2012 Lessons Learned :The Positive

[Koko Ed]

What did FIRST do particularly well this year?

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

What did FIRST do particularly well this year?

The game was great from the spectator stand point and was a decent mix of all elements. This was probably the 2nd best game I have particpated in. (after 2004 which is a type of game we won't see again)

[Wayne Doenges]

The game was easy to watch and score, the penalties were immediately given and there was very little delay as to who won.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Wayne Doenges

The game was easy to watch and score, the penalties were immediately given and there was very little delay as to who won.

I second that.

[Debbie]

I agree the game was easy to follow and fun. Having live scoring including penalty points was great. Having a basketball theme in the middle of March Madness was an added bonus, planned or not. Though I did not get to attend the Finale, it was a huge improvement over last year from the description. Playing all teams on the dome floor again was right. Allowing MAR, so more teams could experience the district structure was good! Great Championship. Great support!

[jwfoss]

Besides the GDC giving us the best game in recent history, I would like to thank them for this years motor rules.

The amount of motor power we had to work with this year was fantastic and left a lot of options. I hope to see this and the pneumatic rules make it through to following years. Overall the rulebook was fairly well written (minus some issues with trolling, grappling, and appendages).

[Jared Russell]

The game was awesome, the robot construction rules were wide open, and there was FINALLY a working/worthwhile vision system.

[IKE]

The bridges were probably the coolest most dynamic and exciting bonus I have seen in FIRST. They provided an excellent challenge and rewarded good design and driving yet were simple enough with a little teamwork almost anyone could score on them. Rotate a similar element into the game every few years as this one was a winner.

More than Michigan can do the district model. I talked to a lot of MAR participants this year and while almost everyone had a very specific complaint, the season seemed to meet or surpass their expectations over and over.

I was truly shocked how many teams were able to shoot baskets. When the challenge was anounced, I thought this would be a horribly low scoring season. Overall, I am impressed with so many teams doing so well at scoring.

With 1114 winning the Chairman's Award, a lot of myths were "busted". Yes an international team can win. No you don't need a team of 100 students (I think 1114 is around 24). Yes field competitive teams are role models too.

Never judge a book by its cover. When Kareem Abdul Jabar was invited to be an honored guest, there a few vocal people against hero worship of pro-atheletes, only to find out KAJ is a huge supporter of STEM complete with even writing a book targeted to get middle school kids excited about inventors.

[rsisk]

FIRST Choice and Vouchers in the KOP. Making the KOP more flexible for teams is a huge win.

[JesseK]

I was just about to say FIRST Choice this year was better than ever. I like the freedom of choice. The $30 to Banebots voucher, Gates Belts/Sprockets and Bimba Cyllinders were also very welcome and appreciated by my team.

The game is the best I've ever seen in FRC (like the 2010 FTC game). It was very exciting to watch finals. It was nerve racking to see our opponents balance, knowing we had to do the same to win in less time. Box on wheels bots had a place; super stars were still super stars. The rules weren't constricting. Strategy could be the deciding factor when executed.

[Nate Laverdure]

Some more 2012 postives:

The bumper rules stayed the more or less the same from the previous few years. Although Bill Miller has mentioned that a special group will soon be tasked with reviewing the bumper rules and possibly revising them, I think they'll find that the seat of the problem is not with the rules, but instead with teams choosing to build something else instead. I hope they'll decide to keep the rules functionally the same and instead find new ways to reinforce the existing rules.

The KOP wheels were awesome.

[Nick Lawrence]

The co-opertition bridge, and it's effect on the rankings.

It allowed for some of the greatest matches (possibly ever,) to occur this year.

1114 vs 2056 at GTR West is a prime example of that.

It allowed 488 to seed #1 at Alamo, an event that 148, 118 or 1477 was expected to seed #1st.

But most importantly, it allowed for some great stories and great experiences for students and mentors alike to happen.

-Nick

[Astrokid248]

At the risk of sounding repetitive, this year's game was incredible. Easy to follow, fun, high scoring, and required robots to be good at all aspects of gameplay. The co-op bridge also added a meta-strategic aspect, which made alliance selections much more exciting, in my opinion.

[Carol]

I challenge everyone to make The Positive thread longer than The Negative thread.

[Nemo]

This year's game produced an unbelievable number of dramatic matches that came down to the last few seconds. Yet it didn't suffer from a problem of the end game being worth too much. Almost all of our team's matches this year was close until the end, which made the competitions very exciting. And the game is already pretty spectator friendly because of its simplicity and its basketball theme.

Coopertition bonus was great. It embedded a value of FIRST into the game in an effective way. It also evened out the impact of randomly drawing an easy or difficult qualifier schedule, which was nice.

I like the design trade-offs that this year's game design forced by making the elimination rounds score differently than the qualification rounds. Some people griped about that, but it made for a great engineering design challenge.

Edit: The instantaneous final score in most matches was also great.