Programming skills & sensor use ≠ robot performance/robot skills challenge ranking.
As quoted from this season’s judges guide:
“The Think Award is presented to a team with the most effective and consistent programming strategies and solutions to solve the game challenge. Key criteria:
• Participation in the Programming Skills Challenge is required (does not apply to VAIC-HS or VAIC-U)
• Autonomous programming is consistent and reliable
• Programs are cleanly written, well documented, and easy to understand
• Team clearly explains the programming strategy used to solve the game
challenge
• Team clearly explains their programming management process, including version
history
• Students understand and explain how they worked together to develop their
robot programming”
No where in this is a team’s robot skills ranking mentioned (which is what I meant by robot performance). By robot performance, I was referring to a team’s qualification and robot skills challenge ranking. As a matter of fact, there has been controversy over the qualifications of the Think Award (I do not wish to discuss this;the topic has been beaten to death. If you wish to learn more, please see these threads: Award Confusion:Why would a team with 0 autonomous win the Think (Programming) award? - #2 by Foster & Unfair Judged Awards at Worlds? - as a matter of fact, these threads beg the question of how much a robot’s performance weighs into the Think Award).