Team 2980 2025 Open Source Thread

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Sunday 01/05/25

Kids…young FIRSTers…Everyone, I need you to do me a favor.

Over this break I have gone for dog walks with some of my teacher friends. I have also run into them around school for various reasons. And I am going to relay a story to you.

See…the thing is, I am really blessed to get to work with some of the most amazing people our school has to offer. The kids on my team are amazing and wonderful and I get to work with most of them for YEARS. Starting in 3rd or 4th grade. I get to watch them grow up into young adults, and so many of them stay in touch moving forward.

But…back to my point/request.

I was talking to a teacher who was in her classroom over break preparing for the rest of the second trimester. Her daughter had a thing in town so while she waited she went to her classroom to get some work done. We were talking about how all of us have that one class where you would really rather not…Or that one group of kids where you wonder how they all ended up in the same class…and how exhausting it has become over the past several years.

How it zaps our love of teaching, and makes it so that even the classes we love to teach and the kids we love to work with aren’t enough.

She teared up. Another teacher said, “We have to keep doing this until the next part” By next part she was referring to retirement. For me 12 years away. For her…She left the conversation feeling down.

I ran into another teacher friend at the copier. Same story.

She has had to reconfigure all of her classes because where they used to run themselves giving her time to work one on one with kids (she teaches a number of classes that should be more self directed) now she has to spoon feed kids the information. She felt like her kids wouldn’t do the slightest bit of work and everything is about skipping to the end or just hitting submit on a blank assignment and going back to playing whatever the latest online game is that kids shouldn’t be playing in class…

A paranormal fantasy romance novel that I am reading,The main character ended up in hell somehow. In this version of hell people are forced to do repetitive tasks with little meaning without enough time to truly rest between tasks. That is how she felt about teaching right now.

We wondered where we went wrong and talked about what needed to happen in order for things to get on the right track.

So, back to being a mentor and getting to work with the best and brightest and all that. Here is my ask.

Go easy on your mentors this year. So many people that I have talked to are absolutely exhausted. I know you guys try, but please just think a little bit before you get defensive with them, or before you push back when they ask you to do something.

On another note, a brighter note?

Before the team started this year the kids decided they wanted to cut back the number of hours we meet in person. We are cutting one weekend day and one weekday so the team will meet something like 14 - 15 hours a week. We are also getting rid of homework hour and leaving at 5 instead of 6 PM on weekdays.
Honestly this makes me a bit nervous. On the other hand, the programmers decided they want to come in on Sunday and the awards kids are coming in on Tuesdays…So…Not much different from most years.

My hope is that in the least I will be able to do things like walk my dogs a few times a week, and I’ll be able to pick up my prescriptions at the pharmacy. (most of the time during build season the pharmacy is closed before I get home. (small town)

I just wrote a whole bunch of doubt down…well by just I mean last night when I write the majority of this, but then I had another thought…Manifest what you want to see in the world.

This year is going to be amazing! The game looks like fun, and there are some strategic elements that are going to provide interesting dynamics. The game pieces are big, but not too big. 16 inches is a lot of space to take up in a robot and I can see a lot of ball carriers or intakes getting smashed. Worse, reaching out for a ball Algae means risking getting penalties for contacting inside someone else’s frame perimeter. Tubes (Coral) are also relatively large. The one of each limit will also be interesting as well as giving the opponent an opportunity to score points by scoring points through the processor Cooperatition though…

And scoring coral may be an important ability because other teams might want to get the coral ranking point, while in the least removing algae is important because scoring coral can’t happen if the algae is still in place.

Note: I haven’t watched any of the robot in 3 days videos yet. I plan to, I just want to get my own feel for things first. (I hope you can understand.) I will try to post as often as possible.

Ok…Enough for now.

Edoga

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Monday 01/06/24

I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics.

Ok…so I have the game manual…all of it printed out in a binder taking up most of my desk.

I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics.

Ok, so I am visiting chief delphi the same way I would check my email or my phone, or my watch for alerts.

I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics.

Ok, so I am coming up with designs and I already “know” my team is going to build some sort of elevator and…

I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics. I am not going to obsess about FIRST Robotics.

I am falling into a trap of my own making.

That said, I am watching some of my kids fall into traps of their own. I have a kid that does this thing. She sits off by herself with headphones on. She then proceeds to struggle for hours trying to figure things out on her own. The thing is, if left to her own devices, she would just sit and draw. She wouldn’t draw things that are exactly relevant to what we are working on, more just draw things that are things for things sake. So, I can’t put her on the media team because she wouldn’t actually do anything there.

Yesterday she actually tried to do the task she was assigned. She was supposed to research different intakes for coral. I’m not sure she understood what I meant by research, but she did make a drawing of some sort of gripper with an arm and a basket?

