[FRC Blog] Frank Answers Fridays: June 7, 2013

FIRST General Forum
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Originally posted: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog-frank-answers-fridays-06072013

Frank Answers Fridays: June 7, 2013

Blog Date:
Friday, June 7, 2013 - 16:55
By far, the most common question I received in the first batch of emails for ‘Frank Answers Friday’ was about Districts. While these aren’t hard questions, I think it’s important for me to deal with them sooner, rather than later, because they are clearly on the minds of many. Also, while I would normally publish the full question that came in, for this particular topic I’m going to just list the folks that asked instead. The questions they asked touched on several aspects of Districts, but had much in common.

These individuals asked questions about Districts:

Bar Danino, Team 2212, Lod, Israel
Francis O’Rourke, Team 190, Worcester, MA
Nate Laverdure, Team 122, Hampton, VA
Jay O’Donnell
Evan Raitt, Team 174, New York
Isaac Rife, Sterling Heights, MI
Navid Shafa
(Quick note: When you send in questions, please let me know your team number – if you have one – and where you are from, so I can include this information in my response)

We will be continuing to expand the District system over the next several years. The system allows teams to get more plays, closer to home, while also being more scalable than the Regional system. For the 2014 season, we are targeting starting Districts in the Pacific Northwest and New England areas. A great deal of work is going on now to make this happen. The schedule for expansion of the District system in 2015 and beyond has not yet been set, but we would like to bring up a similar number of Districts each year as we are planning in 2014. There may be some geographic areas in which the standard District model does not make sense. If we find this is the case, FRC will still continue to be supported in these areas, of course.

Our intention is to evolve the existing District system to allow for cross-District competition. We have begun work on a standardized points ranking system, and a standardized way in which teams will advance from District Championships to the FIRST Championship. As we grow, it’s important for us to maintain consistency between Districts. In addition to helping us maintain the quality of the FRC experience, this will give us the best chance of evolving the system to the point of allowing cross-District competition.

The concept of some type of Intermediate Championship for FRC, like a ‘Super-Regional’, between District Championships and the FIRST Championship, has been talked about as one possible way to support the continued growth of FRC. FTC recently announced plans to introduce Super-Regionals in their program. However, these discussions as it relates to FRC have been brief and speculative. We don’t have firm plans to proceed with this particular concept, although it’s still being considered. While you may have seen a PowerPoint slide that’s been floating around on websites and forums purportedly showing a detailed breakdown on how FRC Super-Regionals will be implemented, you may want to check the dates on that slide. It’s a good two years old, and was created as one potential concept, not a firm plan.

Thanks for your questions.

Frank

Frank Answers Fridays is a new weekly-ish blog feature where I’ll be answering ‘good questions’ from the FRC community. You can e-mail your questions to [email protected]. Please include your name, team number and where you’re from, which will be shared, if selected.

I’m glad he answered our questions and finally gave us an official view on districts from FIRST, in contrast to all the guesses and rumors and misleading presentations (as he mentioned). Bothers me he didn’t address international teams fitting into the model though, which was what the question I sent was about…

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Glad to hear that the plan is to eventually have inter-district play. I’ve heard many conflicting reports on whether this will ever happen over the years. Hope it can happen soon, as the 2014 district expansion is going to start to put some regions in a difficult spot (NY, for example.)

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I think this mostly falls under “There may be some geographic areas in which the standard District model does not make sense. If we find this is the case, FRC will still continue to be supported in these areas, of course.” One of the biggest issues with the district model (IMO) is how it’s so closed off - you only compete within your geographical region. That issue needs to be solved for international teams and areas that simply don’t have the population density to support a district model - we have to find a way to allow these teams to continue attending multiple regionals if they want, instead of cutting off all their options by closing off areas for districts.

4

That applies to Israel, since we have a regional, but I son’t see how this applies to teams like those in China and Taiwan, that obviously can’t compete in districts and would have an enormous financial difficulty in coming to Israel. The solution to this would be leaving some areas in the US with regionals, which was made pretty clear to not be part of the goal, or for them to go to Canada, if they wouldn’t have districts (which is a topic that wasn’t adressed in the answer).

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Very cool! Those of us who are currently in MAR hope that we can have some inter-district play with New England in coming seasons.

Bar, you’re asking for too much too soon. This type of detail doesn’t really need to be answered right now. Districts won’t just pop up all over in one or even two seasons. When the issue does become more relevant, I’m sure Frank will provide the answers.

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My question was satidfied. That was essentially the answer I was hoping for.

For those keeping track of the timeline:
2009-FiM does Pilot district system that is used by abouty 9% of the FRC population
2010-Fim keeps the format with a handful of tweaks.
2011-Rumors of MAR and meetings
2012-MAR creates their version and an additional 6% of FRC now doing districts (total about 16%)
2013-More rumors…
2014- NE FIRST and PNW joing the district… with probably around 12-16% more of the the FRC population (total for 2014 will likey be about 30-35% of FIRST now have a district system).
2015- Assume 2 -3 more areas join in for another 12-18%, and FRC will be around 50% District system.
2016- Assume another 3 Regions, and FRC will be at about 65-70% District system…

I would actually love to see Isreal create the first Mini-Region. With about 48 teams, you could do 3 24 team events with 4 alliances of 3 elims. Teams would play at 2/3 events and then all would play at the Regional Championship. Very scalable in that format up to 60 teams (3 events of 40 with full 8 alliance elim). Much beyond 60 would get a bit tricky, but realistically that would take a while to hit that number. This would be a giant departure from the current format, but I think it would work really well for isolated area of the world.

