No MAR since I couldn’t think of a good way to split pre-districts PA teams. I’ll probably geolocate PA teams to add MAR to v2.
There are some slight discrepancies between district team lists and the teams the script picked up for each year due to how TBA is counting teams for a given year.
Without FIM:
https://i.imgur.com/1nXtDK3h.png
Plateaued districts:
https://i.imgur.com/aYqHJVSh.png
Tabulated data:
https://i.imgur.com/WM537vD.png
The only district that has seen a notable increase in team growth rate since the switch is Michigan, which obviously has other outside factors (state funding) that contribute significantly. North Carolina has also seen a slight increase, and it will be interesting to see how that progresses into the next few years.
Ontario has at least been able to rougly maintain the rapid levels of team growth that started in under the regional format in 2013.
PNW and CHS haven’t just plateud, but shown some shrinkage in teams since the switch to the district format.
Indiana has the flattest plateu I’ve ever seen. It’s almost impressive in a way.
Very cool analysis. Just want to point out that a lot of the Ontario data from earlier years seems suspect. In 2004 there were at least 60 Ontario teams (not 19 like your data suggests), most of which competed at this event:
What’s your data source?
I’m pulling team lists for each year from TBA and checking the state_prov field, I must have missed some in Ontario. I’ll check it when I add MAR.
Yep, looks like some of the Ontario teams have ON instead of Ontario for that field. Whoops. :o
I get the feeling that Michigan will never stop growing when it comes to the FRC. Even if that means schools start having five or six FRC teams.
If Michigan’s growth continues, there will be more teams in FiM within the next few seasons than there were in all of FRC when I first started.
I’ve been working on a huge TBA data science project and there are quite a few irregularities with the data… I’d be sure to look for both the state abbreviation and the state name itself.
for example… here are some events with missing state fields
events_df.loc[events_df.EVENT_ID == ‘2007az’, ‘STATE_PROVINCE’] = ‘AZ’
events_df.loc[events_df.EVENT_ID == ‘2007ca’, ‘STATE_PROVINCE’] = ‘CA’
events_df.loc[events_df.EVENT_ID == ‘2007fl’, ‘STATE_PROVINCE’] = ‘FL’
events_df.loc[events_df.EVENT_ID == ‘2007br’, ‘STATE_PROVINCE’] = ‘Brazil’
events_df.loc[events_df.EVENT_ID == ‘2007ct’, ‘STATE_PROVINCE’] = ‘CT’
events_df.loc[events_df.EVENT_ID == ‘2007ga’, ‘STATE_PROVINCE’] = ‘GA’
events_df.loc[events_df.EVENT_ID == ‘2007co’, ‘STATE_PROVINCE’] = ‘CO’
The state_prov field changes formatting depending on the year / what FIRST published at last update. Older teams whose data hasn’t been updated follow state codes “NY, ON”, etc. while teams w/ updates localize to a full name of a state / province.
It’s annoying but it’s at least known to be an issue.
Yeah, I just didn’t for Canada because I’m dumb apparently. :rolleyes:
Ontario now lists 62 teams for 2004, which seems about right based on what Karthik said.
I’ve also made at least an attempt at including MAR. The Mid Atlantic Robotics Bylaws Article 1 Section 2 established that MAR included ‘the counties of Pennsylvania including Harrisburg, eastward’, so I defined -77 degrees longitude as the western boundary for MAR and geolocated all teams in PA to figure out whether they would have been in MAR or not. This seems to have been fairly accurate, I added a check to make sure that no current MAR team got listed as being an out-of-MAR PA team.
Here’s an interactive version of the chart, and here are pics:
https://i.imgur.com/zvZ7kuyh.png
In order to achieve growth, there are 2 main things that need to be done.
In Michigan, we have done both.
Doing one or the other is not enough, you need to do both, and do both well.
This is why we have had the growth we have seen thus far in FiM.
This is not easy, but also not impossible.
The underlying economics of FRC is not affordable enough.
FiM has underwritten these costs with government dollars.
This is a local solution which we have been able to achieve but will not be a solution for every region. There are strong political dependencies.
The real solution is program price reduction from HQ.
The fact that HQ still have not acted on this after 10 years of compelling data indicates that they do not actually want growth.
If they did, they would make changes.
Exactly, Michigan has so many teams because even poorer schools have a fighting chance to compete in FRC. In Indiana no one can afford to start a new FRC team. Schools can afford FTC but First often treats FTC as a lesser program and trust me, the kids get it. I know a lot of kids who love FTC because they can do it. In return they feel like they are almost looked down on by First in general.
It has to be made more affordable, or they need to upgrade the more affordable program they do have. Teams are starting to look at alternative programs they can actually afford to do.
FIRST is actually quite up on FTC as far as I can tell. The problem with FTC is that the game play is not as exciting as FRC - especially for the audience. It is really sad that the teams walk away from a given match without knowing whether they won or lost and have to wait for a few matches to be played before they can see the score. FIRST is working to fix that, but has a long way to go. The FTC Scores app helps. The teams can monitor the website and see their scores a few minutes after the match is over. But that is really not exciting in the same way that FRC matches end with a winner being displayed on the screen, Here in NC, a couple of FIRST alums (who have been active as refs since graduating) wrote a real time scoring program. It worked well here in NC. They took it to SSR and had some difficulty given the number of fields and the number of volunteers needed to sit field-side and do the scoring. They tried to use it at Houston for the finals in MMP, but they had not used it all tournament and the scorekeepers struggled a bit leading to the embarrassing result we all saw. However, despite the fumble at Houston, I think the real time scoring made it a lot more interesting to watch the FTC game this year than previous years. I think this year, they will get a lot of those bugs worked out and this may be ready to deploy to all of FTC, which would really be a big win for the program.