The other thing is I told the kids to look through the list of tasks and find people who were supposed to be researching similar things. Hard to do that when you have your headphones on for the entire meeting.

Another kid on the team was given task 10: Lift Coral 31.75 inches above the ground. There were a series of these with different heights for the various places to score coral. Again work with people who are doing similar tasks. Instead he went in the back of the room by himself and started working on an algae shooter. He intentionally ignored the rest of the team, and did his own thing,even going so far as to pull some of the other kids off of what they were supposed to be researching.

Another kid refused to take a task all together and instead sat by himself writing a fundraising speech. I wouldn’t complain about kids doing fundraising except for the fact that had he said anything to anyone he would know that we already have a fundraising packet with all of that already made, done, and dusted…but he spent the entire time we were supposed to be working on coming up with ideas doing that instead.

I just spent a bit of time entering grades in my robotics class. My kids were supposed to be working quietly on an assignment using their robots…Some did…Others seem to have lost the temporal connection to school and classwork. (I think that is a huge factor in why so many of your teachers are so exhausted…Kids don’t do classwork when it is assigned, instead doing meaningless things during class time and turning in relatively meaningless work later on. (My opinion only and not worth anything)). At the end of the class one of the kids who mostly plays chromebook games all class period came back and asked why he had a bad grade in the class…”Well…you failed a test and have 4 out of 6 assignments marked as missing…He is falling into a trap of his own I suppose.

So back to the kids who struggle with the idea of being on a team.

Back to kid assigned task 10. It isn’t that I mind him going off and prototyping something, and honestly no one said the kids couldn’t swap tasks…but it is more that he didn’t do that. I’m not even sure he looked at the tasks. He didn’t argue that the tasks should be broken up differently. He just went off and did his own thing.

Last year ended up being really hard for my team. We built an amazing robot, honestly one of the best robots we have ever made on this team, but the team fell apart as a team.

There was plenty of blame to go around. There are some kids on the team who don’t really understand the nature of what we do here, and why we are under so much pressure. The kids who don’t show up for a week at a time for whatever reason and then show up and don’t know what is going on and need everyone to stop what they are doing and catch them up…Ugh.

On the other hand the kids who do all of everything (often at the direct exclusion of other kids on the team,) started complaining about the other kids on the team and comparing them to kids on other teams.They started walking up to kids on other teams and quizzing them about their robots. And coming back and quizzing kids on our team saying…”See…they are dumb and don’t know anything while the kids on other teams are so much better at everything.”

It all blew up and ended really badly.

Hurt people hurt people and the people they hurt, hurt others in turn.

I am really worried that we are falling into the same patterns and the same traps.

During FTC a junior on the team sent me an email saying that other kids on the team wouldn’t let them do anything. The same kid who emailed complaining routinely says “I don’t know how to do any of that” in regards to the list of stuff we actually need to get done. The same kid shows up for parts of some meetings, eats snacks, and hangs out wandering around the room not really getting much done.

And now that FRC has started I think I have seen them for part of one meeting?

I am really worried that we are falling into the same patterns and the same traps.

The same way the kid in my class doesn’t understand why he is failing when he has 4 missing assignments and an F on a test.

And…I don’t know how to fix it.

In anycase, here is the work product from yesterday:

Ok…Enough for now

Edoga

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01/10/25

I need to learn to relax.

Tonight we have our annual robot design competition. The kids split up into three teams, each team comes up with a design, and then they present their designs to the community. The community votes and sometimes frankensteins the robot, and then the team builds a robot based on what the community tells them to make.

The community comes back on February 25th and we have to show them what we made.

Fingers crossed?

The kids scared me today. They have sort of gotten into the habit of doing that as of late.

Yesterday I had a dentist appointment. So I got a sub. I don’t like getting a sub for a half day because it means someone has to get all dolled up and go to work but they don’t get paid for the whole day. So I got a full day sub. It was good because I took the rest of the time to take my dogs for a walk, fix my mother-in-law’s sink, and take my second part 107 pilots practice re-test. (I take the official test tomorrow at 9:30 AM. Wish me luck.

The problem is that someone started a rumor that the robotics meeting was cancelled. Day before a presentation to the community with the superintendent, the principle, and the CTE director something like 80% of the team didn’t show up…

And then today…It scared me because they walked in as if they didn’t know we were actually doing anything this evening.

But…They got on the phone, they rallied, and they got a bunch of them in here. I think they are going to be ok for tonight! They are putting together presentation! They are putting together their poster boards. I think 2 of the robots are even really well thought out. One…not so much, but still right!

The livestream should show up somewhere on this channel:

I’ll edit the post if I get a more specific link.

Tonight from 6-8

Ok…Enough for now.

