“FTC is the single best thing our students can do to prepare for the FRC season”
Agree or disagree? And why? What do you think is the single best thing students can do to prepare for frc?
I disagree that FTC is the absolute best way to prepare, but it still helps students learn about working in a team and designing a robot.
In my opinion, the best way to prepare is to build a simple robot, like a box on wheels using parts from older robots. You learn about machining, programming, and electronics, as well as FRC specific robot design.
The single best thing a team can do to prepare its students for FRC is to start them in FLL and build a “farm system.”
So our FRC team started a smaller FTC team to practice during the pre build season. The idea was to give new team members something to do and to help them learn some engineering. It was a catastrophic failure. The team’s faculty supervisor couldn’t put in as many hours as the FRC build season (this is to be expected) and the FTC robot was unfinished when the FRC build started. A group of team members decided to leave FRC to join FTC. Our team prioritizes FRC so FTC is always allocated a miniscule budget and everyone ends up the worse. I’m sure some teams with a larger budget and a little more time might be able to pull it off.
I disagree. While there are definitely some benefits to FTC during the preseason, there are much better, more applicable things that your team could be doing with its time. The best thing that you can do during the preseason by far is build a practice robot. Everything that you learn will directly carry over to the build season. Also, it allows you to gauge your team capabilities. (For example, if your team has a weak CADing division, you should avoid complex mechanisms, or if your team struggles with machining, you should try to use as many COTS parts as possible).
The last, and coolest, benefit of a practice robot is that you get to test out new things. If your interested in mecanum or octocanum or butterfly drive or swerve, you can put it on your practice robot. If you have some crazy, out of the box idea that’s never been done in FRC, you can go ahead and use it on a practice robot. Doing this kind of stuff for the first time on a competition robot is usually a horrible idea and will often end badly, but doing it on a practice robot allows you to see if it will work and get experience doing it so that you can then redo it on a competition robot confidently.
I mentor both FRC and FTC. I’ve never liked looking at FTC as “Intro to FRC” or “FRC lite”, I think it’s a good program on it’s own, especially for students who participate in lots of other extra-curriculars, and don’t have the free time it takes to commit to FRC.
BadgerBOTS, our organization and corporation (with the same name as the FRC team that spawned it), has five FTC teams running under it, completely separate from the FRC team. These teams are made up of students from area high schools who generally don’t have time for FRC, or who just wanted to do their own thing.
That all said, I don’t think FTC is the best thing FRC students can do to prepare for the FRC season. In fact, I think it’s a pretty bad thing to do to prepare.
First off, the FRC and FTC seasons overlap.
This means one of two things: You work with FRC-level dedication and speed to finish an FTC robot before the FRC build season starts, and essentially double the amount of stress and time you have to put into that part of the year. Keep in mind that your mentors (who often have busy lives of their own and barely enough time for FRC as it is) will have to do the same. Definitely an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” scenario when that season changeover hits.
Also, depending on when your regional FTC competition is, you may have to take time out of your FRC build season to go compete. Yeah, it’s only a couple days, but just like FRC regionals, the students and mentors involved will be quite exhausted by the end.
Or, you spend less time during the FTC season (though keep in mind that it is still a pretty hefty amount of time) to have your FTC bot mostly finished when FRC starts, and then try to work on both simultaneously. And there’s just about no scenario where I can see both of them succeeding. The FRC season is crazy enough as it is.
Our FRC team prepares for it’s season by working on various off-season projects. This year, we’ve been building a dedicated “DemoBot” to be taken to schools, conventions, businesses, community events, and general outreach events.
I think your funding issue stems from the fact that you expect both teams to pull from the same budget. If you have students who have moved completely to FTC, then I think it’s time that you start treating the FTC team as a separate entity, responsible for it’s own fundraising, and recruiting it’s own mentors. That’s how we handle it anyway. That said, we’re a pretty large organization, between FRC, FTC, FLL, farm teams, summer camps, and other classes, we work with several hundred students a year.
