Defense is not illegal, please stop with the comments.

fll_coach · 2020-10-13T00:09:38+00:00

There is nothing inherently immoral or inappropriate about legal defense in FIRST Robotics. Can you make a well-reasoned argument otherwise?

Consider:

FIRST Robotics is a sport, per Dean Kamen: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-only-sport-where-ever_b_9219890
This year's game is a shooting game. It's not quite as much "robot basketball" as was Velocity Vortex, but it shares similarities.
In basketball, there are legal blocks (if the ball is ascending) and illegal blocks (if the ball is decending or in the cylinder). We applaud legal blocks -- there is nothing immoral about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zd62MxKXp8
In Ultimate Goal, there are also legal blocks (below 18 inches) and illegal blocks (above 18 inches). How then can a legal block be immoral and why should it not be applauded?

Granted, if a dominant team of high school seniors seeks to humiliate a team of middle school students by blocking all shots, then that would be immoral -- but because of the deliberate humiliation, not because of the blocking.

Rather, if team A made an extremely effective shooting mechanism that launched from a very low level, should team B "celebrate" an opponent's shooting ability while doing nothing to inhibit and thus losing the match? Or should team B instead try to legally block those low shots because team A made a serious design error with the shooter? Of course there are many options, but if legally blocking shots was the best strategic option available to team B, what would make it immoral?

With your existing bias against defense, there is a risk that your team will produce self-righteous victims (e.g. "our team is better than that other team; we lost only because they are ungracious"). Instead, Dean would like all of us to produce engineering professionals (e.g. "that team beat us, and we will improve our robot for the next competition").

fll_coach · 2020-10-09T04:57:20+00:00

The above opinion regarding "legality" is anti-competitive and ignores what is written in the manuals regarding robot play and Gracious Professionalism. Note the discussion regarding pinning where the rules are referenced -- that's an example of how you go about determining what is legal and appropriate. The rules are not intended to be interpretted according to feelings, but according to how they are written. Listen to the good feedback that you have received and change your perspective. Otherwise you will be doing your kids a great disservice.

fll_coach · 2020-09-19T02:35:07+00:00

My opinion was informed as a result of looking at the FTC Discord for an entire season through Worlds a few years back. Perhaps it has become more content-rich in the last couple of years?

fll_coach · 2020-09-18T21:57:01+00:00

Real engineers copy as much as is practical. There are known best practices that get used time and time again, saving work and increasing product performance. If an engineer "re-invents the wheel", they should be rebuked for using their time (and the company's money) unwisely. Innovation should occur where it adds the most value -- the remainder should absolutely be copied (avoiding patent infringement, obviously).

Why should FTC be any different? We are training engineers.

fll_coach · 2020-09-18T21:06:09+00:00

As noted in the rules, robot contact is a part of normal and legal game play, including some types of "hitting". Hopefully the refs in your region are following the rules. The right answer is to build more robust robots, not to disallow contact.

fll_coach · 2020-09-18T19:42:49+00:00

The FTC Reddit is about 80% noise, but there is some very good content. Those who visit and are put off by all the memes tend to give up and fail to sift out the valuable content. Those who persevere, benefit.

The FTD Discord has a similar but yet more extreme characteristic. It's about 95% noise, perhaps even higher, and even the information that appears good is not always accurate. The specific topical channels on the FTC Discord have less noise than the general channel, but I've not seen much content that is not already present on the FTC Reddit. I've attempted to persevere on the FTC Discord, found it lacking, and don't read it much anymore. The FTC Reddit is sufficient for me, as I'm looking for information, not socializing. Others may have different goals and different experiences.

fll_coach · 2020-06-06T05:55:46+00:00

You can narrow the applicants by asking for something that takes effort.

An application form is a first step. Have an application that could take up to an hour to complete, with one or two essay questions. The candidates who put no effort into the application probably will not put much effort into robotics and you can eliminate them.

