2002 Event Roster Spreadsheet now in White Papers

[P.J. Baker]

A zipped version of my 2002 events roster spreadsheet is now available in the white papers section.

It contains a roster sheet for each event, the event schedule, a master list of who is going where, and computes a few basic registration statistics.

Although it is not hard to update everything form the FIRST site, it isn't simple either. I will try to put together a readme file so that you can update it as things change.

Follow the link below to the white papers section.

Chief Delphi White Papers

P.J.

p.s. - post here to let me know if you find any errors.

[Jessica Boucher]

A thing of beauty, P. J. Wonderful job.

[Joe Johnson]

The spread sheet is wonderful. It is the kind of thing that FIRST should do for us. Be that as it may, you did an excellent job. We are in your debt.

Now for the sticking my neck out business.

Unless I am much mistaken, the numbers seem to indicate to me that there will be under 250 teams at the Nationals... ...er ah... ...Championship Event.

Here is how I reason:

212 registered right now.

With shrinkage this will probably fall to 205 or so based on historical evidence of folks that indend on getting funding but get it pulled at the last minute.

Now, there are 17 Regionals.

Winning a regional:
Assuming 2 on 2 robot format with 1 extra per alliance in the elimination rounds, means theoretically 51 teams from this criterion.

Winning a technical award:
Another 51 potential teams.

Winning the Chairman's Award:
17 Teams.

Simplistically, that means a possible 119 added teams. But... we are double counting and counting our chickens before they are hatched.

For the Chairman's Award, I suppose that only 25% of the teams that win Regional Chairman's Awards will new teams for the Championships because either they are even teams or because they are in some other way qualified. Net 4 more teams.

Winning Technical Awards:
I suppose only 33% of these teams will be new teams that will want to go Florida -- more may WANT to but won't be able to pull it off in the short timeframe given. Net 17 teams.

Winning a Regional:
I suppose that somewhat less than 33% will be new teams that will go the the Championship. Selecting of teams is not random. Many teams going to a second regional after winning a first regional will be choosen because they won the last one. Also, a good team is more likely to win just because they are good. All in all, I expect that more teams than qualify this way will be able to find the money to go, but there will be fewer new teams for a number of reasons (not the least of which being that a team that wins a regional this year is more likely than average to have don well last year which means that they will already be going to FL). Bottom line: 17 Net new teams.

205+4+17+17= 243

Unless FIRST modifies the rules somehow, I suppose that it is a pretty safe bet that fewer than 250 teams attend the Championship Event in 2002.

By the way, I think this is probably a good thing for FIRST in the long run (as long time readers of these forums will undoubtably know).

Anyone else have a prediction?

Give your number and state your logic.

I may want to wager a case of Mt. Dew or two should there be any takers ;-)

Joe J.

[E. The Kidd]

250 or less? I thought FIRST was allowing 288 teams

[Joe Johnson]

I know that FIRST had said that they were going to allow 280 or so, but I am saying that they have under sold the competition.

At this point there is only 212 on the list according to the excellent P.J. Baker's spreadsheet.

The balance of teams are supposed to come from the teams that qualify based on the 3 criteria that I discussed above. In my opinion, the 250 number is a very safe number because there is a lot of overlap and double counting that I didn't even go into.

Unless FIRST opens the floodgates to allow more teams to register for the Championship event, I predict that we will have fewer than 250 in FL.

Anybody heard from FIRST what the plan is if they get fewer teams than they plan on?

If so, do tell.

Joe J.

[Greg Ross]

Originally posted by Joe Johnson
Anybody heard from FIRST what the plan is if they get fewer teams than they plan on?

I definitely have not "heard" what the "plan" is, but my guess is that the upshot will simply be a shorter competition. It's unlikely that they will have enough extra time to add a whole round of seeding matches for everyone, but they might be able to add another elimination round.

[Joe Matt]

Where's the White Papers?

[Brandon Martus]

Originally posted by Team384:JosephM
Where's the White Papers?

either follow the link that PJ provided.
Theres a little folder in the upper right corner of this website
and there's a link 'White Papers' at the bottom of this website.
or follow this link: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/papers/


take your pick

[JasonS]

Where did the "experience" column data come from? Is this based on the number of years the team has participated? If so I think alot of the teams have many more years than they've been credited with (my team 312 for example). Awsome spreadsheet though!! Just wondering.

[Joe Matt]

Thanks.

Are you going to make a Mac version? Our school computers are Macs.

[P.J. Baker]

The experience data are calculated automatically based on team number, so the teams are grouped into 5 categories:

4+ years - were in the 1998 competition
3 years - rookie year 1999
2 years - rookie year 2000
1 year - rookie year 2001
0 years - rookie year 2002

I realize that there are some teams (like 312) that may have gotten new numbers due to a sponsorship change, but I think the number is small enough that the error is acceptable.


As far as a Mac version is concerned, the last I knew all Macs could read PC formatted media and the file format for Excel was the same across platforms. Just unzip the file on a PC and then open the spreadsheet on your Mac. If that doesn't work, I can't help you. Perhaps someone else can.

P.J.

[Nate Smith]

Originally posted by P.J. Baker
As far as a Mac version is concerned, the last I knew all Macs could read PC formatted media and the file format for Excel was the same across platforms. Just unzip the file on a PC and then open the spreadsheet on your Mac. If that doesn't work, I can't help you. Perhaps someone else can.

P.J.

You can find some programs(I think newer versions of Stuffit will do it) that will allow you to unzip PC-format ZIP files on a Mac. Do a little digging and I'm sure you can find something. As far as the Mac/PC Excel format goes, I do believe they are the same, so unless it's a really old version of Excel on the Mac(or something else, like ClarisWorks), you shouldn't have a problem opening the resulting XLS file...

[Ken Leung]

You can always ask someone with a PC to save the excel file into web page format, then you can look at that with any web browser.

[Joe Matt]

Our county decided that it was too expensive to give us *any* Microsoft stuff, so all I have is Appleworks. I tried translating it using MacLinkPlus, but it couldn't be read...

[Nate Smith]

I'm working on getting it into a Mac-compatible format(a set of CSV files if nothing else)...looks like there's a lot of behind the scenes work going on, so it may take a little while, but I'll see what I can do...ZIP format OK for compressing the final product?