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That’s a very interesting consept… We’ve been having discussions about whether districts would work for us for a couple of years now, but I don’t think there was a similar suggestion… I wonder what other Israelis would think of this idea.

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I think they’d be well off focusing on building teams and events nearby in Europe. I’d bet they could have at least two full size regionals in Europe in two years if that was their goal. 4334 and the city of Calgary showed this year that you can do things like going from having just two teams (one a rookie) west of Ontario in one year to a successful local regional in the next. Growth doesn’t have to take a long time.

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I’m glad he answered this question, super glad so many wrote about it with me, and super glad the answer is the one I was hoping for.

I wrote that an issue of Districts is that teams would only be ever able to play with teams from their general area and not have the freedom to travel. If ANY district of ANY week can earn you the SAME qualifying points for your Regional Championship, there would be a lot of fun to be had with traveling to different places. And if some Districts all over the world earned teams more or fewer Qualifying points (based on team capacity), then we could see something very similar to the current/past Regional Event model where some events as High Risk / High Reward and Low Risk / Low Reward.

I’ve now become more exited than ever for NY districts.

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Israel went from 12 teams to 30 or 40 in 1-2 years once the regional got started. Most of those teams are still around, and the regional is now attracting some U.S. teams in addition to the “locals”.

OTOH, Brazil did something similar at about the same time, I think with a few more teams. That didn’t work out for more than a couple of years–there is now no Brazil Regional, and fewer teams. Other than Israel, there are no regionals south of the U.S. border (Hawaii doesn’t count as south of the border) at this time.

What happened? I don’t know. However, with rapid growth comes the challenge of sustainability. You can’t just start 30 teams overnight with a short-term grant and expect them to still be there in 5 years or more after the grant runs out–you want them to diversify their funding to be more sustainable. How does it help you to have 25 teams fail as soon as the seed money runs out?

That said, I’m sure that this hasn’t slipped FIRST’s mind. However, I’m thinking that they just aren’t sure how they’re going to deal with it yet, so they aren’t saying anything.

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As Frank mentioned there is a committee that is working on coming up with a unified points and advancement system with the long term goal of allowing teams to travel out side of their district. In the mean time teams in the district system are still free to travel to traditional regionals as well as play in their district. It is not going to happen over night but we will get there eventually.

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I love the idea of cross-district competition. Along with this idea I would like to see “open” and “closed” competitions. Open being cross-district play and closed being district only play.

13

As far as international teams go, I’ve noticed that there’s almost 40 teams in Mexico now, and plenty of rookies the last couple years. Has anyone heard anything about a Mexican regional?

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I’ve heard rumors over the last couple of years. Still hasn’t happened.

I’ve also heard rumors about one down in Australia/NZ at various times. NZ fell through, at least at the FRC level, back when I was a student. Australia, I’m not sure where they’re at in terms of official FRC competitions.

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I think the reason the Israeli regional survived it’s first couple of years is that it was an Israeli initiative instead of a FIRST initiative, and that it recieved a lot of support from many major bodies in Israel, first and foremost the Technion, Israel’s leading technological university.

Back in the summer of 2011 (I think), I heard rumors of an Australian regional starting in 2014, but I guess if that was the case we would’ve known by now…

16

In Brazil we have a lot of challenges to turn The FIRST in a strong program.

  • our school season starts at march and ends at december (we spend all summer vacations on the build season) and the schools are closed at summer.

-Money: $5.000 for registration in U.S is realy not the same even $5.000 in Brazil, and the exchange literally changes it everytime (we can get 5.000 dollar today and tomorrow this can have the half of the value).

-Kit Of Parts: All brazilian teams, or pick they KOP at a local kick off in U.S and bring at the plane (ilegal for brazilians law) or need to wait a month for receive by mail with a big Importation brazilian tax (some times you can buy a car only with the tax) , (for us 1772 we don´t use KOP anymore, we pick it at the first event and use in the next year)

for this and much more the first 2 events in Brazil had problems.

by the same way, we (1772), 383, 1156, 1382 and 1860 still strong in FRC, now we need to use this “know how” for solve this problems and expand for more teams.

We probably will have more 1 to 3 teams with us at orlando regional next year, and 1772 and 383 are working STRONGLY together for have a regional in Brazil next year or 2015

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The deep south is one of those regions that is not ready for districts. Just saying, it will take a long time before there are enough teams in the area to support it. We’ve wondered if we could compete in the Texas districts, but its quite a drive from where many of us are.

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On the division slide that Frank references it groups LA with OK, MS, and AR. That would be interesting. It’s not that much bigger of a distance between the furthest teams than what we can expect when Texas goes to the district system. It’s also 106 teams and 3 regionals now.

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I would think that one of the next district regions to be set up will be Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa that would. Although im not sure how many teams FIRST is envisioning each district to have.

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Oh, I personally doubt it the MN area will be going any time soon… we may have the team density, but there are a lot more factors than that!