Event Structure

[Rachel Lim]

Originally Posted by Max Boord

also the top 24 teams based on points also qualify for the championship.

According to the Admin Manual, the number of teams that qualify from a district to the district champs and to champs varies:

Originally Posted by Admin Manual 7.4.3

Number of teams attending District Championship
FiM ......................... 102
IN............................ 32
MAR ........................ 55
NE .......................... 60
PNW......................... 64

Originally Posted by Admin Manual 7.4.4

District Championship Allocation
FiM ......................... 68
IN............................ 10
MAR ........................ 25
NE .......................... 35
PNW......................... 31

The ranking for districts (how they chose the teams from each district that advance) is explained in section 7.4.1 of the Admin Manual. This blog post and the two documents linked in there explain the math behind it.

I also wrote this document for my team to help explain the math more "visually," since I thought the inverse error function was fun but most of my friends didn't get it: http://goo.gl/lx2I2l

Qualifying through regionals is slightly simpler (but the math is less fun), and is explained in section 7.3 of the Admin Manual. Team can qualify in three ways:

1. Awards: Winning Chairman's, Engineering Inspiration, or Rookie All Star
2. Winning: Being on the winning alliance
3. Wildcard: A team on the winning alliance is already qualified (through any way) or wins an award at that event that qualifies them, and passes on their qualifying spot to the next team on the finalist alliance that hasn't qualified (captain -> first pick -> second pick)

There are various pros/cons for districts and for regionals, but as FIRST grows, most places are turning to districts because regionals simply can't deal with that many teams. A quick search on Chief Delphi can probably bring up many of those debates.