Championship Event Improvements

[Don Wright]

After attending my second championship, I am still blown away at how amazing it is. I can't imagine the time and effort it takes to pull something like this off. My admiration to all those that worked on it. You did an incredible job.

On the bus ride home last night with 469, we were discussing some things that we think might make the event a little more crowd friendly. These are not all my ideas, but I like them and I thought I would post them to see what everyone thinks.

1. Have three other monitors above the main monitors for each field. These monitors will be showing the action from the other fields. This will allow us to see what is going on over there so that the first time we see the robots from the other fields isn't on Einstein. Plus, it will allow the crowd to watching something during field reset.

2. Have a monitor with the current standings along with upcoming matches.

3. Sell programs and put a match list in the programs.

4. On the match list that each team gets (including the above match list in the programs), include a list sorted by team number so you can immeditely see when your team is up as well as other teams you might be interested in seeing.

5. OK...this one is a stretch... Move the elimination rounds to Einstein and one of the fields next to it. Then, you play matches on one, then the other, back and forth. When one field is being reset, the other field is going. This way everyone can see how the teams that make it to Einstein got there and can be part of the excitement. When we figured this probably isn't possible, I came up with the field monitors idea above...

6. For the awards...take pictures of the technological things they are getting awards for so that we can see it. If the team is using a neat OI controller, show a picture. If a robot has a cool device on it, winning it an award, show a picture on the screen.

Any comments? Other ideas?