Edoga

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01/11/25

First things first. The live stream didn’t happen last night. The event still happened, but the live stream didn’t because there was a problem with the wifi in the library. So, if you wanted to watch and follow along, sorry that you couldn’t.

At one of the off season events “Bordie best in show” I think, I was talking with the lead mentor from another team. Their team cut way back on hours last year, we are cutting back this year. He said something to the effect of, “We didn’t get as much done as we did in prior years, but we got enough done.” and the difference in what they got done wasn’t as great as the difference in the amount of time they spent in meetings.

Yesterday was a prime example of just that. We presented the community with three designs, two of which were pretty well thought out. One of the design teams sort of fell apart before it started, and another one, while decently put together wasn’t at the same level as the third. This showed in the communities selection, Afte the first round of voting it was something like 35 for one design, and 10 or so for each of the other two. Second round of voting, the least thought out idea dropped to 1 holdout.

Here is the thing…

The design we ended up with, a jack of all trades that uses an elevator to place coral that strives to load coral from the human player station and algae from the ground, and can hopefully score algae in the barge as well as the processor.

I am a bit concerned about the proposed software package, I know one of my kids can definitely pull it off. The question is, will we get us last year at Glacier peak, or us last year at Auburn?

I am concerned that so many kids on the team don’t seem to understand the purpose of the team. We have a lot of no shows.

01/13/25

I don’t have very long so I won’t be able to write very much.

I was struck by how many kids just didn’t show up for Saturday’s meeting, and even those that did show up sort of wandered through showing up late and leaving early. There doesn’t seem to be the necessary drive to get anything done.

We got all of our field elements done which is really nice. I so appreciate the kids on the team who came in and got that done. Many of them are kids who need a lot of direction before they make any progress on things, and building field elements is very much up their ally. Unfortunately a lot of these kids will just as soon sit in the hallway on their cell phones. If they are given direct instruction, they will work really hard. It is more what happens when you leave them to their own devices, but Saturday and Sunday they really came through.

The hard part is, there are very few jobs left that cater to that type of work. We have some service projects, wheelchair ramps and the like, but with the CNC plasma cutter and the 3d printers a lot of what we are doing sort of does itself.

Ok…I will try to write more later.

Enough for now?

Edoga

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First off I want to say I always enjoy reading through your posts every year. The insight you provide is a welcome reality check that I sometimes need as a mentor. Seeing someone talk about the struggle of balancing everyday life with FRC and doing what is best for the students while also needing to do what’s best for themselves really helps when I am struggling with the same decisions.

I really hope you continue writing these for as long as you see the value in them.

Now:

I am just trying to parse out what is being said here. Is the implication that they met 30% less but the robot was only 50% as good, or they met 50% less time and the robot was only 30% worse?

I am guessing the former since you see worried about it.

I have always been a big proponent of teams cutting down on meeting time because I have found a lot of value in doing so.

When people see teams who have a lot of success talking about how little they meet a lot of them seem flabbergasted but I think one of the things that is lost on them is how affective the meeting time these teams do have needs to be. If you are the type of team who meets week nights for 2 hours but 45 minutes of each of them is recap/updates then cutting meetings doesn’t really help because the meetings you have are not using their time effectively. When we meet on weekdays it is for 2.5 hours and typically it is 10 or less minutes updating everyone on what on our “to do list” was done and what needs to be focused on today, then everyone goes to what they want to do.

In your first post you describe your week as 14-15 hours with only one of those days being on a weekend, this is about what we meet but we get 11 of those hours on Saturday and Sunday so if you don’t mind I am just curious what your teams schedule is supposed to be (what days a week and how long you meet plus how long what regularly occurs is supposed to take) vs what the teams schedule actually is.

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01/14/25

First off to answer a question.

Is the implication that they met 30% less but the robot was only 50% as good, or they met 50% less time and the robot was only 30% worse?

I actually hadn’t done the math on it but…we meet 57% as much as in the past (working on the robot) and we did about 66% as much work? Something like that…

So…take everything I say with a grain of salt. I worry…a lot. I worry when things are going great. I worry when everything goes to hell. If I am not worried a whole bunch of things are probably terribly wrong and I am trying to hide the fact that I am worried from my kids.

Currently the team meets mon, wed, thur from after school until 5 PM. The awards team meets Tuesdays and we have been doing service projects on Sundays, but neither Tuesdays or Sundays are regular meeting time. We used to meet every day until 6PM.taking an hour to do homework in the classroom.

So we really only gave up about 8 hours on Sundays and 2.5 hours on Tuesdays which different sub teams have then filled in. (so we really haven’t lost or changed anything? I’m really not good at this.)

Week 1, research week, we only met the minimal hours except for 7 kids who met on Tuesday to work on a presentation.

As for what is and what isn’t getting done?

For “research/design week we split into 3 subteams, and each subteam is responsible for coming up with a design concept for this year’s game.

