VEX IQ vs. LEGO EV3

[BSV]

As a scientist, and someone who hires a lot of people who are in college or fresh out of college, I really like the project portion of FLL. It really requires a lot of creativity to come up with a good one, as well as a lot of interaction with real-world experts (in different topic areas each year) to discover what the big challenges are in their field. It's a fantastic introduction to real-world research problems. The teams who have really great FLL projects have worked hard, interviewed a lot of people, and probably even taken it past the idea stage into a physical product prototype.

In my mind, using a fully autonomous robot should require a lot more programming finesse than "driving" a remote controlled one. At least in my field, people who have scientific expertise AND can program (code up and test) scientific ideas) are golden. From a kid's perspective, why learn how to program when you can remote control the whole thing? That's kind of opposite of what we are trying to achieve.

That being said, I've not seen a Vex IQ but would love to get hold of one to try out. It sounds like each of the programs (Vex and FLL) have different strengths and weaknesses depending on what your goals are with it. We'd enter a team in each if the seasons didn't overlap so much.

[Allison K]

Originally Posted by BSV

In my mind, using a fully autonomous robot should require a lot more programming finesse than "driving" a remote controlled one. At least in my field, people who have scientific expertise AND can program (code up and test) scientific ideas) are golden. From a kid's perspective, why learn how to program when you can remote control the whole thing? That's kind of opposite of what we are trying to achieve.

VEX IQ does integrate autonomous control in the skills challenge portions of a tournament, and as part of the consideration for the overall winner. Qualifying matches are two teams working together to score the most points in a driver control match, and then separately each team gets an equal number of attempts at both a driver skills challenge (teleoperated) and a programming skills challenge (autonomous) as the sole team on the field. The first place team in each skills challenge is awarded at each event, and in my area the programming skills challenge ranking is used to fill in state championship qualifying spots created by teams double qualifying. All three of those elements, plus the project judging and engineering notebook judging are used to determine the excellence award winner at events. The autonomous is much less of a focal point than it is in FLL however.

Last note and then I'll stop thread cluttering for a bit. It occurs to me that much of my stress with FLL is probably a regional issue with time crunch issues. Public schools here aren't allowed to start until after labor day (so as not to inhibit tourism, or something) and qualifying events start the second weekend of November (because they want all FLL done before FRC starts), resulting in only about 9 weeks of meeting time to get everything done before our one and only shot at a qualifying event (each team only gets one event here). Areas that don't have that particular combination of time constraints and single event pressure probably have a much more manageable and valuable FLL option.

Edited to add: I looked it up and Minnesota's FLL State Championship takes place in February (rather than our early December), and now I am a little bit jealous.

Also edited to add: The moral of the story is that overall quality of the competition experience appears to be highly dependent upon regional differences.

[Foster]

One of my pet peeves is the perceived difficulty in running the smaller robot events. I get that FRC needs mongo space, power, etc.

For a VEX IQ event you need a room big enough to hold 12-16 (depending on the number of teams) card tables and the 4*8 field. So a cafeteria is great, or a room at the local fire-hall, church, YMCA, etc works. You will need a laptop to run the scoring software. You will need 2 people with clipboards and the paper score sheets to count the scores up at the end. Since its not a 1 vs 1 event, but a 1 "Helping" 1 event there are not the fouls and stuff to watch for.

So for about $25-30 per team you are good to go. (Based on Fire Hall Rental and the VEXIQ trophy pack (http://www.vexrobotics.com/228-3053.html)

Start at 8 run a ton of matches and be done by 12 (four hours will give everyone about 8 matches)

It's super easy to do. In our area most of the schools will run one event that's how you quickly get 10 events in a season.

If you want to judge the projects then you will need judges for that (2 people) Projects are not hard or complex to look at.

The entire reason I stay in competition robotics is for the competitions. Let me be the first to say "I don't like the projects that are not directly related to the robot". I understand that they are nice, expand roboteers outlook, etc. If you want to do a project oriented event, organize a science fair. I want to see roboteers doing robot engineering on their robot that they are competing with. (If you want to start a side discussion on this, lets do it in another thread, don't derail this one).

12 teams * 2 adults per team = 24 people you can ask to help. So an hour a person gets you more than enough help. In most of our cases there is a big brother/sister/grandparent that we can get to do scoring, etc.

Please don't let the lack of IQ events deter you. If you are in an hour drive of Philly and want to have an event contact me.