IRI - Comments, Suggestions,

[Chris Fultz]

We always look to improve the IRI and want your feedback on everything that goes on. What is good, what could we do better. Please post or PM me with comments.

Also, many people asked for info on how the IRI is organized. If you are looking for info, please PM me with the request.

[Rich Kressly]

No singing Canadians
Seriously..
For three years Morrison, Baker, and company have been putting the heat on me to attend. This year the planets aligned and I was able to take Team 1712. Not to slight other events, but it's perhaps the most friendly AND competitive FIRST event I've ever attended. Great atmosphere, people, and teams. The organizing committee should be very proud of what IRI has become. Thanks for showing us easterners a great time.

[Chuck Glick]

Originally Posted by Rich Kressly

No singing Canadians
Seriously..
For three years Morrison, Baker, and company have been putting the heat on me to attend. This year the planets aligned and I was able to take Team 1712. Not to slight other events, but it's perhaps the most friendly AND competitive FIRST event I've ever attended. Great atmosphere, people, and teams. The organizing committee should be very proud of what IRI has become. Thanks for showing us easterners a great time.

i have to agree with mr kressly here, even though this was the students of the team's rookie year, i think we can all say that this was the most friendly event that we have attended. I met so many people there and every single person was friendly. Dodgeball was quite fun, (to tytus and greg: WEST BEAT YA!) and I'd like to thank team 40 for bringing their amazing mini aim high field and letting us tryout their bots and let us run ours on the field. I will definately attend IRI again in the future and did i forget to mention that it was DA' BOMB!

oh ya and to answer your question, the singing canadians must stay... that was a great highlight... but i don't have any complaints, definatley the cream of the crop when it comes to off-season events.

[Beth Sweet]

I loved it guys. Personally, I enjoy this better than regionals, because you seem to get so much more for so much less money.

The social was excellent and my team all loved the mac and cheese, the talent show was very amusing (and I think that Dave will be making his own fish hat), and overall, it was just fun.

As a side note I wanted to make sure to give major props for the resonable food prices and hotel discounts. Both of these are huuuuuge to us. Thanks so much guys, great event!

[JBotAlan]

I wish I could've stayed for the talent show and do some of the other stuff, but we came, stayed for dinner, and left. For the time I was there, I had great fun. I have 2 gripes--there was no wireless Internet (probably something you'd have to talk the school tech admins into)--and the scoreboard projector needed to be brighter and higher resolution. I saw nothing else wrong anywhere. This is the first off-season event I've ever been to (not counting OCCRA, which is totally different) and it was way more fun than a typical FIRST regional. Thanks to everyone who worked for weeks to put this on!

JBot

[JackN]

I have a few comments and suggestions

The second pit aisle (the one where it ran 233-494 on one side and 703 was on the other side) was very crammed making it hard to move. It would have been nice to have had a ranking list in the pit as well, and if there was one make it more visible. Please order more pizza next year. Krispy Kremes on both days would be sweet. This is a big one, move the mentor rounds to the end and make them not count. It sounds harsh but they can really hurt teams. The food line could be more spread out to keep it moving and more efficent. Maybe move fruit cocktail and salad farther down.

[Wayne C.]

OK-
here's a few-

1. put ALL the teams in the large pit area and use the "VIP" pit area for staging, the auction and posting the running standings. The traffic in and out of the tunnel was awkward and unsafe. There shouldn't be people wandering behind the control and play stations.

2. put a map or directions to the event on the event web site

3. designate a camera zone on the upper balcony and maybe supply a few small tables up there

Overall the IRI team put on a great event and we generally had a good time. Thanks to all the organizers for putting it all together.

WC

[taggartbg]

i liked the fact that not only was there an extremely fun robot competition, but also the dodgeball and talent show added a lot to the expirience. Good times...

[Dan Zollman]

Wayne C.'s number two...For some reason I thought that all the information was on 234's site and I didn't see this page after it was updated, so it seemed there were a few things that were missing or incomplete.

Originally Posted by Rich Kressly

No singing Canadians
Seriously..
For three years Morrison, Baker, and company have been putting the heat on me to attend. This year the planets aligned and I was able to take Team 1712. Not to slight other events, but it's perhaps the most friendly AND competitive FIRST event I've ever attended. Great atmosphere, people, and teams. The organizing committee should be very proud of what IRI has become. Thanks for showing us easterners a great time.

