Friday's Action

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Posted by Patrick Canale at 03/02/2001 10:08 PM EST


Student on team #250 from Shenendehowa High School East.


In Reply to: Benifit to 5 second stop
Posted by Jason Leslie on 03/02/2001 9:27 PM EST:



: : Hey all,

: : After spending 3+ hours with my eyes glued to my monitor watching the NASA feed of the KSC regional I have a few comments and questions.

: : 1.) It seemed many teams did not understand the importance of their stop buttons and the accompanying multiplier. I saw numerous matches where alliances could have maximized their scores by stopping the match at 16 seconds, but instead they tried to get that last robot in the endzone. A 1.5 multiplier always outweighs those extra 10 points, unless your score is less than 20.

: : 2.) It also seemed that there was a lot of overestimating of abilities going on. A lot of alliances tried to do more than they could, and ended up with relatively poor scores. Of course this is the first regional, so most teams are still trying to figure what they can do well. As the day went on, teams seemed to redesign their strategies.

: : 3.) Here's something that puzzled me. I saw a few alliances stop the clock with about five or fewer seconds left. Why? I was under the impression that there was no benefit to doing this.
: : Overall, I'm very impressed with the competition the FIRST has created. Today’s matches were far more exciting than I expected them to be.
: : Anyone one else have any thoughts about today's matches?

: : -Karthik

: The only benifit that I can see to stopping the match with less than 5 seconds left is that if everything is the way they want it why wait those 5 sec to have seomthing go wrong like an unbalanced ramp...

: Just a thought.

: Jay

It doesnt if they have the ramp balanced. After the stop button is pressed or the game finishes, there is ten seconds to let everything settle. For instance,a balanced ramp might fall during the ten seconds.
-Pat