No “defined end date”.
It’s a lot easier to interest some folks in doing hard/stressful/tough stuff if you can convince them that there is, in fact, an end date. And believe me, I know what I’m talking about.
At the risk of over-stretching the metaphor, imagine if the top 25% of runners were 15 feet tall. They don’t even notice the hurdles, or they do but they barely have to adjust for them. So for the top teams it’s a straight footrace, everyone else it’s a hurdles event. At that point, why not get rid of the hurdles? Then it’s a footrace for everybody.
Because the lead teachers/mentors involved with these teams don’t want to commit any additional time to the team beyond stop build day. The current format allows their season to stop in late February and only resume for a couple of days of competition(s). By moving to an unlimited build season, these adults would feel pressure from their teams to continue working beyond any self imposed deadlines designed to replicate the stop build day experience. It’s not something they want to deal with.
Sure there is, it’s the end of competition season.
Nothing is stopping a team from defining their own “end date” if they wanted to stop sooner (or later), we’re basically on the honor system right now as it is so it’s not like there’s really anything preventing a team from working for more or less time. Your teams schedule is what you make it.
Don’t teachers already get this in the form of “we should build 2 robots so we can keep working and be like successful team X”?
I’ve worked with teams that have started their build season in week 3 and only meet 2 days a week (and their resulting robots were about what you’d expect for that kind of schedule), but it was a decision they made to limit their own schedule (or more specifically, the teachers), not one imposed by FIRST. I don’t know, that reasoning just seems like a cop-out to me.
And could someone who’s only 5’ tall have any hope of catching up to someone 15’ tall in a footrace? Having to take 5 steps for every 1 someone else takes is the bigger disadvantage, I think.
So add hurdles to the disadvantage? I’m unclear on the point you’re making here.
I am pretty sure Tyler from 2056 mentioned this in an interview.
Don’t quote me on this as I don’t recall the exact details but his answer was along the lines of: As a competitive person you just don’t give less than 100% and doing that for the 6 weeks is already a lot. If there was no stop day you would not slow down after the usual 6 weeks. Considering FIRST is made up of lots of highly competitive individuals the bag date is a good safety net to ensure they don’t burn out. (Mentors, Students and Parents)
“End of competition season”. OK, is that early-to-mid-March, late April, or July?
If your answer is “I don’t know”, then you are correct! And if a team defines their own end date as “early-to-mid-March”, but then does well enough to be playing in late April (with associated logistical fun times), do they decline their spot at Champs because “we’re beyond our end date” or do they go to Champs, thus prolonging their season/stress? (For the sake of this argument, I don’t think anybody should assume they’ll be playing in July, though that is a really nice problem to have.)
I think the strategy to follow if the bag isn’t a factor is simple: Take the 6-week schedule. Figure out how many hours you were in the shop. Now figure out 1-2 weeks before your first event, how many working hours are available between Kickoff and that point, and cut the shop schedule until they match. That should be manageable for most teams to do… and builds in enough buffer for the unexpected.
I am pretty torn between the thoughts of whether to continue B&T or getting rid of it.
For our own honest reasons, it would put as a larger disadvantage vs. teams that can drive to and from their events all season long.
It also would pressure us to commit to a roughly 16-week build season vs. the traditional 6+ week build season we have in place currently.
On the flip side, we see other teams that continually improve throughout the season and see that as a positive when the level of competition is much higher come championship. We already have plans to finally attempt to build 2 robots in Year #19 for us.
This is one topic I dont care one way or the other, going with the flow.
At what length of build season does it change from being a “high intensity” stretch of activity to something more manageable? I think virtually everyone is in agreement that the current 6 week period is a high intensity schedule for almost every team. Would a 9 weeks before your first event substantially change that? Would 16 or 17 weeks of unlimited access between kickoff and season conclusion lead to a notably less intense workload? To stretch things to the logical conclusion, would a 365-days-a-year schedule allow teams to schedule in a non-intense fashion? Where does that tipping point actually lay? Obviously it changes by team, but figuring out where it would change for any particular team should yield some insight into why some mentors would fear burnout without a hard stop at 6 weeks.
Is moving away from a high intensity schedule a beneficial move to the program? Is the high intensity build season integral to the appeal and/or efficacy of the program?
It’s not that a few more weeks will make a difference, the reduction in intensity will come from having to build half as many robots!
(I recognize this only applies to the subset of teams who are competitive enough to build two robots, but not so competitive that they won’t keep building two robots without bag day. I wager that’s a pretty big “middle tier”, although maybe not big enough given the survey results)
Back on topic though - I wager most teams keep the end of February as a hard “stop build” target, and then use the extra week or two to make fixes and practice. That said, teams that struggle to finish with 6 weeks will still struggle with 8 or 9. FIRST could easily provide a “suggested schedule” to help teams with their planning culture.
