Code templates and Student-Centered Policy discussion

[Grant_Cox]

(Disclaimer - this post is my own, not an official GDC stance or statement, take it with similar grains of salt as if I was speaking informally a summit or webinar or something.)

I could summarize most of my thoughts about this thread into one phrase: “don’t overthink it”.

This thread is being largely driven by professional software engineers, or educators with a university-level understanding of computer science. This cross-section is not representative of the average VEX competitor / educator, and is therefore not really the main audience we need to have in mind when writing Q&A answers.

@Foster

Software has been an issue with RECF for years, here is your chance to get it nailed down in a complete fashion. Maybe this is a good thing for both the Student Advisory Board and the Event Partner Advisory board to work on.

The Student-Centered Policy is the formal attempt at getting it nailed down. It is impossible to overstate how much energy has been spent between GDC, RECF, and VEX staff on this subject since the mid-2010’s. There are always opportunities to simplify verbiage or clarify things, but the core philosophy is unlikely to change any time soon.

@Mentor_355U

Some other Ref/Inspector/Judge/EP might say “Here’s a laptop with no internet access and an empty room and your Engineering Notebook, please duplicate the library you used during the lunch period or you’ll be DQ’d from the Event and written up”

I guarantee that if what you’re suggesting were to actually happen at an event, every single team involved would be emailing their RECF support rep immediately to complain. The Q&A doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists alongside the network of EP’s and RECF staff that train volunteers and enforce best practices, a network which is surprisingly good at self-regulating to catch outliers.

@AlecMiller

“Program at a level equivalent to” means no teams can use LVGL.

Come on - unless you planned to go remove LVGL from your team’s robot upon reading the Q&A response, then you know that’s not what it means.

If someone is trying to decide whether one library is legal while another one isn’t, or whether a PID loop becomes illegal once you add “I”, then you are already further ahead than the real reasons for these rules.

Here are some examples from over the years. These are very real, I’m sure James could tell you a dozen more.

• 1000’s of lines of code (including many loops); students could not explain why a loop would be used
• Multiple perfectly consistent, complex auton modes; students could not answer the question, “which section would you modify to make it turn left instead of right”
• Top-10-in-the-world Skills score; students did not know where the “download” button was

These are while the students are presenting their own robot’s code. It’s easy to read too far into these rules if you assume that we’re already past this fundamental stage of “students code their own robot”. However, I assure you, we are not. (but it does get better every year).

tl;dr - just re-read this part of @jpearman’s post, it sums it up pretty perfectly:

@jpearman

For the specific case of LVGL, adding the library to your robot does nothing, writing code to create a clever UI using LVGL on the V5 brain needs skill, do that yourself and explain the code and I think you are good to go. However, grab someone else’s cool UI written using the LVGL library without being able to understand that code is not ok. I think in the case of LVGL, “Program at a level equivalent to” means being able to explain the LVGL APIs and how you have used them in your program.