** DISCLAIMER ** The lead designer on the Vex IQ project was my son. It’s nice to finally see what he has been working on since joining IFI. I’ll check the proud father here. The rest of this post will only be my observations and personal opinions will be kept in check. 
My wife and I were asked to referee on the then Vex pilot fields (now Vex IQ) at the Vex World Championships. I was head referee on the main fields and Joy was lead referee on the Vex IQ skills fields.
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Robust Robots. The first thing that impressed us about the new system was the robustness of the robots the students built. One of the things that has been missed in the early conversations about this product is that the Vex IQ system was designed for full 3D assembly. Those that have built LEGO robots know it can be challenging to get good cross reinforcing and these robots love to shed parts occasionally. Very few robots lost parts during over 350 qualification matches! Most could have avoided losing parts with a little more work strengthening some parts subjected to higher moment forces.
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Driver Control. Here is where LEGO needs to step up their game. The students LOVED being able to drive their robots. This is usually where the middle school students start looking to move on from FLL to FTC, VRC, and FRC.
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Object Manipulation. While the pilot Vex IQ robots were using standard Vex tank tread, the production Vex IQ will have their own tank tread/conveyor system which is very similar. I watched dozens of robots with tank tread intake and delivery systems easily handling the tennis balls used in the pilot game. At least three robots were capable of collecting and scoring all 18 tennis balls on their side of the field in a single attempt. I’m not sure if the same could be accomplished with a LEGO robot as elegantly or efficiently.
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Ease of Use. I believe the pilot teams only had about five weeks to build these Vex IQ robots to play the pilot game. As with any competitive robots program, the robots varied from fairly simple to awesomely complex machines. It was amazing to see the quality of machines built in a limited amount of time. I was not able to gauge how many teams had prior LEGO experience, but clearly the students took to the new system easily.
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Durability. LEGO has been around for years and has that real world testing to back up the durability or lack there of. We will see how Vex IQ stands up over the next few seasons.
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Cross Compatibility. I did not have the opportunity to test for cross compatibility between Vex IQ and LEGO bricks. I suspect that when people start playing with both systems we’ll learn of some ingenious ways people find to use both systems together. Whether this is ever allowed in competitive robots will yet to be determined, but for summer camps, demonstrations, and other public educational uses, I’m sure we’ll figure out how to leverage both platforms together.
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Software. This will be determined once we get to work with the software offerings, but the demonstrations were very impressive and encouraging.
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Classroom Curriculum. Project Lead the Way at the elementary level. Awesome. Vex IQ is will have full classroom curriculum support through PLTW, Carnegie Mellon, and Autodesk. Catching students imaginations earlier in their education will be key to changing the world. FIRST needs to step up their game in this arena.
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The Game Format. This new format was received very well by all students that participated. Two robots on the field at the same time. One red. One blue. Sounds familiar, but the two robots are the alliance. They score cooperatively throughout the match. There is a subtle way for a team to score a few points more than their alliance partner, but it doesn’t cause a non-cooperative environment during match play. Even when a team of much older middle school students were allied with a much younger team of elementary school students they worked as a team and the older students didn’t try to tell the younger students what to do.
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Research Project. We did not get to see the research project or speak to any of the judges so I have little to share on this subject. Students will be keeping and being judged on their engineering notebooks just like the other levels of Vex robotics, and they will have an engineering project which is similar to the FLL research project. This makes both programs fairly similar and beneficial to the students.
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The Playing Field. It has been point out that the new Vex IQ playing field will have a higher initial investment cost than the FLL field. It has also been pointed out that the new Vex IQ field is extremely portable. The pieces break down into 12" square tiles and side walls are 12" long pieces. They will fit into two boxes that would easily fit into a compact car or a classroom closet. How many of you have tried to transport and/or store a FLL playing field? How about enough fields for a large state-wide event? This new system should be much friendlier to tournament organizers. Since playing fields tend to be a one time purchase, this is probably a minor problem. Price to FLL. Storage and transport to Vex IQ. Durability TBD.
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Game Specific Components. This will be determined over the next few seasons. Again I think price goes to FLL but storage, transport, and set up go to Vex IQ. Again, this is a once per year investment, and the cost is offset by Vex IQ’s lower team registration fees.
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Team Fees. Price goes to Vex IQ. as mentioned above, if you support several teams this is a big cost savings and would offset the cost of the playing fields and components, and also allows teams to add to their Vex IQ robot parts inventory.
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Conclusion. Is one system better than the other? That is yet to be determined. What is clear is that competition has come to this level of competitive robots. That is a good thing. As we all know, competition helps all of us end users. Lower prices. Better products. Better support and services. We will all be winners (especially the students) with competition. Since we as a community are barely scratching the surface of how many students we are reaching, this will open up competitive robots to many more students.
Win. Win. Win.
