follow it with the honor system. I mean, it’s also hard to enforce the bag, or to enforce that the driver is actually in high school and not an early college student, but I personally have confidence that all, or at least the vast majority, of teams follow these rules. So I see no reason to believe that teams would egregiously/intentionally try to bend it.
This is very cool idea. If FIRST wanted to do this they could unroll it by saying you can have one adult on your driveteam as either the drive coach or the technician. Then after a year or two they do a full transition.
I dunno, I think we should still leave the option for teams to have an adult coach. I think sticking with the intermediate is better than only allowing adult techs. Some teams use the adult for the sake of an adult, not all. Some would still like adult coaches, and I think that should be up to them to decide.
Given an experience or two from this last year… I think the correct answer is “no”, if a correct answer exists (which… it doesn’t, yet).
There’s a couple of reasons, one being pulling experience away from the field; the other is that in my experience it’s the adults that ignore rules more often than the students do. (Or… forget them. Either way works.) In that particular experience I would say that putting an adult technician is asking for someone to try to treat the technician as a second coach position–which would hopefully result in FIRST forcing the technician spot (should it be used in the future) to be sat near midfield in the “judges’ chairs” rather than with the carts. I’d like to see somebody try coaching from THAT spot. Anyways…
I’m thinking that FIRST will have gotten a pile of feedback from this last year, and knowing teams I’m guessing that some of them will have given feedback on the technician position. Whether there is a Technician next year is still unknown–they could be Pilots again. Who knows? But if that role exists again, I would advocate handling it slightly differently (putting the technicians in the station under coach restrictions, maybe?) without opening it up to adults.
I would have liked to have had an adult technician this year to help lift the robot. It was really awkward to lift with two ramps, especially if they had been deployed.
if you can’t handle yourself on the field without the supervision (or mentoring, or how you would like to call it) than maybe you shouldn’t be a driver or a human player…
Yeah, it definitely seems like technicians were included in order to keep the number of drive team members the same as the previous year.
Really, this idea is just to give teams an option somewhere between “no adults on the field” and “an adult on the field commanding students.” I think there would be more takers from the teams currently doing the latter option. The last time I was a drive coach, we never really considered having a student coach. If there could still be a mentor with the drive team, I think we would have considered it.
I’ll throw in an added suggestion that might work in a future game (and would have worked this year as well). For the sake of simplicity, we’ll continue to call the role “Technician” although probably not the best name for what I’m about to propose.
One of my favorite things about elims at Champs is having one more person behind the glass who can call overall match strategy. So, I propose that each alliance, at every level, can choose to have one Technician behind the glass. Their restrictions are the same as the Drive Coach…don’t touch anything. This could drive better alliance coordination in any given quals match, helping to raise the competition level.
In addition to the standard drive team buttons, each drive team gets one “I’m an Adult!” button. This can be allocated to a drive coach or a technician, depending on the team’s preferences. Prefer to keep your all-student drive team? Great! Hand that button off to your favorite mentor who’s tired of being mistaken for a student.
This gives a bunch of flexibility for teams to place students and adults in the places where they can most effectively help their team/alliance. Downside is that it’s one more thing to coordinate before matches and that time is at a premium at smaller events. It could also lead to a “too many cooks” situation behind the glass, especially if there hasn’t been enough trust built up between alliance mates.