FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

In September, as we announced here, we surveyed our community on their thoughts about Stop Build Day. The intent was to gather data in support of our further discussions on this topic. And as we had clarified before, other than switching to a worldwide, simultaneous stop build time, there are no Stop Build Day changes for the 2017 season. Any significant changes we would make would be for 2018 or later, as we want to give this topic very careful consideration, and announce changes (if there will be any) long before the season starts so teams can make plans.

We are presenting these results without editorial comment. As we are in the middle of season prep right now and have a very busy season right on the horizon, we are not likely to be able to turn our attention back to this matter in the short term. 

You can see the very long and detailed report here. You will see that our Research and Evaluation team sliced and diced the responses in many different ways. If the thought of reading through 16 pages of information with hundreds of numbers makes your head spin, here is a brief summary:

• We had 9,286 responses total, though of course not all respondents made it to the end of the survey or answered every single question.

• Those responses were from 2,196 unique teams.

• Graph of full results to the question about what would be best for the FIRST Robotics Competition overall (7,507 responses): 

• Graph of full results to the question about what would be best for ensuring equity and inclusion of students and schools in the FIRST Robotics Competition program (7,470 responses): 

• The two largest groups of respondents were Mentors, at 50.8% of respondents, and Students, at 36.7% of respondents.

• Graph of results of 'best for program overall' question, Mentors only (4,130 responses): 

• Graph of results of 'best for program overall' question, Students only (2,554 responses): 

Finally, the 'Averaging Responses by Team' data in the detailed report probably needs a bit of explanation. We wanted to see what the results would be like if every team that responded essentially got one 'vote', and that vote was the average of all the individual responses from that one team. You can compare this to the Senate in the United States, in which every state gets two votes, regardless of state population. As this process naturally resulted in many fractional votes, we wanted to break the results up more finely, as rounding the results to the nearest whole number could have given an inaccurate impression of the underlying information.

I hope you find this data interesting. As I say above, we won't be spending much time on this topic in the short term, as we have an awesome FIRST STEAMWORKS season to get ready for!

Frank