Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

If they were to give EI to the best engineered robot, they would have to change the definition of the award Engineering Inspiration. Right now it celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school and community.

Maybe your saying make the Excellence In Engineering award qualify a robot to worlds too?

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

Personally, I really like this idea. You can use the district point system to rank teams at a regional event based on their performance (at that event only). Give the initial 6 slots to the winners, RA, CA, and EI, then any additional slots to the top X teams at the event, based on the event size. So a 30 team regional might just get those first 6 slots, while a 60 team regional would get 12. Obviously, the numbers would need to be tweaked accordingly each year, as they are now for districts, but it would completely solve the problem we currently have in MN - 4 60-team events at 12 teams per event would be 48 teams, and some of those would go to Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakota's, or whoever else comes here to play.

Why isn't there? The district point system can be adopted to a single event format easily, in order to give points to teams at that event based on robot and award performance.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

In a fairly large amount of cases, this would just qualify the first two robots on the winning and finalist alliances. Right now, a massive chunk of points come from getting picked high and going far. Culture changing awards points would need to be rebalanced to work in a single event format. Someone could run numbers and see how things would pan out.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

Those are usually the four robots that I'm most interested in seeing compete at the Championship level. I'm a fan of any system that sends those four.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

They aren't supposed to.

And most of the times judges don't get to watch many of the matches.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

I took a look at District Rankings for the North Brunswick District Event:
If District Events were regionals, CMP qualification would look something like this:

Winners: 303 (prequalified, Mount Olive Chairman's), 2590 (Montreal Winner), 3340
CA: 1923 (prequalified, TVR EI)
EI: 3314
RAS: 5666

Generating 3 wild cards:
Current System: 11, 193, 1257
District points: 11, 193, 4285

Looking at the OPR for that event, 4285 averaged ~43 points per match, and 1257 ~21 points per match. Using district points for wildcards sends a slightly different but more competitive set of teams to CMP.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

Agreed. I wasn't criticizing the people, it's just that the process isn't currently setup to identify the best robots (as that's not the current goal of the process). Identifying the best robot would require a large shift, or addition of more judges, to allow substantial match view time by more than a single judge or two.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

Agreed. My only concern with any such system is that you take all the competition out of the finals. If everybody is guaranteed to go to champs you're basically playing an exhibition match. If you weighted the points such that only the winning alliance's 3rd robot also got to go that would be way more intriguing.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

I had a student complain to me once that since most judges weren't FRC people, they generally didn't know how to objectively judge for awards.

And I just said "That's the point." Having judges do what they do isn't about objectively determining who the "Innovation in Controls" award winner should be- it's about exposing industry leaders who are often judges to these amazing students and exposing these students to industry leaders.

Ex: I talk to Team A and Team B, and Team A's students tell me in detail about their sloppy control system for their mechanism, while Team B wins the regional with their tightly and highly controlled mechanism but can't discuss it with the judges. I, as an FRC person who understands what these students are doing, might still award the award to the winning team, whereas an outsider judge will award it to the team who can talk about what they built better. That is (I think) an intentional part of the system. I place more focus on results, whereas a non-FRC person will place more emphasis on the attempt and the innovation than the results, while also learning about what FIRST-er's do.

I think the main problem with the regional system is when finalists aren't invited to championships or when the second best robot at an event loses in the semifinals because they were on the wrong side of the bracket or something.

What if (bold idea), before week 7, FIRST polls a number of experts on who the best 20 or so teams to not make championships are (kind of like this, but two weeks earlier) and invites them to the championship event.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

From my experience in a district, I've noticed that there tends to be one or two captain/first pick semifinalists that outrank the second pick winner, and a few more semifinalists that outrank the second pick finalist.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

I'm not as familiar with the district system, but I thought this would be the case. That's why I suggested manipulating the points so that winning the event is more valuable. Although the system works well as is, and just adds more incentive to strive for safety, and spirit awards to push your team over the top.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

That, I think, would be one of the best ideas. Let's expand towards original intent of the question.

1) FIRST polls experts on best 50 teams to not CURRENTLY make championships. (Trust me, there's a reason this number is so high.) This happens sometime around Week 6.
2) FIRST looks at who still has a chance to qualify (playing Week 7, maybe playing Week 6), or is near the top of the waitlist. These teams are set aside.
3) FIRST looks at geography and representation. Teams from underrepresented areas get higher priority than teams that are from fully represented areas.
4) The combined "best teams" and "underrepresented areas' teams" sorts determine the order of offering--but only to the top 25 on the combined list.
5) After Week 7 plays, the list is revisited. The bottom 25 and the teams that were set aside are now eligible for invites.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

If 2 teams are on equal standing, why should where they are from set them apart? If a team is from an area that has more "better" teams, why should that hurt their chances of making it?

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

I just remembered that 3340 declined their DCMP invite. In our hypothetical regional, let's assume they'd decline a CMP invite. Using the district point wildcard system, this would qualify 25. Without this system, the extra slot would go unused, with three wildcards generated already.

Re: [FRC Blog] Frank Answers Friday: Championship Slots
 

To be fair, the district system does this already. Lets say district A had 250 teams and 50 of them are really good, while district B also has 250 teams, but only 20 of them are really good. District A might not be able to send all of their good teams, while district B gets to send a number of not as good teams to championships anyway.

Any sort of equal representation system based on region will do this, and that's (I think) an unavoidable problem, albeit a lesser problem compared to how championship slots are currently allocated to regionals.