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#13
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Re: Declawed games
Posted by Steve Goldberg.
Engineer on team #157, Aztechs, from Assabet Valley RTHS and EMC/Simplex/Intel MA/Others. Posted on 1/12/2000 1:32 PM MST In Reply to: Declawed games posted by Marc DeSchamp on 1/12/2000 11:04 AM MST: Since everyone else seemed to be disagreeing here I thought I'd add that I mostly agree with you. I think FIRST has been toning down the competitions over the years (I have been involved since 1993) Although I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing I think there are a few rules that take away some 'reality' from the contest. Part of FIRST's mission is to show students how real life engineering works. Well, in there real world there are no rules that say the competition can't do underhanded tricky things to you. FIRST has chosen to remove things such as tipping. Instead why didn't they make it a point that teams should design a robot that is capable of recovering from such an occurance or one that would not be able to be tipped over. I feel that FIRST took away some important engineering possiblities by instituting this rule. As for bumpers, I agree... Again, instead of adding a rule for a predefined bumper why don't they just encourage proper design that would account for getting hit a bit in competition. They have also added alliances, which in my humble opinion are a good thing, if they were to be reworked a bit. The problem I have with the way the competitions are run nowadays is that there is too much reliance on luck. By having alliances FIRST took away the ability to engineer a winning robot. Now you could have a fantastically designed and built robot but still lose a good deal of your matches simply by the luck of the draw. Again, I think the idea behind the alliances is admirable but the implementation leaves a bit to be desired. As a final note, I'd like to bring up the point of easy scoring. Part of each FIRST competition is to gather more interest in FIRST. The problem is that if average people who are seeing the contest for the first time can't figure out who is winning easily then they won't be as interested in the competition. Most of the games that FIRST has come up with have used what I will call a 'cumulative' scoring system. (People but objects in a specific place and each object has a point value associated with it) Well, Dean keeps saying that he wants FIRST to be like the NFL. If we look at most major sports, none of them use a 'cumulative' scoring system. Instead most use what I will call an 'additive' scoring system. Score a touchdown, add 6 points. Touch home plate, score 1 run. In each case the audience knows exactly when the scoring has occured and it can not be reversed or removed. This is simplicity in scoring, not this ball is 1 point this one is 5, stop here get 5 more points, hang here get 10, lift the other robot get 10 but not your opponent because that is illegal. This is not simple, it is complex. Anyway, I still think FIRST is a great competition, I just think that recently the competitions have been discouraging some of the engineering that it meant to foster. |
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