[Leibniz13]

Think how much less awesome it would be if the we spent all that time building robots, then had just one opportunity at one regional to walk our robot through its paces in front of a panel of judges. At the end we were told we either won the whole regional or did not win. No matches, no ranking, no score, no learning from what our competitors did to beat us, no beating last year's rank, etc.

With the clever minds involved, why can't we figure out how to bring the game spirit and energy to the community outreach/education side of FIRST? Sure, those things are valuable in themselves. So is managing to create a complex robot and bring it to life. The inspired vision of a varsity sport of the mind still adds something more.

Ideas for and against are welcome, but I'm particularly interested in collaborating on the preliminaries of a feasible gamification architecture (metrics & commensurability, key variables, comparison across strategies, etc.). Promising participants may be invited to a separate forum to develop ideas further.