Just curious about What is the biggest challenge your team have faced and how’d you solved it?
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COVID.
Wish we did solve it.
Huge knowledge gap. Lots of teams handled it differently with various levels of success. We are not out of the woods yet.
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Ours was also Covid related – we lost basically all of our members during that era. When I joined the team in 2022, we were down to five people and two of them were freshmen. Suffice to say that year was not our best season…
Ultimately, we got out of that by working very hard during the 2023 season to recruit new members and learn from our mistakes in 2022. It helped that those of us who were there in 2022 were really passionate about FRCFIRST Robotics Competition and we were determined not to let the team die. It paid off well, since we made it to DCMP in 2023 and the team is currently at a respectable size of ~40 people. We still struggle with a lack of experienced senior members of our team, but that should improve as the current students age up.
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I go on CDChief Delphi to stop thinking about college apps … and now I’m thinking about college apps again. Yay.
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Challenge - Bored programmers in pre-season (Oct-Dec) Java training. Solution - Have them fairly quickly programming and driving Romi’s.
Challenge - Constrained motor availability. Solution - Coach makes large purchases at the earliest possible moment (and we just barely get enough to field a robot and have backups; build and software adjust to whatever could be procured).
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The biggest challenge? Changing the culture after 15 years of irrelevance.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating here. 2004-2018, 15 years of one event per year, no awards, and only three playoff appearances as second-round picks across 2009-2011. VEX teams sprung up in the same district we serve independent of us and did well, meaning we weren’t even the face of robots in our district.
What changed?
- We added mentors. You really can’t do it without at least two or three riding for your team in the shop, plus some folks handling logistics.
- We pulled our build process out of 2012. Quit building a bunch of hand-machined tubes, quit making custom frames, quit using so many 1/4-20 fasteners, quit making so many brackets that would only line up with that one spot on the robot because that’s where they were match-drilled. (The silver lining is that AndyMark had a bit of a renaissance in 2018-2019 after a few lagging product years, so we got to benefit from a competitive market.) More COTSCommercial, off-the-shelf parts, more sending out custom parts that needed to fit just right.
- We started pushing for a second regional, so robot development was more of a process and less of a “build it once and send it” proposition. We did it in 2019, were scheduled to do it in 2020 before the world ended, and the only reason we didn’t push for it in 2022 was due to COVID restrictions on field trips. (By 2023, we were in Peachtree.)
- We started scouting. And not just to say we scouted, but to get really actionable data to our drive team. By our estimate, we would steal at least one quals match per event that way.
- We built our take on a super pit. It’s made out of lumber, but it’s held up shockingly well since 2019 and it’s ensured we actually get to work quickly at events.
- We got the district PR contacts. When we do something big, we start talking.
Since Kickoff 2019, we’ve only missed playoffs on one occasion (Roebling Division 2022), we’ve earned a judged award, we’ve snagged our first blue banner, and this fall we had our biggest crowd in the shop since COVID began.
It’s hard work, but it’s doable.
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Well, lets take stock. At least we got to play in 2020, a Week One event just days before Covid shut down the world. During Covid we did nothing and graduated essentially the entire team. We were left with two mid level builders and four slightly bewildered kids who we’d called up as 8th graders.
We then lost our off school Build space when the sponsoring company moved. We tried moving into the high school tech ed area but it was a fiasco regards facility availability. Oh, and the teacher who was going to step up and be our main advocate baled on us a few weeks before the season began. It was a tough time.
But tough times make tough people. We had an outstanding recruiting year with kids who had been going crazy during Remote (non) Learning. We called in a couple of retired grandpas and a team alum or two. We had a new and supportive Superintendent. A move that might have been interpreted as a snub - moving to the middle school tech ed area -has worked out well. Moving your build space two years in a row is interesting. Don’t do it unless you must to survive.
Limping out of post covid we were a one event per year team with about 8 collective student-years of experience…half of them superficial. After getting a little too big last year we now have 30 students, and 14 mentors at various levels. We have 52 student-years of experience. We were in elim rounds at both regionals and were roughly 10 seconds from qualifying for Worlds in one Final match.
I predict even better in the next two years.
Sometimes you have to just do crazy things, because playing it safe can be the path to mediocrity.
T
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Not always true… my team’s been pretty successful over the past 4 years having only 1 technical mentor, but I’d definitely prefer having more support!!
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I think the most challenging thing has been getting my team’s school district to allow us to operate the team in the way we needed.
Not allowing external sponsors, not giving mentors shop access, or internet access while on campus, refusing to allow the team to operate off-campus without an extensive and time consuming permission slip preapproval process, refusing to compensate mentors for making team purchases, are all things we had to — and were successful at — overcoming just this past year!!
Compared to this, everything related to training students, designing, building, and competing with a robot is easy!!
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About three weeks before the 2014 season we were dropped by the school that had sponsored the team since it’s inception in 1997.
We asked a different school, the HACTC, to sponsor us instead.
It is a better fit in every way. We have more space, more resources, our own rooms, more money, a trailer, and a school that WANTS us there.
It all worked out implausibly well for us, but staring down the barrel of ending The Grasshoppers after 17 years because of some administrative issues was the single greatest existential threat we have faced as a team.
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