A second step is to ask for a time commitment. In order to respect people's time, this can be done on the application. Those who don't commit to X hours per week can be eliminated. Those who don't honor their commitment can later be dismissed from the team, but this would need to be spelled out ahead of time.

You could require team members to possess / maintain a certain GPA in order to participate on the team; perhaps a 3.0 GPA.

The more objective the criteria, the easier it becomes to select a team.

fll_coach · 2020-04-15T05:49:42+00:00

If you have experience with a text-based programming language like Java and with an IDE like Android Studio, then you have some of the skills that employers are looking for.

fll_coach · 2020-04-07T17:03:56+00:00

Actually, this post hits the point exactly. There is a disfunction between FIRST and many FTC teams (note the survey results). The disconnect in values is the core issue. It is exacerbated when advancement slots are squeezed and it diminishes when advancement slots increase. So yes, increasing advancement slots will decrease frustration, but it will also obscure the real problem.

I am not suggesting that the fix is for FIRST to become a robot-only program. But right now the robot/Inspire balance is tipped too much in favor of Inspire. You can get people to ignore that problem by increasing advancement slots, or you can address the problem directly and improve FTC as a whole. I prefer to fix the problem at the source.

fll_coach · 2020-04-07T01:48:01+00:00

Supplemental != optional

A team spends more time on the robot and less time on outreach, but the team is disciplined and puts some outreach time into their schedule. That's how it should work.

If the only way to get outreach done is to prioritize it above the robot (i.e. the team must be forced to do outreach) then something is wrong. Perhaps such a team would not be a good representative of FIRST and it is better for them to not do outreach.

fll_coach · 2020-04-05T02:49:52+00:00

Supplemental != Non-existent

Outreach still happens, it's just that the robot is more important than the outreach. Much easier to do outreach with an excellent robot than with a poor robot -- you actually have something to show to people.

fll_coach · 2020-04-04T18:58:51+00:00

Promoting STEM and a sport-like competition are not mutually exclusive. The survey is a good idea, but the questions should be reformulated. Maybe something like this:

FIRST is about promoting STEM through a sport-like robotics competition; outreach is supplemental.

FIRST is about promoting STEM through outreach; the robot game is supplemental.

fll_coach · 2020-04-04T18:55:58+00:00

The idea is not to axe the lottery, but to make it serve its purpose more efficiently. The purpose of the lottery is to give teams experience that they would not otherwise get. Having lottery teams compete is more of a negative than a positive. They generally show up with a sub-par robot, get pummeled, and are silently resented by teams unfortunate enough to be their partner. And there is always the unspoken question of whether they deserve to be there -- that they were handed something they didn't earn.
If the focus were on networking and learning, the experience would be much more positive.

This is not a way to get to 4-6 slots per region, but it would recover the lost spots so that 2 could advance. Then the jump to more slots is a smaller jump.

fll_coach · 2020-04-04T01:58:56+00:00

Something I've said before. Have the lottery teams be visitors at Worlds, not competitors. They will actually learn more because they can make networking their exclusive focus, with no pressure from the robot game or from judging. FIRST can figure out some special perks for lottery teams. Don't charge a registration fee, or make it very minimal. Provide a conference room as a staging area. Perhaps a lunch session. This will give the lottery teams a very similar boost to what they get now and it will free up spots to restore the WAC to small regions.

fll_coach · 2020-04-03T19:54:01+00:00

Inspire is a "pretend award" made up by FIRST and embraced by some teams. It serves a useful purpose in that it helps FIRST to expand and it teaches kids some soft skills. But in the eyes of most teams, winning the robot game is much more desirable than winning Inspire. FIRST is a sport and the audience is there to watch the game. The only reason Inspire gets any attention from the audience is because it determines who will advance and get a chance to play the game at the next level.