I would argue that it depends on the background of the team. FTC is a great way to get started in competitive robotics. It provides a less stressful version of FRC with significantly lower complexity and associated costs, while permitting a similar team structure and organization, albeit at a smaller scale. However, FTC needs to be operated properly in order to be a proper stepping stone to FRC. FTC needs to emphasize disciplined design, teamwork, and organization in order to be an effective stepping stone for FRC. One of the biggest problems with FTC is that because it is so simple, hacked solutions actually work. That generally doesn’t hold for FRC due to the complexity of the challenge and the involved systems. Teamwork is essential, even though FTC is small. A sufficiently skilled worker can make an FTC robot in under a week. But in order for FTC to be effective to the students, they need to be able to enforce a top-down design structure for their robot - that’s generally the same structure that FRC will use (or rather, it’s what successful teams would ideally use). Organization is also important, even though with FTC there’s not really a stop build date. Organization helps the FTC team get more design iterations in, and disciplines them to the rigors of the 6 week build of FRC.
That said, FTC is not necessarily the be all end all solution to training for FRC. Again, echoing previous posts, actually building a robot is essential to getting team members up to speed. If one were to structure a team such that first years and a select set of upperclassmen spent the entire year building and learning different FRC designs/skills/systems/etc, and then the first years were then promoted to being part of the build team, that would also give the students the experience and skill set needed to field an effective FRC team (assuming, of course, that said set of upperclassmen were capable of actually teaching and organizing the students). If we develop this system further and establish a sort of mentor/upperclassman mentor/underclassman trainee structure, where rookie students are mentored by skilled upperclassmen who were then mentored by the actual mentors (sort of how an Air Force ROTC squadron is organized, with the cadre mentoring the wing leadership and professional cadets, who in turn lead and mentor the general military cadets), we have a self-sustaining system that adequately prepares students for leadership and design roles within FRC.
Overall, integrating FTC into an effective training pipeline for FRC is probably the best thing to do, if FTC needs to be a part of the pipeline. Otherwise, FTC takes away at least a year of FRC specific training, unless summers are adequately used, in which case again, FTC needs to be well integrated so that the transitions between years are smooth and well used.
EDIT: To clarify, I’m speaking on the assumption that students will progress through at least a full season of FTC before ever starting FRC, not jumping from FTC to FRC in a single year.
There are thousands of students who prepare for FRC without FTC experience who go on to play with the best in the world. “FTC is the single best thing our students can do to prepare for the FRC season” is just not true.
That doesn’t mean it’s not a good thing, or not a key component in many robotics programs, but the idea that FTC is a “magic bullet” for FRC preparedness is just false.
I think ideally, a fall training program should accomplish a few things. New students should have some training and experience with their preferred discipline (fabrication, prototyping, design, programming, etc). They should have some experience at some sort of competitive robotics event. Finally they should start to get an idea of “how to win” - how great hard work is correlated with success. FTC is a way to accomplish these things. VRC is another. Going to a fall off-season and running training seminars is yet another. There are quite a lot of ways to make this work.
Personally, I really think that FTC has moved away in the past several years from being an accessible and simple robotics competition to a difficult, complex, custom-machining-required cousin of FRC. When all you needed was COTS parts and your imagination, FTC showed such strong promise… But now it’s far more of a cost, time, and experience commitment. I guess it’s a bit more relatable to FRC, but at the expense of new students being able to leap right in.
I believe that FTC is a great program on it’s own as others have already said. I do think it can help in getting an idea of what FRC is like but otherwise it should be on it’s own.
Ftc takes up time in the fall and if a team is good enough they will go to state which is during the Frc build season for us. With ftc (like frc) people can never stop building or improving their robot so it does take up the build season a lot.
Frc can always help mentor ftc during the fall to help out with future frc members (if they choose to move in to frc or continue to improve in ftc) and help with communication skills.
Strongly disagree. First off, there is no single best thing you can do to prepare for build season. The level of intensity, the amount of strategic analysis, and the scale of the robots designed is only comparable to a FRC build season itself. Second, the robots are very different. They use completely different control systems and are a whole lot smaller.
My team competes in a vex competition (not official vex competition, we use the signal splitters and banebots) that helps get new members acclimated with the strategy meetings and some basic building and wiring. We also are planning on building/wiring a kitbot, rewiring our 2013 practice bot, and simulating a strategy meeting; all an effort to prepare members for FRC season. The intensity still blows away new students, and is pretty impressive to veteran members.
