Creativity Award to Champs

[tindleroot]

Originally Posted by pilleya

A few examples being teams 148, 610, 900 and especially 1657. These design's came about from in-depth analysis of the game manual, and identifying the pinnacle aspect, making lots of stacks and having the bins to cap them with.

While your point is great, I just wanted to point out that while the four teams you mentioned all won awards, only 900 won Creativity specifically. That being said, this is an interesting thought experiment. To answer the OP, I would be disinclined to make the proposed change. I feel the problem with sending Creativity on would be twofold.

1. Is the Creativity winner more deserving to go than other awards, specifically, the other four robot awards? Chairman's, EI, and RAS make sense because they stand for the epitome of team excellency. As for the robot award teams, many teams that build the most creative designs end up winning Quality or Industrial Design instead, for good reason. Would they be given Creativity over the other robot awards just to be moved on to Worlds? Is Creative design more important than Quality, Engineering Excellence, etc.? Which leads to #2:

2. How would the most Creative design be determined? Is it the most creative design that plays in the elimination rounds? Or the most creative design at the event? Remember that engineering is about elegancy - if you're an engineer, you should build the most efficient (Read: simple) robot you can rather than going out of your way to build something complicated*, and I would expect that many teams that don't expect to win the competition may sacrifice their design quality even further just to make the "odd one out" robot that can't stack more than 4 totes a match but is really complex. After all, doing that could now get them to worlds when they felt they didn't have a shot before. And now they are sacrificing their own playing ability and hurting their alliance partners.

Just my $0.02


*Unless you are in a Rube Goldberg machine contest