Team 3018 (Nordic Storm) was inspired by last year's robot in 3 days-- not their design, but rather the challenge of doing such in 3 days.
This year the students tried to build a fully functioning prototype robot and did a pretty respectable job of it. Their final design was largely based on their 3 day prototype. They used the drive train from our rebound rumble bot and focused on the manipulator and collector during the build, but the prototype was able to nominally do all aspects of the challenge that our final version could do.
3 day prototype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE9H627YZyM
Final:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8sxcxqOOMA
It didn't hurt that we are a community based team and we had snow days Monday and Tuesday so they were able to build from Saturday@noon until Tuesday@noon. The original plan was Sat Noon-late, Sun 1-9, Mon 4-9, Tue 4-9 for roughly 30h or build time over a ~80hr period, but they worked pretty much all the waking hours Sat Noon-late, Sunday 1pm - Tue noon.
In the end, I think the decision to try to not just prototype ideas but prototype a complete functioning robot took us further faster than in years past. It certainly was a lot of fun and we wouldn't have considered it if it weren't for last year's Ri3d effort.