Micro-District Model

Competition Regional Competitions
1

While I have thought about this a few times, I wanted to start a new thread on an idea I have for more remote areas of FIRST in the context of a possible competition format.
Micro District.
I for one love the district model, but understand that you really need an area of about 100 teams to do a Michigan or MAR style “region”. What about going smaller. I have posted in the past about options for a 60 team area, but I would like to extrapolate that down even smaller.
What about a 30 team Region. This region would then be comprised of Micro district events.
For a 30 team region, you could garuantee 2 events for each team and do 3 events with 20 teams at each event. This would essentially be a 1 Day event. Teams would do load-in and inspection Friday afternoon/night. Saturday Morning would open at 7:30am, have opening Ceremony at 8:30am, and then matches start at 9:00. I would target 9 matches per team (thus 20x9 or 180 slots). Assuming 3 vs. 3, this would require 30 matches. I do not think a 6 minute turn would be possible as almost 1/3 of the entrants are on the field at the same time (6/20). With an 8 minute average turn, this would require 4 hours of playing. I would actually spread this out a bit with 1 hour of play, and then a 15 minute break provided field faults have not caused that sort of delay. I would also follow "qualification with a purposeful 15 minute break for scouting/pick list formation (yes, that is a tight window). This would mean that alliance selection would start 5 hours after matches start. or 2pm. I would only have 4 alliance captains. After a 30 minute strategy/prep break, Eliminations would start roughly 2:45. Since you are only doing semi-finals and Finals essentially, elims should be under 2 hours. Thus finishing elims by 5pm. Then conduct award ceremony and wrap up.

These micro districts would then have a “Regional Championship” where all 30 teams would be invited, and then birth the traditional 6-ish teams to the World Championship. My recommendation would be to go from 9 to 12 Qualifying matches and make it a 2+ day event.

This 4 event region would scale fairly well from around 30 teams to up to 45 (micro districts would have 30 teams). Much above 48 teams in a region, and I would recommend looking at bumping the 4 events into a “District System” with the 2-day events and a full field of 8 alliances (or possibly a 6 alliance system where #1 & #2 get automatic bids to the Semis). Around 60 (plus or minus some). The full District system of 3 district events of 40 leading to a Regional Championship of 60 begins to be a better model.

You would likely need a better name than “Micro-district” as the it reminds me of the Cringe worthy “Regional Qualifier” name that floated around a while for the “District” Events. Maybe District is still the right name (as there are some Regionals smaller than some Disrict events)

In this model, there will be a lot of playing against/with the same teams. I Know this is “not desireable”, but I think I would rather play 20-30 matches (2x(9Q+elims)+12Q+E) with a lot of repeats than play 8 matches total…

With a 4 events (3 Districts and a regional championship) running events in the odd weeks (1,3,5 and champs in 7) should allow for a cadence that teams and volunteers would appreciate.

Thoughts? I would especially be interested in hearing from International teams like Brazil (which sort of did this with the Brazil Regional Way back), Mexico, Isreal, and Australia.

2

“For a 40 team region, you could garuantee 2 events for each team and do 3 events with 20 teams at each event.”

The math doesn’t add up here… 2 events per team for 40 teams means 80 spots. 3 events with 20 spots each is only a total of 60 spots.

Besides that nitpick, having only 20 teams would be very tough to do from a turn around perspective. you’ll have 6 teams on the field, plus the next two matches queued (typically). That means 18 teams that are either in the match or in the queue. With that type of turn around, you would literally be asking teams to go straight from a match into the queue, with at most a couple of minutes in the pits. That eliminates almost any time a team would have to fix something that breaks.

We do 30 teams at our 1-day State Championship (occurs after Champs and is technically a “post-season” event), and even then it’s pretty tough to manage the flow appropriately. While there weren’t major issues this year, the previous year I know there were some issues with teams not having enough time between matches to swap their bumpers. We aren’t even talking about repairs… just doing the absolute minimum to be able to put your robot on the field!

I certainly like the concept of trying to get more competitions and more plays in for those under-populated areas, but we need to make sure to look at timing and stress level for all of those involved. the faster the turn around time, the more stress people are going to have!

3

My mistake, tweaked the numbers per Jon’s comments.

4

So we’re taking the Regional experience and diluting it even further? Is it really as inspiring for team members when every event most of them are ever going to go to is in a high school gym playing against the same 30 teams over and over again? Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so…

5

I think this is a really interesting idea, but I agree that it would be very very difficult to run a match schedule like that… One possibility is to insert a break between every three matches so that every team usually has some pit time between each match, but that’s cutting down more and more on qualification matches.