I’ll be interested to see what happens to FTC growth now that they are shutting down the super-regionals. For the vast majority of teams, the State championships will be the final tournament for the year. Here in NC, we had 90-something FTC teams last year and we are thinking by the math that maybe 2 or 3 will advance to Houston next year (meaning that only the winning alliance captain will advance based on gameplay unless they also win the inspire award). Our club has had one team go to worlds the past 2 years and another that has gone each of the past 3 years. This is unlikely to happen again, so the relationships that our teams have built with the perennial teams that make it to championships will fade and we will only really “know” the other teams in our state. FTC, as a program, will shrink back to a feeling of a science fair rather than a competitive sport.
FIRST will need to figure out a way to increase the size of the FTC tournament at Worlds if they want to keep that program growing. FIRST works because it is a sport. Yes, it is more than robots, but without the robots and the sport aspect of it, I don’t think you will be able to keep the students inspired. If the sport stops at the state championship level and the teams that advance beyond that have to do so based on the inspire award, then I think you have really lost something important. The alliance system is a core element to the ethos of FIRST that keeps GP alive. If only the winning alliance captain stands a chance of winning their way to worlds on the field, GP is going to break down and you are going to see an every-team-for-themselves attitude creep into the competition which will destroy the program. Then the students will leave FTC and come over the FRC in much bigger numbers than currently and FTC will be relegated back to a sort of Junior Varsity status. That would be sad.
But Jim… 4 out of 5 strategic pillars indicate that FIRST wants growth!
I’d like to point out that you are talking about sustainable growth and not just growth, which is what HQ seems focused on. They don’t seem to care about attrition or sustainability.
It is only a matter of time before a competitor to FRC comes along and has solutions for these problems baked into its foundation.
I think Michigan has done wonderful things and wish their counterparts down here in the Shadow Realm (because apparently that’s what we’re calling South Carolina now) would do the same.
That said, perhaps it’s not a case of “HQ doesn’t actually want growth”, but rather “HQ doesn’t actually want more growth than they’re getting naturally already”? When we’re adding hundreds of teams a year, that is a certain increased load on all the moving parts–KoP distribution, finance receiving all those checks, more events requiring more fields, more team support calls, more exasperated emails to Frank about this or that…you get the idea. Despite what Dean says each year on [strike]that Championship stage[/strike] those Championship stages, I think FIRST would have to make some significant changes to cope with high-three-digit team growth–otherwise you’re just going to burn out more people that are already on the Adam Savage “Am I missing an eyebrow?”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5-xS9sDuLg) tier.
I hope First does not sacrifice quality for growth in order to control expense. FTC is less expensive but like others have said its not the same experience even though it may require the same amount of knowledge, learning, and skill sets.
I think the bigger question implied by the OP is:
If districts help address the underlying economics of FRC (they don’t fix it, but they do help), why are we seeing 3-4 of the district areas plateauing instead of growing?
I can think of multiple answers to this, but I want to hear from people who are more knowledgeable than I am about this.
Jim,
Is FiM concerned about how the proposed changes to “[House Bill 5576](www.msbo.org/sites/default/files/HB5576 Substitute Draft 1.pdf#page=249)” / “Senate Bill No. 863” this year will affect growth and team funding, especially for new teams? It appears that FiM will likely have to share funding with other Robotics programs now (like Vex), while at the same time the overall “pot of money” has not expanded to cover the additional programs.
Thoughts?
Growth AND Sustainability…
The areas where it is plateauing are likely benefiting by the district model simply by sustaining team numbers.
I am in a state that is in the regional model bordered by two district states. We are located an hour from both of those state lines. I am not knowledgeable about competing in the district model, but would very much like to be. We asked FIRST if we could be an SC team that got adopted by a neighboring district essentially becoming a district team. We were told No. We didn’t care which district it was NC/PCH/even CHS/IN would have worked for us. Our current state leaders do not want to put the effort into moving to districts.
I know that if SC went to districts there are defunct teams that would come back. There are teams that struggle to raise money each year to compete at 1 60+ team event held in SC. They are discouraged each year when they cannot compete at a second one. One of those being 1102 who packed up and jumped the border into Georgia. From 2011 to 2017 they only competed at 1 event each year. Look up their 2018 story on TBA if you do not know it already https://www.thebluealliance.com/team/1102/history . If SC was in the district model they would have been a team that would have stayed and sustained our numbers. Instead we had to rely on Georgia to keep this team going.
In short districts may not grow all areas but they certainly sustain them. IF you don’t believe that ask the teams in the district models what they would do if they were forced to compete in the regional model again.
Jim, do you see a point where other considerations outweigh these ones? I’m thinking of very small rural schools and communities. Some of these schools get so small that even getting 10% of the 9-12 graders is 5 students or less, and the available mentor pool is very slim and often transitory (parents that mentor until their kids are out of the program). I’m wondering if we could put a rough number of the school and community size where FRC just isn’t viable, regardless of financial considerations.
Strangely - this is a problem NC is having to tackle and it’s leading to a lot of “community based” teams - I think we have more than any other region within FRC. Granted, with them comes their own challenges. It’s fostering a lot of resentment from the FRC community for public schools and administrations rather than compassion and reasoned understanding of the complexities on the other side of the office wall.
