IRI - Comments, Suggestions,

[Chris Fultz]

We always look to improve the IRI and want your feedback on everything that goes on. What is good, what could we do better. Please post or PM me with comments.

Also, many people asked for info on how the IRI is organized. If you are looking for info, please PM me with the request.

[Rich Kressly]

No singing Canadians ;)
Seriously..
For three years Morrison, Baker, and company have been putting the heat on me to attend. This year the planets aligned and I was able to take Team 1712. Not to slight other events, but it's perhaps the most friendly AND competitive FIRST event I've ever attended. Great atmosphere, people, and teams. The organizing committee should be very proud of what IRI has become. Thanks for showing us easterners a great time.

[Chuck Glick]

No singing Canadians ;)
Seriously..
For three years Morrison, Baker, and company have been putting the heat on me to attend. This year the planets aligned and I was able to take Team 1712. Not to slight other events, but it's perhaps the most friendly AND competitive FIRST event I've ever attended. Great atmosphere, people, and teams. The organizing committee should be very proud of what IRI has become. Thanks for showing us easterners a great time.

i have to agree with mr kressly here, even though this was the students of the team's rookie year, i think we can all say that this was the most friendly event that we have attended. I met so many people there and every single person was friendly. Dodgeball was quite fun, (to tytus and greg: WEST BEAT YA!) and I'd like to thank team 40 for bringing their amazing mini aim high field and letting us tryout their bots and let us run ours on the field. I will definately attend IRI again in the future and did i forget to mention that it was DA' BOMB!

oh ya and to answer your question, the singing canadians must stay... that was a great highlight... :D but i don't have any complaints, definatley the cream of the crop when it comes to off-season events.

[Beth Sweet]

I loved it guys. Personally, I enjoy this better than regionals, because you seem to get so much more for so much less money.

The social was excellent and my team all loved the mac and cheese, the talent show was very amusing (and I think that Dave will be making his own fish hat), and overall, it was just fun.

As a side note I wanted to make sure to give major props for the resonable food prices and hotel discounts. Both of these are huuuuuge to us. Thanks so much guys, great event!

[JBotAlan]

I wish I could've stayed for the talent show and do some of the other stuff, but we came, stayed for dinner, and left. For the time I was there, I had great fun. I have 2 gripes--there was no wireless Internet (probably something you'd have to talk the school tech admins into)--and the scoreboard projector needed to be brighter and higher resolution. I saw nothing else wrong anywhere. This is the first off-season event I've ever been to (not counting OCCRA, which is totally different) and it was way more fun than a typical FIRST regional. Thanks to everyone who worked for weeks to put this on!

JBot

[JackN]

I have a few comments and suggestions

The second pit aisle (the one where it ran 233-494 on one side and 703 was on the other side) was very crammed making it hard to move. It would have been nice to have had a ranking list in the pit as well, and if there was one make it more visible. Please order more pizza next year. Krispy Kremes on both days would be sweet. This is a big one, move the mentor rounds to the end and make them not count. It sounds harsh but they can really hurt teams. The food line could be more spread out to keep it moving and more efficent. Maybe move fruit cocktail and salad farther down.

[Wayne C.]

OK-
here's a few-

1. put ALL the teams in the large pit area and use the "VIP" pit area for staging, the auction and posting the running standings. The traffic in and out of the tunnel was awkward and unsafe. There shouldn't be people wandering behind the control and play stations.

2. put a map or directions to the event on the event web site

3. designate a camera zone on the upper balcony and maybe supply a few small tables up there

Overall the IRI team put on a great event and we generally had a good time. Thanks to all the organizers for putting it all together.

WC :cool:

[taggartbg]

i liked the fact that not only was there an extremely fun robot competition, but also the dodgeball and talent show added a lot to the expirience. Good times...

[Dan Zollman]

Wayne C.'s number two...For some reason I thought that all the information was on 234's site and I didn't see this (http://www.indianafirst.org/events/iri/) page after it was updated, so it seemed there were a few things that were missing or incomplete.