Something I thought of: why require all teams to have the same number of qualification matches? I wonder if it would be possible to have some filler line for the normal qualification matches, and possibly even have extra matches count for your seeding (of course now you have to average performance over match count rather than just adding - or maybe you could drop the worst matches). So obviously the teams who have fewer issues on the field will get more chances to play and improve their seed, while those who need more time in the pit won’t get as much drive time. Creates an incentive to get the wrinkles worked out, but at the same time is maybe not a tradeoff we want in place… Just an intriguing thought…

Also, I often see people refer to the inspiration that comes from attending a big flashy regional event with multi million dollar A/V setups, loud music, nice venues, etc. But I don’t really think this is the kind of inspiration we should be looking for, or the kind that is effective. The vast majority of the robotics season is spent in the build season, doing the bulk of the engineering. It may vary for others, but for me personally, I always drew the most inspiration from the build season and the chance to see and participate in the entire design process, and also the chance to see how much is possible with technology. And correspondingly, as a mentor, the build season is when I find the most opportunities to pass that inspiration on to the current students, by showing them everything that they can do and helping them with their own design process. The event is just a fun bonus at the end where you see your work pay off, and particularly if you drew significant inspiration from the build season, the flashy lights and party music aren’t really a big deal… You still get to see your work pay off if it’s in a high school gym.

6

Many off-season events end up around 20-24 teams. Yes, the turn arounds are fast but everyone makes them work. I think it would be hardest on rookie teams but they would have a whole second event to get it right. A luxury they often don’t have right now.

Most high school football teams play what a total of around 20 different teams over a 4 year period? I don’t think the diversity of the competition is necessary to our competition. I like it but it’s not necessary. BEST, VEX, FTC, and many other competitions rely on almost entirely local competitions and it seems to work alright for them. I’m not saying we should be more like these other competitions, but there are advantages of getting teams to multiple events and this system would nearly triple the matches for many teams in these smaller regions.

7

We’re playing 7 local events this year–I could drive between each and every one of them in a total of 3:45 hours (thanks Google)–and virtually every team at every event is in MAR. Usually overlap is much, much more than that. (Almost half the teams that played Chestnut Hill '12 had just played Horsham the week before.) It’s far from a bother. In fact, it has incredible upsides and can really help teams and students directly, in particular the sense of community it builds. And some friendly rivalry too–after all, it’s quite similar to the way other sports work. It’s a different model, but it seems to be working well enough.

I’d opt for the model with any “boredom”* it’d entail just for the sense of community it fosters alone, much less the additional playing time/lower cost, etc, etc. Throwing on a “regional-like” championship would just be icing on the cake.

*I have yet to experience this in FIRST, even with District play in an area that has among the highest density of off-seasons.

8

I’m for anything that gets more competition time for the roboteers.

I’m a huge fan for off season events:
–they are as action filled as a regional: the same game, cool robots, alliance strategies playing to the strengths of the alliance.

– a chance to see everyone play “lots”: limited “strength of schedule” issues

– a chance to talk to all the teams about their robot – 30 teams 5 mins each, three hours is easy. 60 teams, I’m going to miss someone. I love the pits. “Tell me the top three things about your robot” and it’s unlikely that you can get out of a pit in under 5 minutes.

Problems that people see:

–fast turn times are an issue: Hey, it’s 2013, set up a queue Twitter feed. Buy a set of those “your table is waiting” LED indicators. We are technology mavens this is easy

– too hard to manage the queue: ask an expert, on how to manage this, talk to the off season people on how they DO manage this.

– pit times: New design constraint “need to be able to play matches with minimal pit time” Build robust robots. Build repairable robots. Have a pit strategy (think NASCAR). Plan out “well what if that breaks”

A roboteer is going to spend 250 hours on pre-season and Build Season. 200 hours of playing time seems about right.

Families want to participate: Scooting 25 minutes to watch Timmy play is easier to schedule in with other sibling activities vs driving 3 hours each way.

/stepping off my It’s called competition robotics so lets compete soapbox

9

Or is it?

As I recall, there’s currently a “time between matches” factor in the FMS schedule generator. If that is sufficiently large enough and the event sufficiently small enough, you’ll probably get a group of 6-12 teams that only plays each other (in various combinations). Make that 3-4 groups, for most events. On the other hand, make it too small, and some teams may just have to stay on the field for back-to-back rounds, which also isn’t ideal.

