“mostly build season” FRC teams?

FIRST General Forum
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I’m aware of a school-based team with the following annual schedule:

  • Pre-build season school year: 1.5-hour team meeting every other week. 45-min student leadership meeting the other weeks (mentors optional - most cannot make it).
  • Build season: Three 4-hour meetings per week (each having a half hour work pause for dinner). Weeks off for finals and school winter break. Occasionally an extra meeting (maybe 2 or 3 total during Build).
  • Competition season: 2-hour fix/pack/unpack sessions. One 4-hour “fix the robot” session between competitions.
  • Post-competition: For a few weeks, one meeting day per week (duration varies) for things like open house prep, season debrief, discussing purchases to make for next season, discussing non-school-supported efforts for summer.
  • Summer: No school shop time. Some years a few students and mentors organize some training / project(s), including at a local maker space that is interested in helping, and other years nothing happens at all… depends on student/mentor interest.

Reality: The past several season, during Build, the team needed to spend dozens of extra hours away from the school to put a robot into the field, including transporting the robot, materials, tools, etc. to and from people’s houses on off nights, over weekends, & over school break when school was closed.

A non-FRC person might look at the above and think it is a generous time and school staff budget investment, while a seasoned FRC person might say it is far too little time. Is anyone out there sustaining a successful (however you define it) team using an annual schedule like the above?

To me, the team might be best off using the first part of build season for manufacturing training and then focusing on fabricating & assembling the Everybot or other open sourced design, unless during a given year there are sufficient FRC enthusiast students who want to do the necessary heavy lifting away from the school to realize a more ambitious custom design. The team has historically done custom designs & competed reasonably well, but recently they’ve been less competitive, lost mentors, had fewer true FRC enthusiasts (mentors & students)… Interested in input from people with related experience, to help me advise this team. Thanks.

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As with a lot of things the answer is “it depends”. In this case it largely depends on your definition of “successful”.

I would be shocked if there is a single team in FRC that is a perennial alliance captain with a shot at finals at their events (i.e. top 4-6 team at the event) that has this build schedule.

That being said, there are plenty of teams that aren’t aiming for what I just described above. I don’t see any reason why a team can’t define “success” in other terms and meet those goals in the time that you described.

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To give you a comparison - our rough schedule over the past year.

November:
Controls every weekend. Swerve Developement. Some mech involvement.

December:
Controls every weekend. Swerve Developement. Some mech involvement.

January:
Kickoff week- meeting every day. 4 hours a day. 6 hours on Saturday.
2nd week onwards, 4 hours Monday, Wendesday, Thursday. 6 on Saturday.
(starting 3rd week in January, controls has been 6 or 7 days a week).

That schedule continues through states or worlds, and we go back down to once every couple weeks.

We quite literally have to turn the lights off on the team members to get them to leave most days.

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Our team uses the off season to train team members. We have practices a 1-2 days a week for the whole year, to train new members, refresh skills, and just do fun projects together. During build + competition seasons, we go HAM.

We practice 4 hours per week day and 10-12 hours per weekend day, some years we have a lighter practice on Sunday. The weekends feel like the only times that anything can get done. Roughly 40 hours a week. That includes homework, Students usually show up to practice and collaborate on homework for the beginning of practice.

After one season of this, our students are hooked and will be on the team pretty much forever. Many alumni, including myself, come back year after year to mentor/coach the team. The harder you go, the more fun/engaging it is. Sadly, this sort of time commitment does not work for everyone, so our team is fairly small (10-15 members). It is amazing what you can accomplish with so few highly dedicated kids

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This year we didn’t meet much (at all?) over the fall since the middle school FTC team was meeting and out of some COVID caution. Over build and competition season this year we’re 3 hours each weekday and 4 hours on Saturday. Hopefully we’ll be able to do more things over the spring/summer and next fall, but the last couple years have been rather “mostly build season” for us.

We’ve also won our first 2 events as alliance captain in the 2020-22 span.

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This schedule sounds maybe a step down from where our team sits.