Some years things work out better than others. One year for example the teams ended up horribly unbalanced and one of the groups got up in front of the community and just played a robot in 3 days video and said, “We’re gonna do that.” Yeah…the community was not impressed with that one.

Other years the community asks me which robot I prefer and I can honestly say, “Choose whichever one you would like. They are all good ideas and it will really come down to execution.” (I don’t ever tell them which idea I like best, and I try really hard not to steer them in any direction unless a team alumni is saying things about one or the other design that is wildly out of the park.”

This year everything was Ok. Some parts of the presentations were sloppy, and one of the presentations really pushed the boundaries of passing as acceptable. Not as much thought was put into the presentations as has been done in past years, so at least one of the teams presented an idea for climbing that would have required the robot to extend more than 18 inches outside of the frame perimeter.

In the past teams would have done work to make sure their ideas were at least nominally possible based on kinematics. This year I think 2 of the groups did, but honestly I am not 100% sure on that one.

Things like that. On Thursday one of the teams came to me and said, “We should just go with 2 teams because 1 of the teams hasn’t met that much and they don’t really have an idea.”

So basically, if we are going to meet less often, then we need to make the time we have much more focused than we otherwise would.

Since we last spoke and the issue I am struggling with in terms of the makeup of the team this year?

We have too many kids who say they will do things, or complain that they aren’t getting assigned jobs, but when they are given jobs they either don’t do them, or do them really shoddily. Not everyone is doing this, but the harder part is that kids are not asking for help when they need it, and not reporting that for whatever reason they can’t do whatever job they accepted.

Normally over the years, kids would group out of a lot of these behaviors,but some of my juniors and seniors are still behaving this way.

The harder part is that historically when things haven’t worked out the people who bear the brunt of the blame are the kids who actually do the work.

A side cultural issue…Yesterday two kids got into it. One of the kids had a decent experience doing scouting last year and wanted to take on the role of lead scout. They decided that they were going to use our FTC season to practice for the role. Unfortunately during FTC the student in question had driver’s ed. They missed most of the season and didn’t do any work to lead scouting efforts at our competitions.

Yesterday they came to the meeting. They had arranged for an alumni to come in and help them with creating a shouting form.

Couple things the kid in question and the alumni didn’t know. During the intervening time another kid took over scouting and the team had decided they wanted to switch from paper scouting to doing something online based.

Another kid was a bit too blunt and said, “Why are you doing scouting, that is so and so’s job.” or something to that effect. (Not really anyone’s place to say at this point.

So…this comes down to communication failures. The kid who wants to do scouting failed to communicate that they wouldn’t be able to do it during FTC because they were doing driver’s ed. The other kid failed to communicate their disappointment and concern over the fact that someone who took on a job didn’t show up and didn’t communicate along with their desire to have the new person who stepped up into the role during FTC continue in that position.

As for me…I failed to see it all happening in real time so that I could proactively address the situation.

01/15/25

So…Last night I wanted to keep writing this, but we have a wheelchair ramp build coming up and I needed to get the materials list together in order for us to be able to order the materials in time and at some point I got tired and went to sleep.

The problem on that front…I find myself wanting more me time…We didn’t have robotics last night. I rushed home after school, took my dogs for a walk, made dinner, did the dishes, worked on school stuff, and went over the CADD model of the wheelchair ramp Oh, and I did laundry. By the time I was done with everything it was almost 11:00. I could have gone to bed right then, but I wanted some me time, so I ended up watching youtube videos about pilots making mistakes and what they did wrong (https://www.youtube.com/@pilot-debrief)…Then all of a sudden it was almost midnight. I get up at 4:15 AM pretty compulsively so…yeah…not the best recipe. And tonight I am going to have to do everything I can not to do the same thing all over again. Also, I have to drive the van down to Olympia ( a 4 hour drive) on Monday after potentially doing a ramp build on Sunday?

Two things today. One is, a kid who is on the robotics team is also in my beginner robotics class. During class she sat and played tetris on her chromebook. Her group’s robot isn’t done…I asked her about it…She said the robot worked well enough and that she is more of a builder. Another girl in the group struggled trying to get the robot to work.

It is hard because the kid who is on the team has made some amazing progress on the team, but it is also disappointing because she is sort of representing the team in the class and the other kids see her sit there playing games on her chromebook…

I just wrote a whole bunch…but I deleted it because it wasn’t really about robotics.

I hope some of this makes some kind of sense.
Ok. Enough for now.

Edoga

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Gems like this are why I look forward to your 2980 thread every year.

The culture stuff you write about is more important than the technical outcomes (it drives the technical outcomes), and you write about it with clarity and candor that I admire.

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From the the start to “I am falling into a trap of my own making” read like poetry. Like I want to print it out and put it on my wall.

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