[archiver]

Posted by Chris Hibner at 04/11/2001 10:00 AM EST


Coach on team #308, Walled Lake Monster, from Walled Lake Schools and TRW Automotive Electronics.


In Reply to: i didnt like this years game....please read
Posted by Travis Covington on 04/10/2001 2:05 AM EST:



Why I don't like this year's game:

1. Too much luck involved. With 4 robots on the same "team", the probability of a disaster is pretty high. I'll never forget the story that someone posted about the team that built their robot on Thursday and were raked 16th out of 60+ teams at the end of Saturday. This is a good sign that the competition doesn't work (in terms of sorting out the teams). Our team seeded as high as 6 out of 85 and as low as 42 out of 45. The difference between the competitions was luck.

2. No winners or losers. The qualifying matches were like watching batting practice before a baseball game. You watch and say, "whoa, that one almost made the fences," or, "oooh, a *home run*". That's about as exciting as it gets from a spectator standpoint.

3. Too much dependence on other teams (similar to #1). I worked like crazy for 6 weeks on our robot. I would like to have a little more control over how we do in the competition. There's nothing worse than working that hard only to have your fate determined by other teams (this is not aimed at any teams in particular, but I've talked to a number of teams that agreed with this). This brings me to the next one ...

4. The wrong lessons learned. I think it is obvious that in order to get extremely high scores, the alliances needed to work together. However, it became obvious that what a lot of teams said they could do and what they actually could do were different things. This lead a lot of teams to rediscover the old saying "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself". This is completely against what this year's game is supposed to be about, yet I feel that this is what a lot of teams got out of it.

I think the goal of trying to teach teamwork is noble, but I think all of the teams learn that lesson long before the robot ships.

If FIRST wants to continue to to have no winners or losers, I have two suggestions:

1. Limit it to 2 (or 3 at the VERY most) robots per alliance. The more robots, the greater the chance of a disaster. Thus, more luck enters the competition.

2. Publish the match list at the beginning and give teams time to develop a strategy. Giving teams less than two minutes to decide how to work together is not conducive to working together.