No singing Canadians ;)
Seriously..
For three years Morrison, Baker, and company have been putting the heat on me to attend. This year the planets aligned and I was able to take Team 1712. Not to slight other events, but it's perhaps the most friendly AND competitive FIRST event I've ever attended. Great atmosphere, people, and teams. The organizing committee should be very proud of what IRI has become. Thanks for showing us easterners a great time.

I'd like to thank team 40 for bringing their amazing mini aim high field and letting us tryout their bots and let us run ours on the field. I will definately attend IRI again in the future and did i forget to mention that it was DA' BOMB!

I think so too. Thanks for "putting the heat" on Kres. The event was a lot of fun, and I had the chance to meet many people I've heard about and to hear things from different teams. And now I get to say that I hung out with Dave Lavery (while making a point to ask him a weird question, which I've been waiting to do all year).

[Craig Roys]

Our team had a great time - I love the relaxed atmosphere combined with the tough competition. That makes for a great weekend. Just a couple suggestions:

1. I agree with a couple previous posts - the screen was difficult to read, and it would be nice to have a screen in the pits showing the matches giving teams a better idea of how much time they have to their next match - and also enjoy some of the competiton while working on the robot. Having said that, the pit announcers did an excellent job of calling teams so you didn't miss your match.

2. I like the mentor rounds - despite my inability to drive back towards myself :ahh: - and I don't mind them counting (it adds to the fun), but I do have one complaint. We were in the last mentor round and all three teams on the opposite alliance had already played once so they had student drivers back in place. Our alliance had two mentor-driven teams and one student-driven - a most definite disadvantage. I was impressed that we managed to hold them to 56 points (or somewhere around that). I realize that this is probably a scheduling nightmare, but if there was a way to make sure that no alliance was able to have this type of advantage during the mentor rounds that would improve things.

Thanks for a great competiton and hopefully we'll be back next year.

[Kyle Love]

I think there should be a different tournament structure. It would be kind of cool, since we are in Indiana, to have it be something like a sprint car race. I think it would be cool to have a "B Main". The top 7 alliances are locked in to the "A main" and they do their alliance picking before the "B Main" teams. Once the "A Main" alliances are full, you pull the next top 4 teams from qualifying onto the field and have the alliance picking happen again. There would only be semi-final, final rounds in the "B Main" though, so only 4 teams come out to pick. You play the "B Main" just like how you do the "A Main" and then the winner of the "B Main" gets transfered to the "A Main" in the 8th place alliance spot. If you have questions about how this all works pm me.

[David Kelly]

I think there should be a different tournament structure. It would be kind of cool, since we are in Indiana, to have it be something like a sprint car race. I think it would be cool to have a "B Main". The top 7 alliances are locked in to the "A main" and they do their alliance picking before the "B Main" teams. Once the "A Main" alliances are full, you pull the next top 4 teams from qualifying onto the field and have the alliance picking happen again. There would only be semi-final, final rounds in the "B Main" though, so only 4 teams come out to pick. You play the "B Main" just like how you do the "A Main" and then the winner of the "B Main" gets transfered to the "A Main" in the 8th place alliance spot. If you have questions about how this all works pm me.


Would you like to also design a new scoring system for that? Maybe Brandon Marcus could make a php website to do it....

[Billfred]

Would you like to also design a new scoring system for that? Maybe Brandon Marcus could make a php website to do it....
Didn't GTR do something in a similar vein? How did they do their variation on the tournament?

I know from experience that you don't even have to be fancy about it--Mission Mayhem's ladder was a PowerPoint slide that got updated after a round was decided. Worked fine for us.

[Don Wright]

I had an absolute blast at my first IRI (no pun intended). The competition was incredibly intense and the environment was wonderful. The best FIRST competition I've ever been to.

Which leads me to an off-topic suggestion.

