[MJunkin]

After three years of observing FIRST competitions, I offer some thoughts on a number of ways to make a FIRST game more challenging from a design perspective. I personally like the idea of combining variable (pseudo random) game piece location with an initial uncontrolled (i.e., no human control) portion (i.e. 30 seconds of the 2 minutes).

By changing the location of the game pieces (selection from a set of configurations just prior to the match), it would greatly increase the requirement for team coordination/strategy, as well as limiting the benefits of single function designs.

Combining the varying locations with the uncontrolled portion would force detection and other technoligies to be used.

The attached PDF contains 6 different goal locations, and 7 different ball locations (notionally, just for one of the goal locations).

Another change that would help make the design/competition needs for the qualifying rounds and the finals more consistent (i.e., unlike this year when ball handlers lead the qualifying, but goal handlers were the dominant force in the finals) is to revise the scoring somewhat. If you make an assumption that the best matchs are those that where there is only one point difference between the high and low score, the one could conclude that there should be similar/or equal qualifying benefit to the winners/loosers of a 50-49 match as there is to 15-14 one. To accomplish that, one could change the scoring to reflect the difference between the high and low score rather than just a multiplier of low score. For instance, the winner might get 125 points less the difference between the high and low score. The looser might get 50 points, less the difference. If there is a need to reflect raw scoring talent, then an additional factor based on combined score could also be introduced.

... just food for thought ... not that one would reuse this year's game, but as the design progresses for next year's, some alternatives to the more traditional approach could yield some interesting results.

Malcolm