Preventing burnout of our students, volunteers, & mentors

FIRST General Forum
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Funny how a troll \ “exaggeratory” post generated so much conversation. Now don’t get me wrong; I love FRC. I love what it does for my students, my kids, and me! But, I’m writing this post because I know that in 8 months, I will have had some of the greatest fun in my life at the expense of other things in life.

I don’t know if this is any of you, but I find it hard to turn off my brain, turn off robotics, turn off chief, until champs will have ended. And I think this is due to an “all-nighter” mentality when it comes to robotics because of the “short” window of time that robotics takes (at least, we tell ourselves this).

Our team is a fantastic team, but when we have 3 mentors serving 30+ students, when you count build season, competition season, and season wrap-up, it’s a lot of dedicated time for students/mentors/teachers/parents. It’s 18/52 weeks of FUN, but it’s also 18/52 weeks of diverted attention. This “all-nighter” mentality tells us, that we have limited build time, limited testing time, limited programming auto time, limited strat time, limited drive time and it’s gogogogogogo until season end. And then, cold turkey, I shut everything off and a wave of relief/depression hit’s me for about a week or two as I re-acclimate to my normal life of church / job family / and SLEEP.

So I’m gonna offer perhaps an unpopular proposal and if you don’t like it feel free to amend or counter-propose. What if we extend our build season so it’s not as much of a sprint and more of a marathon? What if the game was released in September and we kept week 1 where it is today? I would much rather spend these 18/52 weeks spread out throughout the school year rather than in a compact 4-month period. I know some may be saying, “well ur just going to fill that empty time with robotics”, but I would disagree. I mean maybe I’d make the mistake of sprinting one more year, but I don’t think even I could sustain such a high focus for robotics for that long.

If you extend the build season, I think you prevent the “need” for all-nighters and an energy drink budget. You’d spend more QUALITY time with the robot. You’d have more chances to “sleep on it” or “do some shower thinking”. You’d prevent more mental breakdowns (we had to deal with this on our team for a couple of students), by hopefully enforcing a “no robotics after dinner policy”. You’d raise the floor for many teams that have limited mentor time, to go at a slower pace. I know that at least our team could/should have the self control to self regulate time, attention, and energy spent at robotics. You’d allow lower resourced teams to dedicate the time they need to work on their robot rather than being forced to assemble it at their first competition (maybe these lower resourced teams don’t have a workshop but could spend time planning, or even reading chief :slight_smile: )

I read through this topic. Please don’t flog me for rekindling a thread. A lot of posts on this thread said that the short timeline makes the game “funner”. I think, at least personally, the timeline makes it needlessly stressful and anxiety ridden. I look at how hard these Open Alliance teams work, specifically 2980s and @eedoga; This guy seems like he gets completely drained of every last drop energy he has) and I wonder if he or you would feel better if this energy was invested in a more spread out matter than it does now.

What I like about the past thread, is this specific post. I think these are some real solutions proposed by @Lil_Lavery that should be considered.

What do you think? Would this help?

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while but what exactly is the harm of extending the current build season? So far the reasons I have seen listed was that it makes FIRST less ‘fun’ and that the tight deadline was apart of the challenge. I dont think I have ever heard someone refer to the countless all nighters and rushed days spent on building the robot as the deadline draws near as ‘fun’. We shouldn’t be challenging students with tight deadlines but rather with more intricate games that allow for more advanced aspects of robot building.

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Build season affects students pretty majorly meaning they have less time for school and personal stuff. Extending it would result in students sacrificing grades and personal relationships further. Also bigger teams will be able to more consistently pump out stuff as they have many different members contributing portions whereas every small competitive team is unsustainable. Also letting designs get more complicated isn’t very feasible, high schoolers are simply bad at engineering because they have no hours and this will result in technical mentors taking an even more prominent role as designs get more mechanically complex. Although the idea of mentor involvement sounds good on paper it often results in mentors becoming overbearing and killing opportunities for students to learn. For example ive seen teams where any part remotely complicated is machined by mentors so students don’t get an opportunity to learn and I have been having friendly conversations with teams that were shut down by mentors because we need to be “serious”. Many people already take this competition too seriously but grown adults telling teenagers to let them handle things or to stop having fun makes it worse. The less complicated the robot is the less likely technical mentors are to intervene.

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I think time crunch is a part of what makes the challenge interesting. Removing it removes part of what makes FRC unique and special. It’s definitely part of why I do FRC.

I also worry that there will certainly be teams that have year-long build season, where they maintain the “all-nighter mentality” with no breaks in between. A long offseason helps teams rest, recharge, and research before their next build.

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For me the ‘all night-er mentality’ is part of the fun. That sprint gives it that energy, gives it that addictive-ness that other activities haven’t given to me. We have to cram our best work into 3ish months and it really levels the program up. The short sprint build season is also the part of the challenge, there’s a reason not everyone does the FIRST program and that is okay. It is 100000% good to ‘sleep on it’ and not completely burn yourself out with robotics, but there are ways to mitigate burn out and help yourself through a season. I get it, mental breakdowns happen, and those who suffer are valid and need to take care of themselves, but that is why it’s a robotics TEAM one person should be able to take a break and that’s ok.