Thanks for the input guys. At our first ftc meeting of the year(my team participates in both) one of our veteran mentors described ftc to our new mentor as “the best thing our students can do to prepare for the big bots” and it struck me as extremely odd and extremely false. Glad I’m not the only one who thinks so
Well, what’s better? What is better that is an option for your students? What other options do they have for training/prep? It may very well be the best option for your students.
Currently it is the only option. Another member and I are going to try to push the idea of an off season practice bot, but were not sure the mentors will go for it
After having both FTC and FRC for a few years, I’ve concluded that they’re best run separately in many respects. Students and mentors still help each other out across teams and share other resources. But I find it best to have students assigned to one competition or the other for the entire school year so FTC doesn’t end up consuming the entire preseason for the FRC team. Both programs have a bunch of stuff they can be doing in the off-season*, and it’s tough to do that stuff when the overlapping seasons run all the way from September through April.
Also, I don’t view FTC as a junior varsity sport that feeds into FRC. Some people switch at some point, but many pick one program and stick with it for their high school career. That’s good, because it’s good for the team to have some people with 3-4 years of experience on the team. Whatever path the students want to follow is fine with me.
Given the choice, some people at our school do choose FTC over FRC for a number of possible reasons: less travel cost (in Iowa, at least), smaller team, less daunting technologies, different build season schedule. Once they’re in FTC, they often don’t want to be “promoted” to FRC. They have taken a good level of ownership of their FTC team, they’ve been successful, and they want to continue on and achieve even more in the next season.
*such as it is
Disagree. The single best thing is to teach your students. Making sure that they are proficient in cad would be big in my opinion. I am not dure if your question is directed only at mechanical aspects but working on awards and driver training are also important.
Now to complicate my answer. You could use a vehicle such as ftc to teach these concepts.
What do you think you will gain out of building an off season robot? Would this be in addition to the FTC? In place of it? What is your estimated cost? How will you fund it?
I hope to gain practice, prototype a new drivetrain maybe, and help teach the underclassmen in a time of the year where were not stressed about just getting a finished robot before end build day, and practice with all the tools parts etc that go into building an frc bot… addition to frc- in a way. Those of us who would rather do ftc can work on that while those of us who would like to build a big bot can do that… funding and cost- mostly resources we already have, if more resources are needed we’ll cross that when/if we get there
Compared to some of the other expenses we face in FRC, an off-season drive train doesn’t have to be an enormous expense.
After making a few scrawls on a spreadsheet, I think a single speed 6WD can come in under $500 IF you don’t have to buy control system components.
Im hoping to be able to build a prototype drivetrain concept using parts and materials we already own from previous years. $100 tops will be spent on new material
I am starting my 5th year as primary mentor at an Illinois school where the same small robotics team has done both the FTC and FRC programs in each of the prior four years.
In my estimate, having the same group of students doing both programs is potentially more of a liability than a benefit for their participation in either program ending up considered as a success, especially with the new increased overlapping of the FTC & FRC seasons that the super-regionals demands
Being in Illinois, with the earliest FTC qualifying competitions, means our FTC time constraints are tougher than with FTC in other states. In the past this meant we would wrap up all our FTC competition (excluding Worlds) before FRC kickoff, but this is no longer possible if we can qualify for the FTC super-regional.
The ~6-week time window for FRC build always proves to be an extreme challenge, with both finals week and full week breaks often taking a huge time bites out of the build schedule. Dealing with this is extreme FRC time pressuer is barely possible for our team, and to now have FTC overlapping means that, even if we qualified, we would likely have to bail out of the FTC super regional competition.
For most students on our team, going to Worlds during at least one of their four years is a big goal, and to them this seems most likely ONLY via the FTC program. However, they now must consider that any route to FTC worlds will likely undermine their FRC season, or meeting the FRC season timeline demands will prevent a strong finish with their FTC season.
This becomes a major dilemma, since building the bigger robot has big appeal, but getting to Worlds via FTC also has big appeal.
From a mentor perspective, I find that doing both programs allows very little time to teach much in either program, which is frustrating.
Assuming a school has a large enough team and sufficient numbers of mentors, so that enough time can be devoted to both programs during the overlap period, then it could turn out favorably,
Now that the range of materials allowed for FTC has been expanded, the potential carryover for things learned in FTC benefiting students going on to FRC is much greater.
So, for many reasons, doing FTC as a lead in preparing for FRC can become problematic, but in some cases it could still end up being a positive result.
-Dick Ledford