This is a perfect example of what a FIRST regional could be like. Practice rounds where you can actually practice instead of frantically trying to finish a robot you had to ship. Let's get rid of the ship date and allow teams to bring their robots with them to the competitions. Get rid of all the "put down your tools" rules. Get rid of the need to build 2 robots so you can practice while your real robot sits in a box 10 miles down the road waiting to go to your local tournament. It would make all the regionals more competitive and exciting for all teams. We all know the game isn't fair to begin with, and the ship date rule doesn't help. More rules don't either.

Sorry for the off-topic rant, but IRI should be the model competition for FIRST to really look at for Inspiration on how good it can be.

Thank you all for a great weekend.

[Chris Fultz]

I think there should be a different tournament structure. It would be kind of cool, since we are in Indiana, to have it be something like a sprint car race. I think it would be cool to have a "B Main". The top 7 alliances are locked in to the "A main" and they do their alliance picking before the "B Main" teams. Once the "A Main" alliances are full, you pull the next top 4 teams from qualifying onto the field and have the alliance picking happen again. There would only be semi-final, final rounds in the "B Main" though, so only 4 teams come out to pick. You play the "B Main" just like how you do the "A Main" and then the winner of the "B Main" gets transfered to the "A Main" in the 8th place alliance spot. If you have questions about how this all works pm me.

I got lost after "sprint car"...... :)

[Rich Kressly]

I got lost after "sprint car"...... :)

hahahaha I'm with you, Chris.
Maybe we're just old. :cool:

[Richard Wallace]

Didn't GTR do something in a similar vein? How did they do their variation on the tournament?GTR had twelve alliances for eliminations; the top four alliances got byes in the first elimination round. They used the serpentine draft order; i.e., 1st alliance captain got the first pick in the first draft round, then 12th alliance got first pick in the second draft round.

[Richard Wallace]

IRI 2006 was an extremely well organized event. My team (IRI rookies) had a great time, even while being overwhelmed by the very high level of competition.

We attended mainly to get some experience for our returning students, but will almost certainly return if we can.

Storm damage in St. Louis forced us to leave IRI just after alliance selection and before dodgeball. We were sorry to have miss the fun on Saturday afternoon.

Electric power was just restored at my house about 3:30 this morning, after about 100 hours outage. I need to catch up on a few threads now ...

[Tytus Gerrish]

More D.S.K. YEAHHHHHHH!!!!!!

[Kit Gerhart]

About the only negative I can think of regarding this year's IRI is that our robot lost a drive chain early in the mentor round, spoiling my fun. Oh well.

IRI has become not only the best off-season event going, but in many ways, it is better than the best of the Regionals (IMHO). The level of play is fantastic. The elimination round matches at IRI were much better than what I saw at the regionals I attended. Everyone has had time to work things out, but also, the quality of teams at IRI is exceptional. I was impressed that some excellent teams which had so-so seasons this year made the effort to build new robots or major mechanisms to give themselves another chance to improve their season.

The referee work at IRI is superb. Things were called well, and also, I liked the rule changes that were made from this year's "official" rules regarding alliance selection and corner goal intrusion.

About my only criticism would be that it was too difficult to find information such as the team list, rules changes, dodge ball tournament entry, the webcast, etc. Information was spread out over the indianafirst.org, Team 234, and Chief Delphi web sites, and it took too much searching to find out about the webcast. That's about my only suggestion. Consolidate this info and make it easy to find.

When the Pink Team attended IRI last year, our plan was to attend IRI once, and then go to a different summer off-season like the one in Massachusetts. After winning last year, we decided to return try to defend our championship this year and then maybe go somewhere else next year. It turns out, though, that there is already talk among some of the team about next year, so who knows? The trip from Florida to Indiana is not a lot of fun, so the fact that our team is even considering returning for a third IRI says a lot about the event.

[DeAnnaC]

Just a few observations:

Signs with schedule times and locations would be great for newbies.

Pit area: there should be a way for the row we were in (up against the wall) to get to the exit doors without going deeper into the building for safety reasons.

A monitor with the ratings in the pit area and maybe another on the 2nd level would be nice.

