The following are some tips and best practices from the Leesburg Florida VEX IQ event shared by Event Partner and Teacher Bart Nash 1. Bucky ball dots on the field help for field re-set crew and a different color dot on the robot starting tiles helped move things along. 2. I was running a VRC tournament the Cafeteria and IQ in the gym, I noticed the younger IQ students need more volunteers to direct the students at the start, The VRC students have mostly have competed and knew the flow of the tournament, skills, and inspection. 3. Most teams had no idea they need to create their own number plates from a template on roboticeducatioion.org (not clear) Have index cards for teams that forget (At first I thought we got plastic team plates like VRC) 4. I updated to the new tournament manager on Friday night while setting up, (you might want to make new releases earlier in the week! This was a pain because I had a lot of other things to set up) 5. The skills ranking is now fixed in tournament manager where age does not say high school, now it says ELM The only problem is not all teams are elementary some are middle school. (I checked robotevents registration and the teams are registered as IQ Middle School. 6. I required all of my teams to do the STEM project, the rubric worked awesome for the judges. (I provided a laptop and projector all teams could use, I encouraged teams to put digital projects on a thumb drive) 7. Use sign up times for judging and STEM project interviews. 8. Kids just wanted to go go go, so we started using cell phones to run the matches at the same time and not use the big screen, we gave them 30 sec warning 15 sec warning and 10 sec count down. 9. I had 2 playing fields and 1 practice field this configuration work excellent (see picture)
I attached the pictures used I in the above email, if you have any questions about the IQ or VRC event message me.
More pictures at http://www.vexflorida.com/
Bart
Attached are best practices and resources shared to support the planning and coordination of great VEX IQ events.
VEX IQ Event Best Practices Resources2013Dec16.pdf (80.5 KB)