Skills USA did something similar for VRC type events
But you got to bring your notebook and code and then crunch build for 2 days straight
For fun, I checked with my team and they said it could be done in 4 hours. Seems a bit optimistic but rule of thumb is if they say 4, 12 could be realistic. 
I thought it might be fun to have a Dad Bots competition along these same lines! 
I have mixed feelings on this, but having seen a spitfire inspired build that had a triple catapult, I can say that there is much to be improved on. I fully expect the worlds championship for MS if not elementary to come down to a perfect score with a match stop time tie breaker. Heck, there will be at least one division where that happens for the division title.
First of all, Foster, I have to say that I caught and appreciate the âAliceâs Restaurantâ reference.
That being said, in the VRC world, there are always complaints that in certain games, there is a large amount of design convergence. For Nothing But Net, there was a single flywheel shooter out of China very early in the season that a lot of teams attempted to copy. None of the copies, initially, worked as well as the robot they were copying. Of course, they couldnât see every aspect of the design from the videos nor did they have the code either. Sometimes, particular games have, for a while at least, a meta-design that works for a while. However, in my experience, teams will either modify or even scrap the meta, if they find, what they believe to be, a better design. As for Spitfire, I donât know what the motivation was for them showing all of the detail that they did, including the code. (if it is in fact true that they did).)
I agree somewhat with both sides of the argument and unfortunately when discussing it from a competitive standpoint, it dose seem to depend on the region you are in.
Let me start by saying as a High School VRC coach/mentor, I am EXTREMELY hands off. I want my students to succeed or, more importantly, FAIL on their own. Over the years, I have have teams that prided themselves on unique solutions and teams that took inspiration from other robots. But in all cases, they decisions were theirs. Even those who took inspiration modified the robot to work or FAIL better than the robot that was their inspiration. Even teams that were able to copy the Spitfire part by part, hole by hole should have learned something about robot construction and how certain mechanisms operate. If the Spitfire clones ended up being the dominant design in a region, I can see where that would ruffle some feathers. To a small extent, it would ruffle mine. As a coach, it would also lead me to try to inspire my students to come up with a better design. At the end of the day, it is about that learning and inspiration that is the MOST important. It is easy to get wrapped up in the âwin the competitionâ aspect of VEX Robotics, since it is set up as a competition. I challenge my students not to necessarily compare themselves to others, but to themselves.
- Is their robot the best it can be given the knowledge and skill that THEY have
- is the robot getting better?
- What can they do to grow their knowledge and skills?
- Most importantly, are they having FUN!!!
I have been blessed to have some great hard-working and/or brilliant students that have led to a myriad of awards over the many years I have been a part of VEX Robotics. I have been the proudest of my teams that didnât receive any awards. I had a sophomore team this season that went from a robot that didnât move in 6 of 8 qualifying rounds to being 5-3 two weeks later in their next competition. They lost in eliminations, but they did an amazing job of figuring things out. And I assure you that they learned a LOT in the process.
I have always said that what the student gets out of the whole program (and echoed by an alimnus that came to our State Championships) are:
Problem-solving
Fun
Communication
Fun
Conflict Resolution
Fun
Teamwork
Fun
Dealing with Success
Fun
Dealing with FAILURE
Fun
Friendships
oh and did I mention, FUN.
If my students can achieve the above, I could not care less what awards they did or didnât bring home. Sorry for the LONG post, but I am retiring at the end of this school year and I just HAD to write this.
I agree with all of this, enjoy retirement!
Back on topic though, I have seen lots of mentor made robots this year, as sister teams have the same robot, and same skills run (the route they take). It takes the fun of robotics out of it when you donât go through the design process and learn or time and experience.
I got an email this morningâŚ
And itâs another example of adults building high preforming competition robot models. Students are allowed to do this, adults are not.
Can we let the students provide the inspiration?
What do you think of this robot?
From: Ben Lipper - Student Robotics Education [email protected]
We have officially gotten the max score for VEX IQ Pitching In â 154 points!
Click this link to check it out
Now this robot looks pretty wild, and it has a lot of complex mechanismsâŚ
But it really works.
Regardless of whether or not you actually build a robot like thisâŚ
Youâll want to check this robot out.
Itâll take less than 2 minutes to watch, and I know youâll get a lot out of it.
Think of it like a âpreviewâ of the winning finals match at your next competition.
Let me know what you think, and I look forward to seeing what you build!
âBen
P.S. Can you think of a friend who might find this interesting or useful? Maybe theyâre also into VEX IQ?
Just send them the video!
I know theyâll appreciate it.
I like it. Again, not a fan of hole by hole building, but I do like the internal fling, two at a time with a reserve area of two balls. I like how it can do both sides of the field. The high hang is very cool.
So this would be a great robot to have discussions with your teams on the ideas presented.
Exactly! We finished a build like with no adult help about a week ago
If this video was the extent of the public showcase of the robot: no issue.
Even if he broke down different systems within the robot and thoroughly explained how it worked and that nature: still no issue.
If he starts giving step-by-step instructions on to how to build this robot 1:1 as shown in the video: now thereâs an issue.
While yes, it isnât ideal that the students arenât necessarily come up with the idea from scratch, what theyâll gain from trying to reverse-engineer it will still be good for them â and itâs also possible they find modifications to that design while trying to re-create it that they like better.
So as long as this is the extent it goes, I donât see an issue, I view it as more of a catalyst.
At Caution Tape, we are very serious about over coaching problem. Throughout the entire season, our coaches have never built one single robot that actually fully tuned and well functioned. Quite often, when we run some scrimmage internally, we let our coaches to join the matches with the kids. But our students really donât like coach team to be their alliance partner, cozâ they are just that bad.