Typical schedule:

Pre-season: 2 days per week, 2ish hours/meeting. Generally focused on training (code, cad, manufacturing)

Build/Competition Season: 4 Days per Week. 3 hours/meeting (6 hours on Saturdays).

Post Season: No regular meetings, maybe attend one local or semi-local offseason event.

I think we’re a reasonably competitive team, but certainly not a perennial dominant team. We’re usually picked, occasionally alliance captain. We’ve won a total of 3 regionals in our 17 years of existence.

As mentioned above, a lot of it is about defining success relative to your means. For us, this means scaling our build appropriately and making strategic decisions about how to be competitive without doing it all. Our biggest failures over the years have been when we’ve strived to be a dominant robot, rather than building within our means.

As far as meeting organization and build goes. We try our best to make efficient use of our build space in the limited time we have access. That means we want to maximize the time our machines are working while in the shop. This means a lot of strategy and design discussions happen between meeting via Slack. Additionally, using OnShape as our CAD tool allows us to collaborate remotely so that the manufacturing is not wasting time waiting for drawings. We design to maximize use of our most accurate and quick manufacturing process (CNC plasma-cutter) and try to design the rest of the parts with simple dimensions that can be cut with “simple” tools like drill press/hand drills or chop saws. This certainly limits our design, but much of that can be worked out in CAD, rather than trying to piece things together in our limited shop time.

Before bag day died, we’d almost always leave one major subsystem to build as withholding to install on Thursday. The end of the bag made our competitions much smoother, as we weren’t stressed trying to install major robot elements on practice day.

Our programmers are plugged in during the entire build process such that they are updated as to which controls are needed for different subsystems. The team usually has the bot fully coded out by the time it is built and wired and just needs tuning and debugging. We usually try to turn a semi-complete robot over to programmers by week 5 of build, but we also usually miss that date.

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This looks a lot (though not exactly) like what we do. (5895 in NJ).

We’re a school team, we meet after school and on Saturday afternoons. In December that’s usually about 10-12 hours per week. During build season it’s 16-18 hours per week. During competition season we’ll meet for 2.5 hours like a build season - but not everyone is there, and we take some days off.
From our last event until after Thanksgiving - there’s almost no meeting. Maybe once or twice for informational/organizational reasons.

The one thing we do in addition to meetings - is that our school offers engineering classes. First year FRC students take an engineering class (essentially, learning how to CAD, but also learning some of the basics of mechanical design). A handful of our students will also take a more advanced engineering class - they have their own projects, but also contribute some work during build/competition season.

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Since we are a community team with not a lot of people we do a couple of things differently:

  • On weekdays lab is opened every day right after school but is not required (1 hour minimum per week though)
  • On weekends lab is opened both days at 10 am and is also not required
  • A few very dedicated people stay from school letting out to 12 or 1 am almost every day (2 on the week before comp) getting sometimes nearly 40 hours a week

We started training members during the offseason and have a learn-by-doing technique we use in build season. Of course, we learn safety at the start of the season but we learn how to use them effectively by building the robot.

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My team (a school team) has the following schedule:

October-December:
1 meeting per week for two-three hours, mostly focused on outreach. During this time, we mentor our FTC team and FLL Challenge and Discover teams. Members are involved in that as well, taking up 4-6 hours per week per member involved (about 1/4 of our members). Other outreach activities consume 0-6 hours per week per member (about 2/3 of members involved), depending on the week.

Build and Competition Season:
Meeting every day. Three hours per weekday and 6-7 hours each on Saturday and Sunday. Outreach activities take up 1-3 hours of time per week, depending on the member.

Offseason (May-September):
Sporadically meeting, largely working on outreach. I’d say probably 2-3 hours per week. The week or two leading up to offseason events are busier.

This is from a mildly successful team with membership in the upper teens. I’d highly doubt a team meeting on that schedule could win events.

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How has doing homework at the start of practice affected the team? Is this a recent development or has it always been this way?