The dinner thing was a nice touch, but needs to be better organized. Our drivers were 4 people from the food when they were called out to drive in their match. They had already been in line for 20 minutes before then. Can the teams go in shifts or have more lines open to accomodate everyone at once?

Our team had a great time at the event. It was nice to see some teams that we had played before and see some other great bots too.

DeAnna

[Masterfork]

well i was the gunner for IRI this year and i was last years arm operator so i had my chance to defend our teams title as champs and i can't say anything else but wow this is an amazing competition definatly harder than any matchs i have ever drove in or anything its so much harder than nats i believe cus it seems that IRI takes all the best teams and puts them under one roof and its amazing. JUST AMAZING and i would love to come again but its up to my team but i just love this competition and the only thing i would want out of it is archived matchs so we can watch them agian cus the matchs at IRI are the best i have ever played in and i couldn't ask for me.

thanks to all who made it happen it has not let me down yet it has actually surprised me as i come bak it just seems to get better every year.

[MissInformation]

My only complaint is the long drive... IRI is perhaps the most amazing event ever, organized by perhaps the most amazing group of people ever, but with all that brain power, one would think you would have created some kind of a time warp or wormhole or something... Now that I've mentioned the possibility of a wormhole, I'll expect one next year...

The mentor round counted? :eek:

Heidi

[David Kelly]

My only complaint is the long drive... IRI is perhaps the most amazing event ever, organized by perhaps the most amazing group of people ever, but with all that brain power, one would think you would have created some kind of a time warp or wormhole or something... Now that I've mentioned the possibility of a wormhole, I'll expect one next year...

The mentor round counted? :eek:

Heidi


Of course the mentor rounds counted :]


Thank you all for the positive comments.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

IRI is by far the best event I have ever attended. Maybe it was b/c I wasn't under any pressure as an operator or coach, but it was immense fun. There was an extreme level of competition that I don't even think is rivaled by The Championship. I've never seen harder fought matches then the semis and finals. Dean should come and learn from IRI.

Now, onto some nitpicks.

1. As pit announcer: I felt that I was under-informed on where and when stuff was, i.e. the talent show was in the auditorium from 12-2, but where was the auditorium? And the VIP pits were next to the playing field and when one of those teams was late to a match, I was unknowingly announcing them eventhough they couldn't hear me until I realized it and informed the person on the other end of the radio that they were out there.

2. As a spectator: I thought the competition was great. I liked the announcers from what I heard of them in the eliminations. I missed Copioli but I did listen to him on the lunch break. Although, the announcers were a bit loud.

I think that's about it. It was a very good competition. The school was perfect for the set-up too.

[BuddyB309]

Please no fire alarms. Wearing a black t-shirt outside is no fun in the hot sun. Also I would have liked a team social afterwards. to say goodbye to all of my friends.

other than its too short, there is nothing that can be changed. that was so much fun.

[Chrispy393]

Hey! IRI made the AOL news! Isn't that amazing? If anyone has AOL it's on the morning welcome screen for videos, "Kids build basketball playing robots."

It was ABC too, how weird.

We're famous! Woo Hoo! :eek:

Okay, back to sleep. Eugh.

[Kim Masi]

This was my first IRI and just being able to go was a privelege in itself.

The food prices were extremely reasonable and there was a good selection

seating was adequete

One thing I didnt understand was why were the pits so squished in close together when there was sooo much space in that big gym?

[Kyle Love]

This was my first IRI and just being able to go was a privelege in itself.

The food prices were extremely reasonable and there was a good selection

seating was adequete

One thing I didnt understand was why were the pits so squished in close together when there was sooo much space in that big gym?

I believe at times the basketball team had practice on the other end of the court, so they need that much...I guess. On a side note, the basketball team that plays there was the 2006 National High School Basketball Champion.

[Andy Baker]

One thing I didnt understand was why were the pits so squished in close together when there was sooo much space in that big gym?

Good point.

