Research on FIRST!

FIRST General Forum
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Hi everyone!
As an IB student, I have to write a paper on a topic of my choice for my math class. I have chosen to research the correlation between the amount of funding a team receives via sponsorship and fundraising, as well as team size, and the amount of success a team experiences throughout their season. Of course, there are many ways to determine a team’s success, but I am using data from the awards a team has received and their achievements in competition over the past 3 years. I will release my findings to the community for the use of teams! Please consider filling out this form, this can be done independently or as a team.
Thank you in advance!

Link:

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The form seems to be locked to your organization :slight_smile:

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Here is the updated link, so sorry about that

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Should be all set now, thank you for letting me know!!

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doesn’t work. if this is your school account, your school might prevent you from share docs publically. try use your personal google account.

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I’ve gotten quite a few responses… I’ll take a look. Thanks!

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It seemed to work for me just now.

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I managed to fill out the form! I would love to read your paper when you’re finished!

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Of course! Thank you so much :slight_smile:

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Thank you for taking the time to fill it out :slight_smile:

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18 responses already! Thanks everyone

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I am interested in how you will be quantifying the success across all the different questions, especially with awards and the text responses.

I was going to try a similar thing for my IA, but ran into an issue with trying to quantify success. Are you trying a points added system across all awards? How are you ensuring limits on the amount of awards across all teams and the number of the awards a team may earn?

I will be interested in how your IA will turn out, but I would personally wait until graduation before publishing, as it is hard to prove sometimes that you didn’t take someone else’s work wholesale.

Also, last thing is the sample size. Most IAs I have looked at have a large sample size gathered as it improves correlation and independence tests, but even with 50 teams represented it’s just about 1% of the FRC population in 2024. Your survey doesn’t distinguish years for awars at least, meaning your time frame goes back to 1992 with all the teams from then to now being valid.

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Not the first time this topic has come up, nor will it be the last. Here is a particularly pertinent example from 2019.

I suggest a review of CD threads on the subject. These will go back at least as far as 2002.

Tldr: the correlation is tenuous at best, even when normalized for cost of living, economic sectors in the region, hard to quantity funding, etc. Then you have to account for CD not being a repetitive sample, which because you cant really adjust for that forces you to reframe your research question to only be CD teams.

You may find value in including a time component to your analysis (team success as a function of “normalized budget”). E.g. is budget a bigger/smaller/indistinguishable factor in success now vs 10years ago/ pre covid?

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