i have a nice, easy suggestion, that most teams should be doing anyways.
as several topics in this forum have mentioned, there are some people trying to develop dashboard programs. most are rather generic, not much to them. my team, on the other hand, tends to make dashboards that are specific to each robot, which means that a new one is developed each year.
we put lots of time (well, we did it on a coach bus, but it still took some time
) to make our dashboard program this year, and we tried to impress the judges with it, but they seemed to only show a passing interest, as in "oh, hey, what's that on the laptop? oh cool." it'd be nice for efforts in programming would be recognized more, as it is just as hard as actually building the robot (especially when it's late at night and you don't know why everything isn't working
).