This time of year my team is deep into the final stretch of the OCCRA build season. The kids are up to their eyeballs in the usual last-gasp sprint towards the opener one week away, but the nature of the program means I have my own time to reflect on the things I like the most about this time of year.
I see plenty of very cool off-season events and programs out there in the world, but I’m not aware of any OCCRA clones, and that surprises me. I wish every FRC team had an opportunity to take part in something like it.
If you don’t know what OCCRA is all about, it’s a 6-week build season and a 5-week competition. This year’s game is described in this thread: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=166439
There’s more good info here: http://www.juggernauts.org/occra.html
A sample video from a few seasons ago shows some good up-close OCCRA robot action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_YgYgE82MY
There are a bunch of things that make OCCRA special when compared to the benchmark of FRC. I’ve been keeping a mental list for a few years and finally decided to write it down. Turns out, it’s a bit wordy. Here goes anyway:
OCCRA is 100% Student-run. In OCCRA, the students are completely self-governed. Students organize themselves to lead the design, build and competition phases. By rule, mentors are mostly out of the loop, except for an optional 1-hour window of weekly design feedback to the students. From my perspective, it turns out to be a nice balance of mentorship and student autonomy. Mentors are there mostly for safety and to watch helplessly as the students transition from Lord of the Flies to a close-working team. Many FRC teams encourage students to select a non-FRC Captain during OCCRA, to help younger members have leadership thrust upon them.
No precision machining. There’s no CNC, no waterjet, no laser fabrication. CAD all you want, but you’ll have to make your robot with hand tools and a drill press. This ensures equal footing in manufacturing ability regardless of team resources. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but I think this spurs more creativity, not less. Students figure out how to design things they can make by hand, often with some genius MacGyvering skill. Which leads to…
Super cool robots. One of my favorite elements of OCCRA. Lightly-constrained minds make for a wild variety of great stuff. The vastly different approaches are evident in the final products, with a more eclectic mix of mechanical design than typically seen in FRC. A slow stroll around the pits of an OCCRA event will expand your mind.
Game design. Each year, the OCCRA Game committee comes up with games designed to showcase offensive skills and minimize defensive strategies (there are no bumpers). Rules are structured simply and fouls are almost nonexistent. The overriding priority is to motivate teams to accomplish the game objective, “to rise to the challenge”, rather than prevent the opposition from doing so. Scoring is easy and visible to the audience and players at a glance. At the conclusion of a match, referees look at the field and count game pieces. When they agree on the score, it’s done, and the winner is announced. As an example, 2016 was a six-foot tall Connect-Four style game with 10” rubber-ball game pieces. Dead simple to understand, challenging to achieve, and exciting to watch. FIRST could really take a lesson here.
Simple Rules. The rule book is short and meant to be clear about safety, game objectives and robot design limits. Lawyering will get you nowhere, as any dispute can be resolved with a simple – “you know what we meant”.
"Placebo" robot. OCCRA keeps a spare working community robot on-hand to sub in when your team’s machine fails to answer the call. It’s designed to play at least some element of the game at a minimal level. It shouldn’t win any matches and it’s a minor mark of shame to have to use the Placebo, but it keeps your alliance partner from being completely screwed over if you break your own robot before a match. The past few years, the Placebo has been donated by The Robot Space. Really cool idea.
Bang for the Buck. Here’s an area where OCCRA has FIRST beat by a mile. Everything about OCCRA emphasizes the ‘keep it cheap’ philosophy. The field fits in one trailer and many components are recycled year to year. The teams build robots with no single part over $100. Many teams recycle previous years’ drive bases, modifying them to play the new game. Some build new with reclaimed spares. Corporate sponsors are lobbied to support the series and many donate spare parts & supplies. Team participation costs are shockingly small. If you’re a brand new team to the series, you’ll pay $3500 your first year, which gets you a very complete kit of parts & supplies, but you’ll pay just $350 each year thereafter. The ratio of student STEM exposure to dollars spent is through the roof.
Easy Electronics. Vex Cortex is cheap & cheery. Plenty of support available online and RobotC is a good entry point for new programmers. NO Autonomous period. This eliminates the barrier of intimidation that might otherwise keep kids away from the laptop side of the team.
Awesome tournament schedule. There are FIVE one-day tournaments in five weeks. Each tournament is either a weekday evening or a Saturday morning event, with teams spending 4-6 hours total from load-in to load out. They play 4-6 matches each and winners are declared for each event. Best matches go towards a Championship which sums up each team’s performance over all the events. Here’s the best part – if your students have a terrible event because of some problem with their robot, they are motivated to move on and succeed at the next event, as they can overcome a number of poor matches and still succeed at the Championship. Which brings me to…
**NO BAG DAY! ** Not to wade too deep into the FRC bag-day debate, but OCCRA offers another data point to consider. Students have complete free will to add, subtract and modify features on the robot they will compete with on any given day and time. Want to rip off an intake and change it completely? Go ahead, knock yourself out. Teams who take advantage of this freedom will succeed at a higher rate than those who don’t. Or maybe they’ll spin their wheels and not succeed. Either way, the learning process is fast and the results gratifying. Week 1 robots look nothing like Week 5 robots in terms of capability, and to see continuous improvement at a weekly measurable rate is a thing of beauty.
Diversity Tournament. At one of the 5 tournaments, each team plays two matches as an all-girls’ drive team and pit crew, 2 matches co-ed, then two as an all-boys. There’s also a mandatory mentor-drive team match that only counts for bragging rights. Forcing kids out of their comfort zone for at least one tournament is a great experience. And more exposure to drive team is always a good thing.
Easy Hosting. Want to host a big robotics event at your school but FRC is too over-the-top? No problem. Hosting an OCCRA event couldn’t be easier. Since OCCRA is a big team effort where all schools take turns supporting build, reset and teardown, the trailer shows up at your school the day of the event and with a subset of competing teams they assemble the simple field in no time. The tournament starts and finishes that night. Your gym is clean and you’re home in bed by 10pm. Many hands make light work.
One Gym. This is another big enabler for more schools to host robotics. OCCRA tournaments have a small physical footprint. 20 teams, each with a table-based pit, coexist with the field. Bleachers full of families and friends get to watch the matches and see the teams wrenching on their machines between matches.
The small things. There are a bunch of little details done right when a group has been doing something well for a very long time. There’s a well-organized year-end banquet. Posters. A professionally-produced yearbook that showcases every robot, every student and all the awards and wins. These little touches are everywhere.
I’ve shared these notes to emphasize that I believe that any region with a high enough concentration of FRC teams could really benefit from the addition of an OCCRA-style fall season competition.
If you have questions that I can answer as a participating mentor, drop me a line. If you have questions that would be better answered by the organizers, let me know and I will pass them along.
Rich
