asking first questions

[soap108]

All-

Does anyone know how FIRST plans to handled rules clarifications this year? Will it be through yahoogroups like last year, or back to the old way of sending email and waiting for updates??

Thanks,
KA-108

[Jay5780]

I would hope it would be either back to the old way or at least something better than the yahoo groups.

A good idea would be to have a Forum format like the Q&A forum here, but categorized by the section of the manual the questions would refer to. Also allowing users to post follow up questions in the same thread, but a "sub-thread" if you can do that...

[Gope]

I don't know how they plan to do it, but I hope they find a better way because e-mail and yahoogroups are both not very effective. I think an offical rule book should be posted on their website(in html format) and updated immediatly when they change or tweak a rule. I also think that there should be a deadline for major rule changes(5 weeks into the build period a rule change could devestate a team).

I also hope that they are stronger with the rules. Last year they said "no tape measures for extendy arm things" and when regionals come around they said "well, so many teams have tape measures that we're gona let them use them, its a shame to let their work go to waste." My team had a joke about putting a chainsaw on our robot, maybe our work wouldn't go to waste either...It just reall bothered me that because alot of teams broke very obvious rules very openly that Dean simply changed the rule, I really hope this dosen't happen again.

[rbayer]

Two years ago, all the updates/clarifications were in the Team Updates, along with a short list of questions submitted by teams and the answers. This kept everything in one place (well, five-six documents, but you know what I mean) and made it fairly easy to look something up. It wasn't great, but at least it worked.

[Jay5780]

I really enjoyed the teams questions. You'd get some wierd ones you wouldn't ask because it seems so obvious, but the answer from FIRST is 99.9999999% opposite of what you'd think

[AdamT]

FIRST has already said that they will not be using a yahoogroup to answer questions like these. As to how they will answer rule clarification....who knows, I believe they are trying to achieve the impossible by creating a rule system where there will be no need for clarification. Something about having a whole team of specialists dedicated to nothing but the writing of the rules....

[Matt Attallah]

USE CD for the questions/answers! That would be so cool!!

[Gope]

CD would be a great place. It's already the most popular FIRST related website, probably more so that www.usfirst.org . It could be a branch of the new Q&A setup.

Although that would require work on CD's part(work that could hinder them in the build period) and collaboration with FIRST, its probably just to late in the year to make that happen. Maybe next year.

[nuggetsyl]

Does any one know is nasa is going to show the first robotics game again after 1:00 because i am flying at the time off the kick off

[sanddrag]

Originally posted by nuggetsyl
Does any one know is nasa is going to show the first robotics game again after 1:00 because i am flying at the time off the kick off

I couldn't really say but this may be of some use. My local shared channel has NASA brodcasting from 6 AM until 2PM PST. They haven't had any other NASA programming for at least the last month so my guess is they will show a rerun.

[RBrandy]

I believe rule clarifications will be taking place on the FIRST forum on www.segwaychat.com. This is just what I heard from some people. I hope this helps.

[Cory]

Originally posted by nuggetsyl
Does any one know is nasa is going to show the first robotics game again after 1:00 because i am flying at the time off the kick off

It should be archived on http://www.robotics.nasa.gov there will be a link on the main page to archived FIRST footage.


Cory