Public voting! There are seven challenges, and the public determines most of the entries that are later submitted to a panel of judges to select the winners. You can find them here.
Some tips for voting:
Feel free to give your friends’ and teammates’ entries 100%. We expect you to be loyal!
Please use good sportsmanship when voting on the other entries. We do not think it is fair to give someone a zero % ranking just because you do not know them. Everyone spent a lot of time and effort on their entries, and you should respect that.
Non-constructive, negative comments will be deleted.
That’s it – use good sportsmanship, and vote for others as you would have them vote for you.
And remember, about a third of the finalists are chosen by RECF and the challenge sponsors, so if you have a great entry that just doesn’t get the votes, you might still be a finalist.
Thanks Rick for yours and RECF’s efforts setting up this design challenge. It is an amazing opportunity to showcase products from around the world.
This years site looked much cleaner than the previous years although I think you should review the ip address conflict as loads of schools cannot have multiple students/teachers vote unless at home.
-Sam
Because so many people were non-loyal and very unsportsman-like in the voting process, robotevents said that the votes are going to count. When my team emailed them telling them this they said that the voting is only to promote robotics. They said that next year the voting process will be changed.
There seems to be a lot of back and forth in the voting, usually in a short period of time, and with a large change in the number of votes for more than one entry. I’m sure that most votes aren’t cheating, if any, but rather friends and family helping out. The only problem is, this tends to turn it into a popularity contest instead of having the better animation. How much weight does the vote of the professional engineers carry towards scoring?
I’m curious how you know people were non-loyal and unsportsmanlike? As far as I can tell there is no way to know how someone is voting other than them telling you.
I think the results being seen are because the announcement for voting said they expected teammates/friends to be loyal and vote 100%. It is up to RECF to decide how much weight the community votes have and how people vote since it is their competition. I think the professional reviews of the entries will weigh much more than the community voting, but that is just my guess.
It’s pretty easy to tell when someone is voting in an unsportsmanlike manner. When two entries have been neck and neck for a long time, and then one of them suddenly shoots up while the other plummets, you have a pretty good idea of what happened.
Yeah, I’m not exactly sure what happened but it happened fast. Within a couple days it’s almost like all the promotional videos were evened out or something. Just my observation, maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention to notice they had always been that close.
Great entries this year guys we are looking at hundreds and hundreds of hours of work. Every year the standard goes up as people work out what is needed to win and then try to do even better.
Voting wise it is easy to work out exactly what individuals are voting. Here is how:-
-Have an application that pulls the ratings page down every so often (every 30mins).
-Pull the number of votes and average %age of each entry off that page
-work out the number of votes cast since the last ‘page pull’
-Work out the average %age those votes would have to have in order to change the %age from the previous %age to the new one.
This can then be graphed/analysed/tracked etc to see how teams are doing etc.
-Yes it is possible to see 100% votes come in for 1 entry and 30% votes for everyone else (0/10 translates to 30%)
-Yes we can see who is doing it
-Yes we have automated this process
-No we are not part of VEX of IFI
Think how much someone who has the database that logs the votes can see if someone who just logs pages can see so much!
Your safest thing if you want to ‘win’ the public voting section is to go out there and get people voting for you AND FAIRLY FOR EVERYONE ELSE. Think about it you have 500 votes and an average of 70% one vote of 30% is not going to make much difference.
Hints
:)Have fun
-go out there and promote VEX to the community,
-have voting drives at local shopping malls,
-hand out printed sheets showing people how to vote,
-ask them to vote for you AND everyone else
-have your promo video showing in electrical shops on their TV displays (yes we do that in NZ
:)Make sure you get everyone to vote as many times as they are allowed to this can be done using a spreadsheet to track when they vote. Call them to remind them to vote. Calling trees work well here.
:)Have fun
:-Be fair
Router wise
-Have a voting ‘party’ at someones house
-Reconnect your router between votes this will overcome the I/P issue
if someone who just logs pages can see so much!