Change to Worlds Format

Exactly. Alliance selection has its place as intended and not part of IQ. Although everyone would like to make some kind of small tweak, VEX made IQ what it is to make it more fun for the kids and provide a positive experience. Once IQ teams transition to EDR, then they will be more comfortable with it and adjust to the new rules. Quarkmine said it well and we practice what gbr mentions. We always run these opinions by our kids before we think _____ is a good idea. Kids perspective counts more and its their decision.

My kids made the suggestion to have alliance selection as part of IQ, it was not my idea. They had helped with FRC scouting and liked it. They had already decided to move to EDR, I was trying to talk them out of it and that’s when alliance selection came up.

What do your kids think about being able to choose their partner for the finals?

This is from 3 yrs ago now. This has come up. The first year of MS, they chose to go with IQ. They wanted to go easy. Since the MS vex metal was right next to IQ, they (made some friends and) talked over with them about how cool it was to choose a team in the finals of their choice. Then they realized the competitive nature of it and also learned how some teams have a strategy for that and some of it close to laying low (that year there was a controversy on that on HS side). Anyways, then they realized two things after the worlds although they won one award. They wanted to leave IQ alone and go into EDR as a rookie. Rather than investing time and money in IQ along with all the same issues for that selection process (playing what if), use that to into EDR.

> They thought that IQ would be easier to build and play but adding all the similar drama, then it was somewhat similar concept to EDR. The discussion spilled into elementary also it seems (at school) and together they thought that would not be fun.

Sorry, above was a quick summary of week long discussions.

As we added new folks last year, the brand new folks just asked how things worked and moved on. And since few new changes happened this year, this topic did not come up again. Maybe that school talks spread among themselves.

It’s the VEX Robotics Competition, or VRC. The competition program is VRC, the product used to build the robots is called VEX EDR. RECF would prefer us all to use “VEX IQ Challenge” instead of just “VEX IQ” for the corresponding competition program, but I suspect that this ship has already sailed. There is still time to save VRC, though, so please help me in my campaign. (No one in VRC has ever called it the “EDR program.” This is strictly a VEX IQ team habit.)

As a mentor for VRC and IQ, I would not suggest having the “picking” nature of VRC finals for IQ. There are a host of issues that come along with that. There are plenty of VRC threads on fixing the VRC issues. Certainly “picking” in elementary would be a bit much for the students, our VRC kids put a ton of effort into scouting. I personally like the co-operative nature of IQ, I was just hoping to find a way to make World’s more of a reasonable expectation for all of the money spent by teams to get there, versus a crap shoot of randomness as it seems now. Spending the amount of money we did this year for Worlds (4th year for VRC, 2nd for IQ) for the IQ experience is definitely a concern for us as a team next year. We are seriously considering just competing to the State level and stopping there (much more affordable). Just some thoughts.

Moving to VRC out of IQ is a very expensive prospect, so it’s also not just an easy fix to say the kids that want something different should go to VRC.

I have been hearing this from both VRC and VEX IQ teams since the program began, how can we shine when we have to count on the performance of others? My answer is that the Skills Challenges were invented to demonstrate and reward individual team performance. In VRC particularly, there is just about no reason to focus on anything other than programming skills performance.

I agree Rick, our VRC focused on skills this year, got close. Still ends up being a lot of money to have one thing operable like that, but your suggestion holds true.

We focused on STEM in IQ and Excellence in VRC as well for World’s, but, honestly, after receiving absolutely zero feedback on those judged awards we will probably not expend too much effort on them in the future. I think there are other things our kids can spend time on that give them feedback and excellent training.

I understand your argument and part of me agrees with it in the sense that some robots are better than others. However, something I noticed this year in my team was that teams who performed in the bottom half of our division had some of their best runs with my team. I witnessed my team captain working diligently with other teams to ensure that they were able to use their strengths. As a matter of fact one of the things that hurt us most is that with our two highest paired teams that their coaches were much more of the mentality sit there and let us do the work. As a result we had some of the lowest scores of our competition. In conclusion, for the benefit of my students who learn how to work with people of all different levels and to find someone else’s strength I don’t mind the competition being mixed. Maybe if as coaches we showed less superiority with our teams our students would look for those strengths as well. Keep it as is because it is best for students.