I believe at times the basketball team had practice on the other end of the court, so they need that much...I guess. On a side note, the basketball team that plays there was the 2006 National High School Basketball Champion.

No, that has nothing to do with it. There are 3 things:

1. Electrical distribution
The spacing is such because of limitation we had for electrical power for feeding the pits. If we spread out the pits more, we would need an improved electrical distribution system.

2. Tarps
Wherever there are pits, there must be tarps

3. Vex
We had the other side of the gym set up for a Vex tournament, but when it was decided that we were not going to play a Vex competition, it was too late to create more electrical hardware for better pit distribution.

We'll improve on #1 and #2 next year. Who knows, we may be able to bring back Vex at IRI also.

Thanks for the input.

Andy

[Mark Garver]

About my only criticism would be that it was too difficult to find information such as the team list, rules changes, dodge ball tournament entry, the webcast, etc. Information was spread out over the indianafirst.org, Team 234, and Chief Delphi web sites, and it took too much searching to find out about the webcast. That's about my only suggestion. Consolidate this info and make it easy to find.

Agreed completely. It seemed like the information just wasn't out there like it was last year. Searching the ChiefDelphi site you were able to find a lot of 2005 information on the White Pages but only one or two posts about the 2006 event in the White Pages.

[Chris Fultz]

We did not do a good job of consolidating the information and it was spread between two or three sources and it got buried in threads quickly.

For 2007, we are already planning a dedicated IRI website that will be kept current and will be the official location for information about the event.

Thank you to everyone for the comments, both "positive" and "areas for improvement". We will consider all comments as we plan for next year.

[Beth Sweet]

The one comment that I did hear recently from other participants was that the only place to find information on this event was this site. FIRST's site featured no information on it, and for those not on CD (or those who don't check it religiously as I do), they would be left out of the fantastic time that the competition provides. Perhaps FIRST could send out a blast regarding it?

[Daisy]

a bit of a side note: is there any way to improve the webcasts? It was about a frame a second. The audio, on the other hand, was AMAZING. The announcer, and MC, were fantastic.

Thanks,

Daisy

[Mark Pierce]

I agree with some of the comments about information and layout, but the relative minor level of criticism speaks volumes about how fantastic the event was. I had a great time on my all too short visit on Saturday (only 8 hours!).

I did receive a suggestion from several people that I'll try and work on for next year: However, can having team 85 compete again really add much to such a competitive field? I'm sure my teammates would have a blast!

[Josh Murphy]

This was the best competition that I have ever attended in my 3 years of FIRST, thanks to everyone who made it the experience it was and I am looking forward to next year. It was great don't change a thing. :)

[Woe]

Good point.



No, that has nothing to do with it. There are 3 things:

1. Electrical distribution
The spacing is such because of limitation we had for electrical power for feeding the pits. If we spread out the pits more, we would need an improved electrical distribution system.

2. Tarps
Wherever there are pits, there must be tarps

3. Vex
We had the other side of the gym set up for a Vex tournament, but when it was decided that we were not going to play a Vex competition, it was too late to create more electrical hardware for better pit distribution.

We'll improve on #1 and #2 next year. Who knows, we may be able to bring back Vex at IRI also.

Thanks for the input.

Andy

I liked having the Vex bots available without having a competition. Several of our team's siblings had the chance to drive and were very enthused!

[Mark Garver]

I am not sure how it was for other teams that were located near the emergency exit, but I know for at least our team it was difficult to hear some of the matches being announced. But in no way am I suggesting that we need to have a speaker in our pit which seems to happen more times than not at the Great Lakes Regional (having to face it against the wall and cover it with a jacket...).

Overall though, the best competition of the year for the money!

Championship Event = $5000
Championship Event Matches = 7
Price per Match at the Championship = $714.29
Price per Second of Drive time at the Championship Event = $5.95

IRI Event = $350
IRI Event Matches = 8
Price per Match at IRI = $43.75
Price per Second of Drive time at IRI Event = $.036

Nice job to the IRI Planning committee and the volunteer crew.