70 replies on a bag and tag thread in the offseason over the course of a day? I’m gonna not read this thread on the principle that I can guess that the same people are peddling the same fallacious arguments against bag and tag in a thread that is merely tangential to that discussion.
PM me to discuss where to send my prize winnings.
Only speaking for my own team here, maybe even just for myself.
I think the main thing that losing B&T would do for us is that it would simplify the logistics of developing mechanisms. We’d just attach and detach to the comp bot, rather than the practice bot, and come to competition with an assembled robot instead of planning for six hours on Thursday being spent on attaching the new thingy. I’d be okay with it.
5499 is a team with generous machining sponsors but not much money. We were able to build a second drivetrain last season but couldn’t afford a second set of electronics. We removed our electronics from our main robot to use them on the second drivetrain and practice. Then come first event, we returned the electronics using our withholding allowance. Not having to do that again would be a cool strategy.
I don’t know what it would look like for all teams. I do know it would’ve had a radical effect on Iron Kings’ time between district events though. We played Week 1, and we didn’t really anticipate that literally one other team in the building was going to focus on fuel. Doubt anything would’ve saved us there.
We were fortunate enough to have funding for a second robot, which was critical in our gear pocket retrofit for our second event in Week 4. That said, we still had to block out all six hours and our withholding allowance very carefully to ensure we could get everything on the robot, test it, and tweak it to take gears from a 0/10 to probably a 4/10. That left no time for us to improve the climber, which was probably a 4/10 at Tippecanoe, or fuel (3/10, generously).
Considering our second event had three losses that were within tie range (one blown autonomous mobility score–video doesn’t show who though 3176 had drive issues, two with blown climbs by us, one of those also with a blown partner climb), I could see a no-bag situation having a very significant impact on our outcomes at Perry Meridian:
- We’d have had more time to work on rope acquisition. In both of those blown climbs, we were too slow to start moving up the rope.
- With no withholding allowance, we could’ve made more meaningful changes to the climber power arrangement to let us get up faster. When we hooked we were fine, but a little more speed would’ve given us more fudge factor.
- Get that sorted, and we go to 6-5-1, or 6-4-2 if our partner also makes it up that one match. Get that one lousy mobility bonus, and we’re 6-3-3. Score a couple lousy points of fuel in each match, and 7-8 wins (and a sure-fire top-20 seeding after a disastrous 35-of-38 at Tippecanoe) is totally plausible.
5254 is not a high resource team. In terms of machining resources, we have a chopsaw, a drill press, and a small 3d printer.
We’ve been building 1.5 robots the past two years in an attempt to level the playing field between us and teams with more resources, to some results. The second robot is usually missing a major subsystem that we move between the competition and practice robots using the withholding allowance. But this is not easy to maintain.
Robot parts are expensive. Can we stop making one of the thresholds to being successful so reliant on money and resources?
If you pull off the COTS components, that much of your electronics does not count against your witholding allowance, though at an additional cost of hours and minutes of your first day at a 3-day event, or access period before a 2-day event. Our rookie and second years, we pulled key elements from the robot to continue development of our turret in 2012 and climber in 2013. Since then, we have had at least two control systems. A second control system (with a bit of explanation) is a great hook for a crowdfunding campaign targeting extended family and friends of the team members. (We use piggybackr because it is youth and team-friendly.)
While there will certainly be a few exceptions to every rule, I can’t help but think that most teams will continue to work just as hard and spend just as much money during build season in a bagless era, though with a bit less stress and a good bit better productivity.
One of the interesting things about the constraint of bagging is that it drove us to a two-robot build. Over the years, we have embraced it and adopted a leap-frog technique (build robot A. Practice with A, build B. Practice with B, rebuild A. repeat.) that works so well enough that we built a third (unpowered) chassis this year so that we could continue the leapfrog past bag day. There is little doubt that (providing funding continues) we will continue this even in a post-bag era. We’ll just redirect that effort on the third robot elsewhere, and not have to install major upgrades AT every event, giving us more practice time on an official field.
In case anyone has gotten the impression that I’m against ditching the bag, let me say that I’m not, but neither am I particularly in favor of the change. It’s just that I find some of the anti-bag arguments so farfetched that I feel obliged to take the other side. And to those who still think that banning the bag will have no effect at all on the 900s and 254s and 118s and 1114s of the league:
It will definitely impact us. We’ll stop building two identical robots. We will hopefully be putting those resources into a second team.
lol that’s cute. No further comment.