So you have to run a long-cycle event, and dial the time between each team’s matches way down (if that makes any sense… if not, let me know). Maybe run a 1-team queue line instead of a 2-team queue. Add in an extra break, as suggested, every so often, or use field downtime instead, for major repairs to machines.

The real trick is to get the event in a venue large enough to host the field, stands, and pits in the same room with no curtains between the field and the pits. Need a team on the field, send a runner to their pit. If you have between 2 and 6 runners, you should be A-OK.

10

This is a pretty cool concept.

Jon’s comments about robots needing to head from the field straight back to the queue seem like the biggest issue to me. But the idea of 15 minute breaks every so often sounds like a good start. Maybe what would help is a 30 minute break a couple of times instead. You get a lunch break, so teams at least have that spot to work on a robot if necessary. If you add in one or two 30 minute work periods, then everybody has time to fix stuff.

I disagree that competing in a high school gym is bad. I like it based on FTC experiences. High school gyms are designed partly for hosting high energy competitive events… they are well suited to the task. Expensive venues are a waste of money. I also don’t think it’s boring to compete against the same teams. In fact, if you never see the same team twice, it always feels like you don’t know anybody. It’s nice to return to events and recognize people from teams you’ve seen before. People in high school basketball don’t complain about facing the same high schools every year. And they get fewer opponents to see than we do.

11

The FMS generator, as I have been told, tries to schedule a team no closer than once every third match (n & n+3). The problem is that, with 6 minute turn-arounds, the district events are already really tight. You have 12-15 minutes (n+1 & n+2) to get off the field, to your pit, change the battery, change bumper colors (if necessary), repair any issues, and return to the queue to enter the field for your match.

Now, of course, you can probably set the time between matches to something longer, but who wants to sit there for 15 minutes looking at an empty field? However, if that were the case, then for 30 teams who are guaranteed 12 matches each (for ease of math), that would be 60 matches at 15 minutes per match. That would be 15 hours just for the qualifiers alone. Then the eliminations would take 80% of the teams attending and run for up to another 12 quarterfinal, 6 semifinal, and 3 final matches, which would have to be scheduled for about 4 more hours. That’s 22 hours of event (including lunch, selections, awards, and rounding up). At ten minute turn-around, that comes down to 10 hours of qualifiers, 3.5 hours of eliminations, and a grand total of about 16.5 hours of events, etc.

12

From the international perspective:

My biggest problem with this concept is time. There’s simply not enough time in the competition season for 4 events in international regions.
The main reason Israel’s regional is so early (week 1/2) is to give the qualifying teams enough time to prepare for champs, make travel arrangements and get money.
If you have 4 events the earliest you can have the teams qualify for champs (after the regional championship) is week 4, about a month before internationals. This means the teams would have to get enough money to fly 30 people +equipment 6,000 miles away, about 200,000 NIS from what I heard, in a month. That kind of money is hard enough to get in two months, good luck trying to do that in half the time.

Another problem, which is Israel specific, is that we can’t have events on weekends, both because we have religious/mixed teams (so no doing stuff on sabbath), and because it’ll make finding a venue a whole lot harder if not impossible (most places are either shut down or occupied on saturdays).
That means the events would have to be on schooldays (like our regional is now), and I bet no school would let teams miss three weeks of school for something as “unimportant” as robotics.

13

If you had 2 fields, You could actually do it in such a way as having 4 events during the first two weekends, and a Championship on the thirda week, thus buying an extra week for scheduling for the World Championship.

Another option would be for the regional to buy tickets ahead of time. Hotel arrangements and plane tickets for 10 students and 2 mentors for each of the 6 qualifying teams. Possibly an extra 4 tickets for the Chairmans team as they would also need RCA presenters. This would be accomodations for about 75 people… While this would not ecompass everyone from the team, it would be a comp team, pit crew, and a few scouts. I think this would total around 500,000 NIS or about $140,000 US dollars. While not cheap, this sort of thing should be doable…

You could also do an inverted season. Start off the season with the championship, and then do “practice” style off seasons while in season. Teams going to the championship would already be decided, but others could get more play/practice during regular season and maybe talk FIRST into a wildcard slot for the 1 points team… Do the 12 flights/hotel package for the Wildcard team.

14

The US doesn’t allow that anymore for security, do they?