My thoughts today are around this forum post by Foster on the official VEX forums. He talks about wanting competition downtime (between matches) to give teams time to repair or modify their robots / change strategy. However, I have several thoughts on this notion, which I will explain below:
- Deadlines are a good thing: Many people, including myself, have a hard time getting projects finished or work done without a deadline looming. There are people in the world who will not move on until they feel that they are finished with their current project, but this simply isn't everyone. Furthermore, I feel that teams need to be in the mindset that when they turn up to a scrimmage they are there to play matches, not build their robot. I agree with the mindset that every match is a learning experience, but I think that the under pressure environment of having to make repairs or adjustments with limited time available is a good test to be under when competing. Time, people and resource management are very sort after skills, the VEX Robotics competition does an excellent job of fostering them in its participants.
- Getting solutions right the first time is a desirable skill also. Although I believe that failure is too demonized in today's society, creating a "due date" gives a certain incentive to add serious consideration to (in the case of the VRC) design decisions, tactics and so forth. If you simply let a team take a mulligan after every failure, there will be no decision to apply serious though to the decisions they are making in preparation. Far too often, I see teams not think about WHY they are doing something, but just "following the trend", so to speak. This is one of the key areas I would like to work on going forward and I am sure I will be writing about it later on. We need to encourage teams to think for themselves and we do that by setting deadlines.
- Finally, on more of a technical matter, more data is better. In large tournaments, there are already issues of teams on competing against a small fraction of the teams involved and decreasing that fraction will only serve to exacerbate this issue. With the current tournament structure, we want to promote playing as many matches as possible - for two reasons. The first is to aid in removing variance from the qualifying stages. I will conceded that in the tournaments where a lot is on the line (i.e. the World Championships) the time for design is mostly over, so I don't think anyone is advocating more downtime then. The larger point however is teams need match experience to metric their designs. If only a few matches are played, the probability that a team encounters unusually difficult opposition, or their design doesn't fully execute without issue is higher. This may lead teams to give up on genuine ideas because of a few bad experiences. Trying to "make it work" provides a better picture as to whether it will or not.
In all, my opinion is show up to play and if things go wrong, make the best with what you have. You'll learn better because of it.
