Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

Agreed.

Interestingly, I learned from the petition comments that there is a vocal group of disgruntled Coaches/Parents from the greater Sacramento area that are dissatisfied with the quality of Judging at their local FTC events.

Also, if you are ever interested in a forum where only one side's opinions are voiced, create a change.org petition and read the comments... :rolleyes:

-Mike

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

I agree with Mike and Blake.

1a: This is a technical nightmare that, probably 90% of the time, isn't going to make a difference other than the event ends later.
1b: See "question box".
1c: So... if I, as a ref, see a foul in the last 1 second and can't call it before the match stops (for example, my tablet locks out the foul count), it doesn't get counted/called? What if it's the petition starter's team being the victim of a pin... and that non-call is the reason they lose? Hmm... makes you think, doesn't it? All kinds of problems with this one.
2: Fair... but again, a logistical mess. My proposal would be to further separate the FTC and FRC championship events. (Also see: Championsplit making more FTC spots)
3: "testimonials" and "reasonable debate" can easily turn into "flamewar" due to emotions.

4: Don't get me started. All I'll say is that there are mechanisms already in place for this. Conflicts of interest are known to all parties that need to know about them. And, just for the record: I have been known to pull myself out of discussions involving teams I'm affiliated with, by simply not entering them.

5: That's the ONLY thing I can agree with, potentially. Maybe not mandatory change, but a mandatory discussion of the call within the zebra herd, for all referees who saw something.



I have one other, final, statement.

If you think that the referees are the problem, YOU are the solution. Volunteer as a referee. Or a judge. Or an inspector. The other side has its own horror stories.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

Certainly Aerial Assist would pose a set of issues. FTC hasn't really had games like that, though. Quite a bit of the information necessary to calculate the score is sitting on the field at the end of the match in FTC games.

I've only done the one FLL event, but we simply talked to the teams and explained the scoring at the end of each match. We had a checklist that listed each mission, and I told them how many points they got for which things, then we all signed the paper. If they had missed some points that they thought they had, I explained why. In a couple of cases the students pointed out a mistake that I made, I agreed with them, and I changed it.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

FLL has paper scoring as described above. Almost all points are determined based on the condition of the field at the end of the game. There's an occasional exception for a mission that is scored as it is completed.

FRC has been scoring near-real-time for several years now, either automatically or by entering it on tablets. Scores can be corrected post-match if needed - if something was missed before the buzzer, or if something was entered incorrectly.

When I made my comments about considering a replay in FTC (way upthread), I mentioned that I didn't know the FTC game. When it was posted that there was a scoring error, I wrongly assumed that there was some kind of automatic scoring that had failed. That would have been the basis for a replay. But it now sounds to me that the scoring was manually done based on field conditions. In that is the case, there could be some kind of team review of the scores like FLL. But remember, in FLL there's only one ref marking the score sheet. If the FTC scores are based on the observations of more than one ref, then the GDC probably figured that was the accuracy check and a separate team sign-off wasn't needed.