On the other hand, we donât provide any team in depth photos or videos how each robot is built, after all, they still need to maintain the confidentiality of their own design for competitive advantage. But if you are public school, and struggle with your own design, or even autonomous code. Please reach out to us any time, we will have some elite students to help you out to improve your own design or improve your autonomous. By doing that, we are sharing the knowledge, not the design. There is fine line between that. Thatâs what we believe that could truly help the community grow, and help the students in the long run.
Innovation is hard, you donât have to be an innovator to learn and do robotics. If you choose the hard path, like some of our top teams, just be ready for all those road blocks. Winning is fun, but learning and innovating is more important. As long as kids are learning through the process, I think everybody is a winner.
I respect that, i just think i might have just been letting out a little bit of frustration right then. Sorry lol
No worries. If you are going to Dallas in may, feel free to stop by and chat with us. We have total 6 MS teams and 7 ES teams going, you wonât miss us.
This isnât all they provide, you can go to their website and get close up pictures of this robot once you provide your email.
Yes, but should adults build competition robots? If you want the REC Foundation to rewrite the student centered policy, thatâs an argument you can make. Is it something I should do? Should I take the new game and spend 12 hrs/day for a month and come out with a super awesome robot? (Of course, the assumption that I could actually do that⌠
) Would I simply argue that it gives the students an option to reverse engineer? Why isnât the hero bot high preforming in the first place?
Should Northrop Grumman have a team of engineers build an awesome VRC robot and release it in June? Where is the line in the sand? As I read the Student Centered policy, it boils down to:
Adults shouldnât build competition robots.
Thatâs a really easy line in the sand. Itâs hard to enforce, but I thought itâs something we could agree on.
Students should be the ones provide the solutions to reverse engineer. The students should be the catalyst. The only acceptable adult built model is the hero bot. Every time an adult provides a solution it could take an opportunity away from a student to come up with a similar solution.
Hey Sankeydd, I think we are often on the same page. This isnât the hill Iâm going to die on.
When I suggest to roboteers they go look on youtube and other places for ideas, I donât think about where they come from. Is it OK for my MS VRC team to look at VEXU robots for ideas? Most of those VEXU people straddle the lines "roboteers / students / adults " is that where I draw the line?
The people that run the Lipperverse are out there as an organization to inspire roboteers to get STEM jobs. I donât know that their teams go to Worlds. There is a guy in South Jersey that runs a huge STEM education system that has VIQ as part of it. All of their teams / events are âoff bookâ and are not part of Worlds. Are their roboteers less inspired by not going to Worlds?
Why not write to Ben and ask them their views on the âstudent centeredâ part of what they are doing. It would be an interesting answer.
Who knows, maybe their bot is just a hero bot and you can do much more to get it to score everything in under 45 seconds.
Good luck with the rest of your season!
This year is going to go down as a very strange year for VIQC. The meta was broken in July with the inverted ball car, then the rules changed in August specifically to remove this strategy, and then the meta was broken again a few months later with the 2-ball catapult.
I coached VEX in 2017, 2018, 2019, and now '21 and '22, only taking breaks for the pandemic (I missed the entirety of Rise Above). Ringmaster, Squared Away, and Next Level all had various complexities that made it so the best robots could be Frankensteinâs monsters of several good strategies. There was so much variation in each team and each bot.
Max score robots in July and near-maxed out robots shortly after the rule change showed me that Pitching In is a weird one. The dominance that the double catapult bots have had over the meta should be viewed as an aberration more than the new norm. Hopefully, next yearsâ competition will require multiple drastic redesigns for a robot to remain on top of the game. Higher skill ceiling to force top teams to continuously improve, higher skill floor to allow other teams to âthreatenâ a tournament win with a less-than-optimal robot, several different ways to play the game instead of one or two viable strategies.
This could also just be my perception, since I was coaching only elementary before. This is my first season coaching both elementary and middle school.
But I guess we wonât be able to confirm until this time next year, if the âmonocultureâ is here to stay or just an artifact of the peculiarities of Pitching In.
This is part of a thought I had on a different topic, but thereâs some convergence. For the past 2 seasons weâve seen dominant meta bots, and I think thatâs due to the fact that both of the games have had single scoring elements and limited scoring options (e.g. tic tac toe, balls in bucket or balls in lower scoring area). So, youâll get pretty much a single dominant meta design.
If you look at Next Level, pretty much all robots by the middle of the season had the praying mantis designs. That was because you could only score in a certain way. With Squared Away we had much more variation as that game allowed for multiple designs to be successful. There were some really simple designs that could only handle the cubes, but were able to score quite a bit⌠and if teams wanted to score the balls on top, they had to start building more complex designs. And we saw lots of ways to accomplish those tasks.
So, maybe for the 2022-2023 game the GDC comes up with a game that has multiple scoring elements and multiple ways for teams to score⌠make it easy for teams to reach a good scoring amount, but to go beyond that they would really need to re-engineer their robots. This would allow new teams to be competitive with simple designs, yet allow more advanced teams to try to max out the scores.
So they make the distinction that âmodelâ has to be a physical model in front of you. Clearly, I donât agree with this interpretation. I guess thatâs a question for the REC Foundation.
And this is 100% true. Once itâs out there, thereâs nothing you can do about it, so you canât punish the kids for seeing the idea, just cite your source. But the ideas in the video should be from the students. You can agree that students can get the ideas while also saying that the adults shouldnât have built the model.
Even if you were to take away the Lipperverse today, next season a copy cat would show up and it would be the same thing, just a different name. Heck, there could be a third, younger Lipper brother that we donât know about who could take over and be the face of things instead. 
Point being, like everything else in life, there is evolution. Itâs time for REC/VEX to reevaluate things and evolve to stay with the times, whatever that may be.
I would love to know what you mean by this statement. What needs to evolve? What needs to change?