At the end of the day, this is indeed a high-school program, and ones life will not end if a mechanism fails or some code bricks, we are meant to have fun and sure winning makes it a hell of a lot more fun, but there needs to be that balance. That ability to balance both work (robotics + job), school, and social (friends + extracurriculars + family) is a very good skill to have, and I think passively is a great thing to take out of FIRST come life after FRC.

EDIT: not advocating for all-nighters (that’s unhealthy cmon yall), just the mentality of hard work in the balance of life

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For those advocating the all-nighter mentality, I feel the days/weeks before competition you’d get the same ramp-up, but I don’t think it has to be as “severe” as it is. But it’s a preference thing and I of course respect your preference!

For those advocating that the 4 month build season will turn into a year long one, I think this may happen for one year, but it’s not maintainable, and we will be forced to lead our teams in a sustainable rhythm.

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Extending it to a multi-season activity would lose most of my team. Very few students on my team are robotics-only. Many do other sports, especially in the fall, that make it hard for them to attend any meetings. So far this fall we’ve had three meetings, and only 5 students have made it to every meeting (and only two of those for the entire meeting time!). Of the 20 students on our roster, we haven’t even seen 5 of them yet this fall.

Drastically extending the season into the fall would make students feel like they have to work then or they’ll fall behind. It’ll put more pressure on them as they try to juggle other activities, and likely lead them to additional burnout over a longer period. I would not be a fan of it, at least not for my team.

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So…One problem. Robotics season is already year round for teams like mine. That said, if you stretch out build season then that would increase what teams would be capable of. Increased expectations would mean that there would necessarily be some other team out there that would use the extra time to do something even more incredible than teams already do. That would mean that in order to be at all competitive then my team would have to do the same. and so on and so on.

Currently we have FTC and 8 or so FLL teams running. Things are a little bit more relaxed. The FTC teams are only meeting 12 hours a week outside of school and My FLL team (which just started) is meeting 4.5.

Over the summer we had community outreach events and directly after our competition season was over we had weekend camps to help gear up for FLL.

Honestly if you extended the FRC season I don’t think it would make much of a difference for us, and it would take away the lie we were all told when we first started…“FIRST is just 6 weeks to build your robot followed by a competition or two and then your done. Super easy!”

I hope I don’t sound like I am whining. I drank the coolaid a long time ago and I don’t really know what I would do if I wasn’t doing this.

Edoga

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… this …

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We’re year-round as well, though between May and December we really only meet a couple times a week. (Shop is open every day after school and all day Saturday and Sunday during build, one weeknight and Saturdays at reduced hours at other times.)

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We agree.

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I suggest you research what 118 actually does before making such statements.

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We are already year round. We have several major events in the summer and fall, do all of training now (including several robot builds), and meet three days a week. We do this so we can do well in build season without the need for five, six or seven day work weeks. I like this way well enough.

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(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)

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This would also interfere with fall sports, on top of the competition season already interfering with spring sports. People who are both the star players of their sport (QB, Varsity striker/keeper ;), etc) and the captains/leaders of subteams will have a REALLY hard time dealing with both, not to mention potential college searching, ACTs, etc.

Also, it would cross three major holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (And of course, international teams will have their own holidays in that time). I feel like this would be unhealthy; with how important robotics is, it may encourage students (especially older students who can drive) to prioritize robotics over family, if they for example really need to get something done that day.

Finally, in the real world, you’re gonna have short deadlines. Especially if you work at a large company like Apple or Google, where consistent release schedules are a must. Tight deadlines are gonna happen, and the 6-week build season I feel really helps emulate this. Although I do agree that it could be toned down just a bit. We’re high schoolers, not genius engineers in the world’s richest company.

I absolutely love the thought (and I appreciate it, because the less 4-hour-sleep-nights I get the day of competitions the better). However I’m gonna have to disagree for the reasons stated above.

Ultimately I think the solution is to encourage a culture not of pushing through all nighters, but of managing your time and balancing it properly with school, family, and your own health, shifting it to be more about “do the best that you safely can”, not just “be the best”. If you need all nighters to effectively build a robot, then you’re doing something fundamentally wrong. Or you’re overextending your team’s capabilities. You don’t need a turret, for example, so if you don’t have the manpower to create one, don’t!

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@EricH I’m trying to understand your opinion on this. What do you disagree with about what he said? Building an everybot is quite literally copying and pasting a robot cad.

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image

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It isn’t.

I’ve seen too many everybots that, while obviously everybots, have been customized. You have to figure out what works best from the everybot for your team.

While there’s a significant amount of copy-paste, if all you can do is copy-paste, you aren’t going to do well.

There’s another dimension as well, but I’ll leave that well enough alone as it’ll get me off on a rant.

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I can confirm that during build season, my time has to be managed better than the rest of the year, my student’s grades suffer (mileage varies), I dont see my family for days at a time (quality time), I eat out a lot and terribly bad food/snacks, hardly get any sleep, my work suffers, etc. etc.

I can recall every season where we did all-nighters a lot in order to finish our robot in time for our 1st event (2000, 2005, 2006, 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019). My feelings toward it changed over the years, once I had kids. While it was cool to reflect on it when I was younger and without kids, I dont ever want to go through it again.

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