Does it speed up students and thus allow for more build time? Does this urgency result in students rushing through homework and negatively impacting grades? What happens if homework takes too long – where is the line drawn? For the collaboration: do your students happen to have many shared classes or are there students who just work alone? How does the inevitable homework balance between certain classes which correspond to certain students affect things? Is Thomas always stuck grinding through APUSH longer than anyone while everyone is working on the robot, and does that causes issues?

I’m interested in this structure because it’s not one we do and I’m wondering if it would be more productive given that I – a student – could see it potentially making me faster, while potentially introducing more stress and less time for me to feel comfortable with a subject.

(I should probably note that for my particular circumstance, my parents dislike me doing robotics before almost all my homework is done which can be a challenge given that work times start quite soon after school finishes – my parents have always treated academics as first, and robotics and anything else as second; I’m sure most of the rest of my team has different circumstances.)

Thanks

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We have employed this strategy for our entire 10 years as a team

Our main priority is school. If you are struggling with school, no more robotics until that is resolved. We find that our students grades tend to go up, as there are other students to work with on homework with and help when studying (not including mentors). As long as there is a mentor who walks around occasionally, the students are quite productive. We generally find that students spend 1-2 hours per night on homework. If they need to take all night, then so be it. If we need them to work on a certain part of the robot but they are swamped, we either train someone else, or motivate them to finish their homework quickly. We have not had any major issues with this strategy, we generally find that the most productive and involved students can whip out their homework

We also have mentors available to tutor who have recently graduated college in many disciplines, such as physics and math

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My team is “successful” by some definition (Champs elims regulars), and our schedule is pretty similar to OPs, but we meet more often during build season. Typically 4 nights per week (3-5 hours) and a Saturday for 8 hours. We have never taken the robot home or anything like that.

We’ve met a lot less this year because of our schools COVID restrictions (no Saturdays, and only started meeting in mid-February), and our bot is suffering because of that.

Our team is full of people who enjoy FRC but it’s not their top priority, so they carve our 4 months for it, but mostly abandon it the other 8.

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This year we were a “mostly build season” team. We could not start training sessions (1 day per week, 3 hours) until mid October due to school limitations. Non-teacher mentors weren’t allowed on campus until almost November. So our training sessions were thin and not as useful as in years past.

Couple this with 14/15 members having zero FRC experience, and build season was… challenging. We met for two 4 hour weekday meetings, and a 6-8 hour Saturday. If we did not do the KoP chassis and limit ourselves to a static shooter and mid bar climb, we likely would have had no robot at our week 2 event (it was cut close as it was). An everybot would have been a safer choice, and I think the appropriate choice for this year’s meeting schedule.

We’ve been doing the build season schedule mentioned above for a decade. We’ll add an extra meeting per week for the last couple of weeks prior to competition, but have never met more than 4 days in a week. It works for us.

But training sessions need to start earlier in the year. On kick off day kids should know how to do everything necessary to build a robot in 6-8 weeks. No more training after January 1.

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I noticed that quite a few teams meet for only a few hours each week before Kickoff then jump up to several hours per day on many days of the week. This is what several teams I have mentored in the past have done. Do some team members get surprised or overwhelmed by the sudden increase in time commitment? Do you prepare them in some way for this significant increase in time and effort? Does this cause some team members and possibly mentors to drop off?

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This is the first year that our team has done offseason meetings of any kind, and they were very infrequent compared to many others in this thread - about once every 2 weeks for about 3 hours a time. We ramped up in-season to about 15 hours a week, which again seems much less than others here.
Our team was pretty good at retaining members from offseason to build season - only a handful of students ended up dropping out (we even gained a couple of people as offseason continued). We tried to make the time commitments crystal clear from the get-go, and that probably contributed significantly to retention. There is also some overlap between the FRC team and the robotics classes at our school, which gives students rudimentary FRC skills and extra time in the build season to work on the robot.
This has definitely been eye-opening. We’ve always been a middle-of-the-road team, and this is definitely something to look at for the team to get over the hump.

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I think this team’s dual challenges of undertrained students from too little pre-Build training time + having less than 10 hours per week during Build (after subtracting dinner breaks & time off due to winter break) compound each other. More pre-Build training time will definitely be part of my recommendation.

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