Originally Posted by SirCharles982

I'd like to thank team 40 for bringing their amazing mini aim high field and letting us tryout their bots and let us run ours on the field. I will definately attend IRI again in the future and did i forget to mention that it was DA' BOMB!

I think so too. Thanks for "putting the heat" on Kres. The event was a lot of fun, and I had the chance to meet many people I've heard about and to hear things from different teams. And now I get to say that I hung out with Dave Lavery (while making a point to ask him a weird question, which I've been waiting to do all year).

[Craig Roys]

Our team had a great time - I love the relaxed atmosphere combined with the tough competition. That makes for a great weekend. Just a couple suggestions:

1. I agree with a couple previous posts - the screen was difficult to read, and it would be nice to have a screen in the pits showing the matches giving teams a better idea of how much time they have to their next match - and also enjoy some of the competiton while working on the robot. Having said that, the pit announcers did an excellent job of calling teams so you didn't miss your match.

2. I like the mentor rounds - despite my inability to drive back towards myself - and I don't mind them counting (it adds to the fun), but I do have one complaint. We were in the last mentor round and all three teams on the opposite alliance had already played once so they had student drivers back in place. Our alliance had two mentor-driven teams and one student-driven - a most definite disadvantage. I was impressed that we managed to hold them to 56 points (or somewhere around that). I realize that this is probably a scheduling nightmare, but if there was a way to make sure that no alliance was able to have this type of advantage during the mentor rounds that would improve things.

Thanks for a great competiton and hopefully we'll be back next year.

[Kyle Love]

I think there should be a different tournament structure. It would be kind of cool, since we are in Indiana, to have it be something like a sprint car race. I think it would be cool to have a "B Main". The top 7 alliances are locked in to the "A main" and they do their alliance picking before the "B Main" teams. Once the "A Main" alliances are full, you pull the next top 4 teams from qualifying onto the field and have the alliance picking happen again. There would only be semi-final, final rounds in the "B Main" though, so only 4 teams come out to pick. You play the "B Main" just like how you do the "A Main" and then the winner of the "B Main" gets transfered to the "A Main" in the 8th place alliance spot. If you have questions about how this all works pm me.

[David Kelly]

Originally Posted by Kyle Love

I think there should be a different tournament structure. It would be kind of cool, since we are in Indiana, to have it be something like a sprint car race. I think it would be cool to have a "B Main". The top 7 alliances are locked in to the "A main" and they do their alliance picking before the "B Main" teams. Once the "A Main" alliances are full, you pull the next top 4 teams from qualifying onto the field and have the alliance picking happen again. There would only be semi-final, final rounds in the "B Main" though, so only 4 teams come out to pick. You play the "B Main" just like how you do the "A Main" and then the winner of the "B Main" gets transfered to the "A Main" in the 8th place alliance spot. If you have questions about how this all works pm me.

Would you like to also design a new scoring system for that? Maybe Brandon Marcus could make a php website to do it....

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by David Kelly

Would you like to also design a new scoring system for that? Maybe Brandon Marcus could make a php website to do it....

Didn't GTR do something in a similar vein? How did they do their variation on the tournament?

I know from experience that you don't even have to be fancy about it--Mission Mayhem's ladder was a PowerPoint slide that got updated after a round was decided. Worked fine for us.

[Don Wright]

I had an absolute blast at my first IRI (no pun intended). The competition was incredibly intense and the environment was wonderful. The best FIRST competition I've ever been to.

Which leads me to an off-topic suggestion.

This is a perfect example of what a FIRST regional could be like. Practice rounds where you can actually practice instead of frantically trying to finish a robot you had to ship. Let's get rid of the ship date and allow teams to bring their robots with them to the competitions. Get rid of all the "put down your tools" rules. Get rid of the need to build 2 robots so you can practice while your real robot sits in a box 10 miles down the road waiting to go to your local tournament. It would make all the regionals more competitive and exciting for all teams. We all know the game isn't fair to begin with, and the ship date rule doesn't help. More rules don't either.

Sorry for the off-topic rant, but IRI should be the model competition for FIRST to really look at for Inspiration on how good it can be.

Thank you all for a great weekend.

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by Billfred

Didn't GTR do something in a similar vein? How did they do their variation on the tournament?

GTR had twelve alliances for eliminations; the top four alliances got byes in the first elimination round. They used the serpentine draft order; i.e., 1st alliance captain got the first pick in the first draft round, then 12th alliance got first pick in the second draft round.