We held the first Houston VEX Skills Challenge today at St. Agnes Academy in Houston, Texas.
We had a Houston league last year and we found that the first day of the league many of the teams weren’t ready to compete on the first day. However, they all benefited from being in the same room working together on the robots. We wanted to get the same benefit for the teams even though we stopped doing a league. That is why we decided to a skills only event early in the season. That way teams have real fields setup for practice and official skills scores early in the season.
This event also took the place of our local kickoff, some of the schools that get started later in the year were able to come to this event and see the game and ask questions before they really get in to their build season.
Great job everyone! I know Gabe and Shane kept nipping at the heels of an excellence award last year and came up with 5 design awards which is an admirable feat. Now they can complete their trophy asortment. I think Texas is going to be a tough place to compete this year.
It’s also nice the venues don’t need to be as big as they are for full tournaments. This took place in a school cafeteria. We only needed two fields instead of the normal three (one for practice).
It requires less staff since we don’t have to queue teams, didn’t have a full time MC, and needed far fewer judges.
I really liked this event and Houston will be expanding this model in the future assuming most other things stay the same.
Here is a short video of the skills challenge from Sept 28th,
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These scores have not been included in global skills yet. I’ve been working with RECF and they are trying to clear the technical hurdles of uploading these scores.
