You obviously don’t get it. There are no losers in FIRST! I say that anyone who builds a robot out of a kit of parts, in just 6 weeks, to solve a complicated task is definitely a winner!
A few things are:
-incorrect prioritizing
-not reading the rules
-not thoroughly testing your robot
-small build time screwup
This list is coming from what happened with our team this year.
When we planned our robot, we didn’t prioritize picking up game pieces off the ground at all, resulting in us getting very few (no) points on the board. In addition, we didn’t read the rules all the way and had to re-design our robot three times during build. Lastly, since we didn’t test our robot during the season (practices were at quarter speed) we missed key driving issues such as our drive train overheating and binding. (After competition we found out that someone forgot to grease our gearbox which caused a lot of the issue, hence, small build time screw-ups:) ).
Statements like this convince teams that not trying harder is acceptable. Here is a tip, it isn’t. Good enough isn’t.
I say continuity and student determination.
Continuity because it helps to have veteran students/mentors that have been around the FIRST block. These veterans have seen a wide array of problems solved with an even wider array of solutions.
Student determination because no matter how veteran the mentor is, at the end of the day the students are going to run the team. I’ve seen extremely determined students drive entire teams to victory, and a lack of these students drive even more teams to failure.
- Sunny G.
Exactly. Lack of time. Less successful teams squander their time like it was free.
Every year, I find that no student can fabricate a(n) _____ as fast as I can. This coming year (2012) MY personal focus will be on getting our returning students (who are more awesome than usual) to become as fast as I am.
Sure there are - everyone who didn’t win is by definition a loser. You can stink at building robots, and lose because of it. Just slapping together the minimum is NOT winning. Sorry.
One of my pet peeves is when someone makes a speech at an FRC competition and states “You are all winners”. Wrong. Just as in life, we are NOT all winners, or we wouldn’t bother competing.
Lack of understanding the rules. not sweating the details and general lack of preparation are their undoing more often than not.
I’d add to this: failure to test under field conditions.
I wanted to add:
Its what you do during the off-season which is most effective in reducing your chances at “losing.”
Start fundraising early, start training kids early, start planning out your year now.
A few examples of what we are doing now, to help alleviate the challenge of the 6 week build season.
Prototyping a new elevator lift system, continue work on a prototype swerve drive base, fixing up our current crate for next season including IRI next month, fundraising like crazy (personally writing for 3 grants now), building VEX robots for an August 21st competition, ordered $$$$ of supplies in the area of wires/electronics, pnuematics, aluminum stock, lego pieces, VEX piecies, scheduling of outreach events for Fall 2011, reserving space for team bonding camp in October, conducting visitations of our program for STEM-related interest groups, working on procurement docs for current and ongoing renovations to robotics areas, etc.
Working on the 2012 HI FRC regional tournament with discussions on the friday team social (tentative agenda/plans are set), recruitment of mainland teams to HI (subsidized team packages), and recruitment of new HI rookie teams (should be about 40 HI teams next year).
I listed a whole bunch off the top of my head to show how “urgent” things are right now in preparing for the 2012 season.:ahh:
How does that work?
Lack of a standard of excellence within the season, in these areas:
- preparation before the season starts
- quality of the work during the season
- adherence to a set schedule at all points
- drive practice intensity at the end of build season & during competition season (if applicable)
- keeping team values intact throughout everything
- helping to build up leadership values in younger team members
- adherence to FIRST values in GP & general decency within the regionals & CMP
Because no one is interested in how they can change their methodology in order to have a greater chance of losing.
As opposed to answering the poorly formed literal question posed in the thread title, I’ll go with a more generic “Why do teams fail to succeed”. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s define success as “producing a robot with competes at a below average to average level”. Many teams have higher goals, while some teams have completely different goals, but this is a good basis to form a question of success around.
This is just snapshot of some of the more common reasons, many of which have been touched upon already in this thread.
- Building before strategically designing and analyzing the game: “How can you build a robot if you don’t know what it’s supposed to do”
- A failure to honestly and realistically evaluate one’s resources (resources in this context are defined as time, experience, fabrication abilities and money), thus making you think you’re capable of doing more than you can do.
- A failure to properly design around one’s resources
- Over complicated robots: “The jack of all trades is the master of none”
- Lack of effort/desire/focus
- Lack of practice
- A failure to strategize
Giving up. Quitting. Placing blame rather than finding solutions.
FIRST is about problem-solving. Problem-solving requires persistence and an open mind.
If you lack those traits, losing comes easy.
I think another aspect is the attitude and perspective. I would personally call this season a failure for me, but others on the team think that it was a tremendous success. Now, we both had the same season, but yet, how can we have such polar opinions? It is a matter of perspective. I have failed on a personal level. I saw this season as a failure because of several reasons.
First, we relied too much on luck. Luck got a fairly far, in fact, the farthest we have gotten in 11 years. But that is why I consider this season a failure. Disregard all numbers and ranking. I, personally, did not do all I can do to insure a better robot. I did not acquire the trust from the mentors to allow me to implement any autonomy into the robot. In fact, I had only uploaded code only once during the competition. Mentors did not trust code. I call that a failure because I failed to gain their trust.
Another reason was due to the more obvious. I had failed to control the arm efficiently enough. My personal record was 2 tubes during any given match. I considered that a failure. I promised a logo, but due to technical difficulties, the arm was not given the limelight. Perhaps it was not all in my control, but I bare the blunt of the blame.
Lastly, one of the biggest reasons were “diplomatic” reasons. Perhaps, I have made a few enemies in the team. I am very outspoken and opinionated. Which in itself is great in my honest opinion, but the flaw was in the execution of those opinions.
I was hoping someone would recognize this.
Jane
This exactly. Last year, we got the strategy right in week one and built an absolutely beautiful Logomotion scoring mechanism. However, because we finished it after the crate deadline, we didn’t get to use it at the tournament. If we had had more mentors, more partnerships, more student experience, or a bigger library of design drafts, we could have performed a lot better than we did (i.e. had more than a drivetrain and a rather sketchy minibot). Practice and strategy can alleviate some of your problems–I credit our very experienced driver with making us as successful a defensive robot as we were–but they can’t make up for running out of time. We lost before the season even started, really.
Just goes to show how important the “off” season is.
Because people are convinced winning is actually what Charlie Sheen does. When that’s your interpretation of winning, you are destined to fail… epically.
The robot is actually a potted plant.
Our team frequently discusses the failure that we had as rookies in 1995 that lead to a judges award called “Best Execution of an Alternative (Losing) Strategy”. This was given to us because we created an overly complicated catapult to launch the ball through the uprights that formed the goal, the crowd cheered every time they saw us score and people loved the design. The problem was is was not a fast or effective way to score. The best way to score that year was to quickly swing the ball back and forth through the uprights. We had that idea but got so wrapped around the axel thinking that method was easy to defend that we spent all build making an undefendable scorer that took half the match to reset.
Focusing on the wrong part of the game will get you every time. As Karthik said above you have to know how to play the game before you design so that you know what to build and where to focus your effort.
Wow, sounds EXACTLY like my season.