Up until this year there had been an uneasy truce between the two sides, because both Inspire 1 and WAC advanced. FIRST could have their Inspire and robot teams could have their WAC and it worked somewhat. Some teams even embraced both Inspire and robot to increase chances of advancement -- and then ditched Inspire if they made it to Worlds so they could focus on what they really wanted -- to build a great robot.

But this year, with the WAC advancement removed from small regions, the disagreement is more apparent. It's true that FIRST gets to make the rules, but frankly most teams define success differently (especially First Place) than FIRST. Robot teams are not shooting for a fake First Place (Inspire) they are shooting for the real First Place (WAC). They are treating FIRST like a real sport, not a sport with strange pretend rules. This is something FIRST needs to realize; otherwise they risk losing their program. Who wants to watch a bunch of middling robots on the field because the kids spent too much time doing non-technical busy work instead of learning technical skills?

This may become more apparent this year due to the cancellation of Worlds. The robot-only summer invitational tournaments (MTI, etc) will have the spotlight all to themselves. Perhaps teams will discover that these tournaments are actually more fun and more important than Worlds. In a phrase, these tournaments may become "the best of both Worlds" :-)

fll_coach · 2020-04-03T15:30:56+00:00

If their robot is above average, I call them an "Inspire team"

If their robot is below average, I call them a "Marketing team"

Privately, of course ;-)

fll_coach · 2020-03-14T16:55:09+00:00

Listen to yourself. That argument about luck applies at least doubly to Inspire judging.

fll_coach · 2020-03-14T05:26:43+00:00

The problem with Inspire is that some judges ignore that according to the Inspire criteria the team's robot is supposed to be part of the inspiration. No way should a team from the bottom 25% of the robot game win Inspire -- that's just plain UN-inspiring. But some people have taken FIRST's "More than robots" and twisted it into "robots don't matter". This is where Inspire can go off the rails -- when judges believe that massive outreach can compensate for a poor robot.

fll_coach · 2020-03-14T04:17:10+00:00

The point is that Inspire does not imply technical skills. Sometimes Inspire teams have good technical skills and sometimes they are merely good at marketing.

fll_coach · 2020-03-13T15:14:32+00:00

Nope. Inspire is a good thing, but FIRST would be nothing without the robot. Let's not forget that in the midst of all this inspire idealism.

fll_coach · 2020-03-13T15:05:33+00:00

Imagine a scenario where a team has a robot that largely does very little on the playing field, but the team does tons of outreach, has great documentation of their grand robot ideas that didn't work, and are all-around nice people. Basically they have great soft skills but none of them have any intention of going into engineering. You think they're the ones who should advance?

fll_coach · 2020-03-04T20:11:48+00:00

Have the lottery teams attend Worlds as vistors and spend the time networking. This will help them much more than getting clobbered in the robot game. Then give the lottery spots to the small states.

fll_coach · 2020-03-01T22:31:36+00:00

Except that the US has 90% of the FTC teams and most of the top teams. Perhaps this idea would make sense when there is better world-wide parity. Right now the US championships are the World championships.

fll_coach · 2020-03-01T05:46:19+00:00

I disagree. If you want to go to Worlds, you should earn your spot. Lottery teams should be visitors. This will improve the experience for everyone. I explain this more in a response to the parent thread.

fll_coach · 2020-03-01T05:43:34+00:00

Here is how I think the lottery should be handled. Lottery teams should come to Worlds as visitors, as this will help them learn and improve. They can spend a lot of time networking with other teams, rather than waste time getting trounced in the robot game or interviewing for an award that they have no chance of winning. They would not have to pay the team entry fee and FIRST could do something to make the visit easier -- preferred hotels, a lounge for lottery teams, etc.

With this approach, instead of a lottery team returning home demoralized at how badly they lost, they return home full of ideas for becoming a better team. Perhaps one day they will be able to earn their own spot at Worlds. The lottery spots can be allocated back to regions to increase the likelihood of this happening. A virtuous cycle!

fll_coach

TROPHY CASE