What are the differences between VEX and FIRST competitions?

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Mterrell221

I'm curious to hear about the differences between the two competitions and have a couple of questions and would love to hear a few responses from true enthusiasists.

Truth in advertising - I now (for about 2 months) am employed part-time by the non-profit Robotics Education and Competition Foundation that runs the Vex Robotics Competition and assists other STEM programs. I guess that, plus about 5 years of experience make me an enthusiast.

When asked your question, I tell folks these things.
1) Really young students should get into FLL.
2) Older students with access to big budgets and non-trivial manufacturing resources should think about going into FRC after getting their feet wet (and building up a support infrastructure) in FTC or VRC.

3) From about 7th grade up through 12th (and into college with the VRCC) It's hard to beat the value per $ from VRC and FTC.

4) My calculations always tell me that VRC is perhaps 2/3rds the cost of FTC for what I and my 4H VRC Team(s) do; but other folks get different results; so you should crunch the numbers for yourself.

5) As a rule in areas that have hit critical mass (but not always or everywhere) there are more VRC tournaments in a school year than FTC tournaments; and the VRC tournaments are pretty inexpensive (FTC events are usually reasonable cost, maybe a little higher than VRC, depending on how well sponsor $ are flowing).

6) For your tournament $ the FTC tournaments I have seen supply a little more flash and circus along with the STEM benefits. For some students this is exactly what they need. For other students - they don't care.

7) High tournament frequency is good if you want to do plenty of iterating and engineering across an entire (school) year. On the other hand, going to one or two tournaments in a mid-year burst let's your season begin and end without crowding out any other activities you might want.

8) Vex permits some, but fewer custom fabricated parts than FTC. If you want to cut & bend your own parts, FTC has more opportunities, and in this regard is less (less than is the case in VRC) like a chess game in which you are challenged to outwit your opponents while sticking to a common set of parts.

For me & my 4H club, the lower costs that I experience, the lower barriers to entry for team & tournament organizers, and the ability to attend several tournaments spread out over a school year are the points that swing us. Plus I don't want to have to fabricate parts from raw stock, so I stay away from that temptation, and just cut and bend the Vex parts.

However, to be perfectly clear (well actually to perfectly straddle the fence) about the "Which is better question?"; I believe in the benefits of FTC enough to volunteer plenty of my time to it and to make sure that both FTC (and VRC) teams and tournaments get full use of equipment Lockheed Martin (my employer at the time) donated for STEM uses in the region.

So what if some folks like FTC better than I - Who am I to argue with them? I (we all) have better things to do than argue over which end of an egg should be eaten first, or other bogus topics.

Talk to teams participating in both, and visit a tournament from each program. The VRC season is already underway and a tournaments are occurring in the Southern Hemisphere and in a few spots here in North America (Visit www.RobotEvents.com). The FTC season will start near the beginning (a little after?) the start of the North American school year.

Blake