[FRC Blog] Frank Answers Fridays: June 13, 2014

FIRST General Forum
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Posted on the FRC Blog, 6/13/14: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog-frank-answers-fridays-06132014

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Frank Answers Fridays: June 13, 2014

**Blog Date: **Friday, June 13, 2014 - 13:18

Today’s good question comes from Jay O’Donnell, from FRC Team 1058, PVC Pirates, out of Londonderry, New Hampshire, USA:

Question:

*Hey Frank,

I was part of the New England District this past year and I have to say overall it was a very positive experience. However, the one thing I did not like was the timing between when teams were announced for NE champs and the event, and the timing between teams being invited to world championships and the actual event. I know that there were teams invited to NE Champs the afternoon before load-in night, and teams invited to world champs less than a week before the event. My question is does FIRST have anything in mind to improve this situation so that teams don’t find out they can go to one of these great competitions the day of the event?

Thanks*

Answer:

Jay, thanks for the question. At *FIRST *HQ, we don’t like these short periods between notifications to teams that they have earned a slot at Championships and the events themselves either. It stresses teams, raises their costs in many cases, and can cause some teams to have to say ‘no’ to a slot they’ve earned. It makes things harder for us here, also. We need to scramble to make sure the teams are properly registered, and for the FIRST Championship, we need to make sure the robots arrive at the event on time.

From a Championship prep standpoint, it would be great if Districts could have all their District events in Weeks 1-4, take one week off from competitions, then have their Championship in Week 6. However, there are many challenges with this. As an example, for the 2014 season, Michigan needed to run 15 District events to ensure there were enough spots for every team to get in their two plays. You could imagine the difficulties just with resource availability if Michigan were to try to run 4 events simultaneously for most of their competition weeks. Also, the shorter District schedule would mean less flexibility for teams with respect to event choice. I haven’t met a team yet that could participate in two events hundreds of miles apart simultaneously with a single robot. Not even Simbotics could do that. (Well, OK, maybe, I haven’t asked them…)

Districts, for the most part, set their own schedules. We keep track of their plans here at HQ, and provide feedback if we identify any challenges from our perspective. I understand that several Districts, recognizing the stress Week 7 District Championships put on teams, had considered moving their Championships to Week 6 for 2015. However, there are some holidays that fall during Week 6 of 2015 that have raised concerns regarding the desirability of that week, and for larger districts, with the number of events they must squeeze in, it may not be practical at all. The District schedules have not been finalized, though. I would suggest District teams share their feedback on schedules with the Districts directly. This is a great way to have your voices heard.

With respect to late notifications to teams - you had mentioned teams getting notified the afternoon before load-in night – with our current schedules this is driven primarily by offer declines earlier in the process. Offer declines affect both teams going to District Championships and teams going to the *FIRST *Championship. As an example, for the *FIRST Championship Waitlist, we go down the list team by team in the order in which a team joined the list (based both on date and time) to make offers to attend the Championship for the number of slots we are sure we have available. Generally, teams are given 24 hours to make their decision. In the event a team declines an offer, we immediately offer the spot to the next team in line who has not yet been offered a slot, and keep making offers in this way until we find a team who accepts. Offer dates will vary because of this – we only offer the number of slots we are sure we have available, and a team declining an offer does make a slot available for the next team in line, but we may need to repeat this process several times to fill all openings, which can take several days.

We have considered different ways to extend the season to help ease this overall problem, but they have their own challenges.

Of course, we’re open to suggestions on how to make this better. Please let us know what you think!

Frank

*There are some very unusual individual team cases in which this ‘first come, first served’ process is not followed, but this is rare, and there were no exceptions to this approach in 2014.

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The current season calendar is basically locked-in at this point. Kickoff can’t be any earlier without taking place during most schools’ winter breaks. Stop Build can’t be any earlier without kickoff being any earlier. You need 7 weeks of competition to fit all the events in and Championship can’t be any later because of AP testing. At least there’s still that week off between the end of the “regular season” and Championship.

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5-week build season.

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Or, 5 weeks to build and then eliminate bag day.

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If we get rid of the bag, we can move week one up to the same week as what is currently the last two days of build season. This would work especially well for districts that don’t have any teams that need to ship their robot to the event.

6

How about Bag day being the Thursday before Week 1 competition.
Move Week 1 up a week. Teams playing Week 1 don’t have to bag until the end of the competition.

Personally I would rather deal with things the way they are and try to move all of the regional championships to week 6

I understand how difficult this would be for a district like Michigan.
Holding more than 2 events on one weekend is tough on everyone, especially the volunteers.

************It seems that Allen beat me to the punch with this idea… see above

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I don’t think there is much change they can make.

Teams need to be prepared for a long season and have their accept/decline answer ready. Keep tabs on travel options long before DCMP invites or WCMP invites have been sent out especially if you are on the edge. Worst case you pass your information or reservations along to another team.

8

I’d like this a lot more. Eliminate practice robots, reduce mentor burnout, and probably make teams more competitive. Oh yeah, and all the district scheduling stuff too.

