Cheesecake and Pasta

[Michael_Corsetto]

The value and location for inspiring opportunities can take on many forms, so I won’t say that you will inspire more students if you have 8 drive team slots instead of 4, but you certainly can.

Thanks for letting me pick your brain on this for a bit. I’m just trying to see what you are angling for and don’t want to assume anything one way or the other. I’m been kinda badgering, so you can leave this one alone but: how do you think this would look if it was applied to more teams in your area, your state, nationwide, etc?

And more importantly - how would FIRST have to change to accommodate this change? What What would break in the short term and long term?

Great questions y’all.

I think more teams able to enter two or three robots into an event means more inspired students in more programs. Again, this is based on my premise that students come out of the experience of building, driving, and maintaining a robot more inspired. Many will disagree with this, but what can ya do.

I think part of this transition is FIRST changing their pricing model and finally breaking up Team Registration, Event Registration and KOP into three separate charges (long overdue, IMO).

I think a big pinch-point is event slots, which are already at a premium in places like CA. This seems like one of the largest hurdles with lowering the price-point to enter a team into an event. The event slot market would likely be flooded if the registration price dropped significantly. Maybe this problem takes my dream off the table…

I’m sure there are other significant changes that would need to be made. It’s a big direction-shifting idea.

Again, all of this discussion was predicated on one way to remove the incentives of cheesecaking while still being a net-benefit to teams

-Mike

[marshall]

I’m sure there are other significant changes that would need to be made. It’s a big direction-shifting idea.

Well it’s a good thing we’ve got alumni on the FIRST board of directors to actually help make those kind of bold and complex changes… :rolleyes:

[PayneTrain]

Great questions y’all.

I think more teams able to enter two or three robots into an event means more inspired students in more programs. Again, this is based on my premise that students come out of the experience of building, driving, and maintaining a robot more inspired. Many will disagree with this, but what can ya do.

I think part of this transition is FIRST changing their pricing model and finally breaking up Team Registration, Event Registration and KOP into three separate charges (long overdue, IMO).

I think a big pinch-point is event slots, which are already at a premium in places like CA. This seems like one of the largest hurdles with lowering the price-point to enter a team into an event. The event slot market would likely be flooded if the registration price dropped significantly. Maybe this problem takes my dream off the table…

I’m sure there are other significant changes that would need to be made. It’s a big direction-shifting idea.

Again, all of this discussion was predicated on one way to remove the incentives of cheesecaking while still being a net-benefit to teams

-Mike

Yeah, I really did not want to get massively off topic, but also I didn’t want to leave the idea of fundamentally changing the way FRC is conducted hanging out in here casually. Have a good weekend.

[efoote868]

Well it’s a good thing we’ve got alumni on the FIRST board of directors to actually help make those kind of bold and complex changes… :rolleyes:

Are they communicating our needs through interpretive dance?
FIRST Board meetings just got more interesting.

[gerthworm]

The question isn’t,“Should teams buy this?”, but is “Should suppliers sell this?” And while that question seems obvious, it provokes the though as to who determines what is an FRC legal part that can be sold?

Found this question, and I don’t think I ever responded to it.

Internally, I’d been running with an assumption of “suppliers will sell anything profitable”. As long as a market for a product exists, I doubt it will go unfilled for long… I don’t have a super great grasp of economics, but my gut instinct says suppliers as a whole cannot entirely self-regulate.

This leaves it up to some overarching organization to control the market for certain components. Indeed, this is what FIRST does already in some arenas.

Again with extreme examples:

BAD: BuildMeARobot.com sells complete assembled, wired, programmed, and powder-coated robots, shipped in FedEx crates, with a nice spot on the bumpers for you to write your team number with sharpie in.
–> Why bad? I cannot think of a good way to make this a STEM-inspirational activity. It’s meerly a lesson in purchasing things.

BAD: All COTS parts are banned. Only blocks of aluminum and steel are allowed, everything must be milled from scratch
–> Why bad? This raises the barrier of entry so high that no rookie team could possibly hope to enter.

I think it would follow that the happy medium falls in-between these two extremes, and FIRST would want to regulate to that. It’s sticky, because as mentioned previously, the appropriate mix of COTS/custom will vary by team, again all with the end goal of being inspirational toward students. The Game Design Committee sure has their work cut out for them, designing a set of rules that ensure this for all teams. Inevitably, poorly mentored teams will probably have a non-optimal mix, but I’m not sure if that’s something FIRST can directly solve… aside from perhaps requiring better mentor training. But that’s another topic.

In my estimation, the current per-cots price limit and overall-robot-price limit works well toward achieving this at a high level, without restricting team flexibility. As the market and competition evolves however, the current trajectory to me indicates that a different sort of market restriction may be needed in the future.

Question to suppliers: Can you mass-produce a complete, highly-functional robot (minus KOP components) for less than $500? And if so, would you sell it? This is the point at which I think FIRST would need to step in and adjust the rules.

[bjtheone]

I’m not really a fan of Cheesecake due to a factor of coercion involved (“we picked you for our alliance, now make these changes so we can win”).

If the Cheesecake was offered to any/all teams at a competition at the start of the competition in order to increase the overall competition level for any teams that feel that the need it would maybe be okay. But waiting until you’re on an alliance together to suggest an improvement to another team’s robot is inherently selfish. Everyone wants to win, but I feel that this takes some of the fun out of the competition.

I wouldn’t feel as good with a competition win knowing that we only won because another team came in and made changes (“improvements”) to our robot.

In terms of Carrot Cake/Pasta/Pasta Cake (that could be a thing, right? I’d eat it). Similar to what gerthworm said, I think it’s okay if they’re components that a company already sells, but they just give us all a reminder. I think it takes away from the competition to have an outside source do the engineering for the team.

This captures my thoughts! I have seen too many instances of high placed teams crossing over from enthusiastic to aggressive in selling cheesecake to a 3rd pick. Often said victim has their work discarded, and the cheesecake added. Then at the end of the competition the cheesecaked mechanism gets reclaimed, leaving the team with a significantly worse off robot.

I feel much the same way about purchased mechanisms. It is an engineering and design competition, not a who can shop the best, or worse who has the most money. It encourages teams to just sit back and buy a solution. The pricing models are a pretty blatant end run around the rules. The big one this year was per stage elevator pricing, when the solution required 2 stages at minimum. Teams are already doing this with Ri3Ds, but at least there they are only “shopping” for the idea of a solution, and still have to build it.

I say that as a team that designed an elevator from the ground up. I think we could have bought a higher functioning solution, but all the students learned way more, and can proudly say that they designed and built it.