Wondering if any of the teams on here also compete in B.E.S.T. Robotics competition during the fall as well. Seeing the discussing and an explanation of the OCCRA competitions has prompted this question.
We are a low-resource team and by competing in the BEST competition (which is essentially free) is helping out with our design process and teaching the newer/younger members construction techniques.
There are a few FRC teams in Georgia that do BEST. 4188 used to several years ago. We did really well, but decided to stop competing in BEST and focus on other methods for training new members, including letting rookies work on mechanism and software upgrades to our FRC robot for off-season events. Since BEST mostly just uses wood, PVC, etc., we didn’t feel like that was really the right kind of preparation for designing/building an FRC robot.
Don’t get me wrong… For schools/teams with a very low budget, BEST is great since it’s essentially free to teams. A good starting point, but not very useful for advanced training, in my opinion.
Team 418 in Austin, TX did BEST Robotics and FRC for almost 13 years before deciding to ultimately drop BEST. We had a lot of mentor burnout over the fact that we were doing robotics non-stop from September through May, and when we started doing FTC as well we nearly exploded.
BEST was great for teaching students how to build custom parts - how to bend and use PVC in ways you may not have thought about, how to use a bandsaw to make custom wheels, how to use cardboard and string to make a low-strength gripping mechanism, and so on. However, with FTC and FRC we found that we needed students to think within existing assemblies - how to use pillow blocks and not just using pipe clamps to hold motors to a board, how to mount and use gears and chain and not trying to MacGyver pulleys and string to do the same thing, and so on. BEST was fun, and taught students a lot of basics that you just don’t get anywhere else. But it was counter to our goals because we taught our students how to make things themselves, rather than use COTS parts that are stronger and do the job better. But, again, mentor burnout and a team vote was the final decider in leaving BEST.
-Danny
We did best for a good bit. In some respects, I miss it. We built wooden geared robots most years with hand-cut gears, and the shop skills students learned from that are kind of hard to replace in an FRC environment. Ultimately we found that BEST game design was diverging from FRC design in a way that made it hard to justify continuing with. After a few years of spinning our wheels in VEX, we decided to just build a rookie FRC bot for our off-season competition, and we’re pretty happy with the results.
Georgia BEST Competition just wrapped up this Saturday. Of the teams competing there, 6 also compete in FRC: FRC teams 1002, 3815, 4112, 4468, 5109, and 6750.
This old thread has some great information on BEST Robotics that I would definitely recommend checking out. I have been running BEST in Georgia for the past 4 years so if you have any specific questions feel free to DM me
Thanks for pointing to the old thread. It is very interesting to hear other teams take on BEST. We just go done competing at our Hub this weekend and we are headed to our regional competition the first week of December.
For us it seems like a good training program for the younger students. We are letting our junior and seniors teach the junior high kids on some basic design principles, and how to use the tools. We love doing FRC and BEST both but they are indeed different animals. The one thing that I think BEST has done for our team is that it has allowed/encouraged the students to think a little more out of the box for solutions in FRC rather than just trying to buy an off the shelf solution.