9

We got into Championships off of the waitlist and found out the Wednesday before the week of Championships. We’re from California so we had to have our robot shipped THE VERY NEXT DAY after we accepted our invitation. We built a crate in less than 4 hours and it was in St. Louis the Friday before Championships (it arrived 14 hours after it left us). We knew we were high up on the waitlist, so we booked hotel rooms ahead of time at a hotel that had a 100% cancellation policy (we ended up booking another hotel after we got in because we found a nicer and cheaper one). Flights, however, we’re not as great. You can’t cancel flights unless you pay a lot more up front, you can only get airline credit for a year if you cancel which would not have helped us if we booked earlier and didn’t get in and had to cancel. The result instead was our team having to drive two hours to San Francisco for a flight that left at 6am. And half of our team had to go on a separate flight on a different airline. And it was the same split-situation on the way back. Also, we had to leave from here a day later and leave from St. Louis a day later than we wanted because flights were totally booked for the days we wanted.

A simple solution for the Championship waitlist (especially with the increased capacity in 2015): If FIRST really gives out waitlist slots based on who signed up first, just tell teams ahead of time where they are on the waitlist so that teams that are higher up can make arrangements beforehand instead of scrambling at the last minute.

10

We were one of those teams that found out the day of the NE Districts Champs. We found out 9:30am, had to be their by 4ish, and it was a 3hr drive.

We understood that we wouldnt be told until days before, but the day of!!! The worst part is that we found out the team infront of us dropped out the night before, but the NE commitee was off working on other things for the next days events so we couldnt get the official invite untol the next day.

Luckily we knew we only needed 7 teams to drop, so we had made all plans but it was a pain for us and the hotel. I cant even count the ammount of hotel calls and cancelation extentions we got. Finding out that morning was not fun at all! (The event was)

MAR taking week 6 off was the smartest thing ever! Also this year they made the 5 bubble teams confirm a yes or no before invitation. 8 or 9 dropped in NE. They should make the next 10 confirm to hopefully help speed up the process.

Although its a long and horrible process sometimes, i wanted ever spot filled by a team because everyone deserved one! Unfortunatly a team dropped so last minute that their was no time to fill the spot. A perfect reason why they work so hard to fill this spot is that everyone can win. 1153 made it in, the day of NE Champs, and destroyed with their robot, evemtually making it to champs.

Even though the processes and work is hard, I still want to give a giant thank you to all those that helped districts run well (especially NE! I wish we did districts sooner)

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I would be neat if we could get some type of “live” website where teams can accept, decline, and new invites can be sent out automatically. Teams can see where they fall in relation to the current invite and can plan accordingly. Main team contacts can log in to change their team status.

This could drastically cut down on the time it takes to “fill” an event while giving teams the proper heads up to start preparing for their trip.

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I think a good intermediate solution is along the lines of what Brendan is saying.

Create a system (thats far less manual than we currently have) to calculate and live update rankings for the districts.

For example, this year in NE, there was only one week 6 event with something like 36 teams competing. With 54 NE CMP slots available, statistically there were MANY teams that were locked into NECMP at the end of week 5. All of these statistical locks should have been offered a bid as soon as they were locked in. While many of these teams knew this and started planning ahead of time, teams on the bubble heading into their week 6 event could start looking at the feasibility of qualifying and come up with a plan for making it or not.

-Brando

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LIKE

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I know that in the PNW they actually sent invitations out to the top 40 teams after week 5, because those teams were mathematically guaranteed a spot, with only one week 6 event taking place.

The main timing problems for us come between the DCMP and Worlds. Since we are way out on the other corner of the country, driving to worlds is not an option. The only chance we get is flying, and by that time tickets are very expensive. For us moving the state championship earlier would help a little, but even a week does not equal much different costs in airfare, so I don’t know what else we could do out here to reduce those costs.

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I heard something about PDX tickets being too troublesome to reserve for FIRSTWA/ORFIRST - that’s why the only reserved tickets available were out of Seattle. I think for the district model to really work, they’d need to reserve tickets for everyone - buying tickets on that kind of short notice (or alternatively driving obscenely early up to Seattle) isn’t realistic for a lot of teams.

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A proposal, for use by Districts when going to Championship:

Let the district area buy airfare for their team allotment, or partial airfare rather, as well as hotel rooms. Let’s assume 10 “standard” teams worth. (For this purpose, 1 “standard” team is defined as 16 students and 2-4 teachers/mentors/chaperones, or 20 seats and 5-6 hotel rooms. YMMV, and this should be determined by the district area.) Because the district area can buy earlier, and is buying a larger amount of seats and hotel rooms, the costs would presumably be somewhat cheaper due to both timing and volume. The teams then reimburse the district area and pay for any extra rooms/seats.

Now, there are going to be some problems. For example, not all the district teams will have the same convenience level at any given airport. For another, apportioning the rooms to the teams may be a very “interesting” process. OTOH, if the district areas are creative in how they handle this sort of thing, it can be a huge benefit.

Of course, for the DCMPs, it’s a hair easier. Just gotta reserve a bunch of block hotel rooms near the venue for longer-traveling teams, no flights needed, and again, have the teams reimburse the district and pay for any extras.

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Pretty thankful that MAR has mitigated this problem greatly by hosting no Week 6 district. Even with the planned addition of a new district event next year, we tend to stay away from Easter weekend (Week 6) anyway. We saw a lower number of DCMP declines this year as compared to 2013, partially for this reason.

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That’s a cool idea. Is there a way to buy tickets without locking in the passenger names, though? I know that airlines are completely unwilling to transfer tickets from one person to another.

19

It seems to me like the simplest thing is to just move world championships back a week. Why would you try to changed every event around instead of just one? Of course I have no idea what the situation is with scheduling for St. Louis. Or there may just be something else I’m overlooking entirely.

20

I believe the week after Worlds is AP Testing week.