[BSV]

As a scientist, and someone who hires a lot of people who are in college or fresh out of college, I really like the project portion of FLL. It really requires a lot of creativity to come up with a good one, as well as a lot of interaction with real-world experts (in different topic areas each year) to discover what the big challenges are in their field. It's a fantastic introduction to real-world research problems. The teams who have really great FLL projects have worked hard, interviewed a lot of people, and probably even taken it past the idea stage into a physical product prototype.

In my mind, using a fully autonomous robot should require a lot more programming finesse than "driving" a remote controlled one. At least in my field, people who have scientific expertise AND can program (code up and test) scientific ideas) are golden. From a kid's perspective, why learn how to program when you can remote control the whole thing? That's kind of opposite of what we are trying to achieve.

That being said, I've not seen a Vex IQ but would love to get hold of one to try out. It sounds like each of the programs (Vex and FLL) have different strengths and weaknesses depending on what your goals are with it. We'd enter a team in each if the seasons didn't overlap so much.