Ethics in VEX

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC
1

Hello Vex Forum,

We are team 3946, from Denver, Colorado, United States. Our team has been in existence for four years now, and this year will be our third visit to the World Championships in as many years.

Throughout our team’s existence, we have witnessed truly commendable actions in the Vex Community, both in and out of competition. Likewise, we have witnessed dishonorable strategies and disrespectful teams.

We believe that there are things in VEX competition that it is ethical to do, and that there are things that are unethical to do. Therefore, we have listed these things out in our VEX Code of Ethics. The Code of Ethics promotes good sportsmanship, respect for the entire VEX community, and the upholding of a fair and competitive playing field.

We believe that, if teams in the VEX community were to adopt this Code of Ethics and follow its tenets, the VEX community would be a better place. We also believe that, by promoting ethical decisions in this engineering challenge, students will make the ethical decisions in their future careers designing technologies of the future.

The Code of Ethics currently is only a draft. We would like to ask for any suggestions or constructive criticisms regarding the Code of Ethics, so that it may be finalized before the World Championships. Once the Code of Ethics is finished, we hope that teams will pledge to follow it for Worlds and years to come.

1 Mission Statement
The Robotics Code of Ethics is an attempt to improve the VEX community and the VEX competition by defining a standard of ethics, to be adhered to both in and out of competition.

2.0 The Code
Teams that sign the Robotics Code of Ethics promise to adhere to the principles and rules laid out in this code.

2.1 During Match Play
2.1.1 We shall be respectful and gracious to all competitors, coaches, referees, tournament officials, and spectators.
2.1.2 We shall compete to the best of our ability at all times.
2.1.3 We shall shake the hands of our allies and opponents after every match.
2.1.4 No team shall have an unfair advantage over others, such that the victor is decided by teams’ skill at designing, building, driving, programming, communicating, and strategizing.
2.1.5 We shall never break the letter or the spirit of the rules.
2.1.6 We shall respect the decisions made by referees or tournament officials during competition.
2.1.7 We shall treat all teams equally on the playing field (except in the interests of strategy).
2.1.8 We shall not say anything derogatory, offensive, or otherwise harmful directed to the opposing team.
2.1.9 We shall not say anything derogatory, offensive, or otherwise harmful directed to our alliance partners.
2.1.10 We shall cheer for our team rather than against the competitors.
2.1.11 We shall respectfully report errors in scoring, refereeing, and judging, even if the errors are in our favor.

2.2 Pit Etiquette
2.2.1 We shall always treat other teams with respect and friendliness.
2.2.2 We shall always help any other teams in need of parts, advice, etc., to the best of our abilities.
2.2.3 We shall never lie or otherwise mislead when speaking to other teams.
2.2.4 We shall never lie or otherwise mislead during our design presentation.
2.2.5 We shall never lie or otherwise mislead during inspection.
2.2.7 We shall respect the competition venue, e.g. pick up trash, respect rules, not wander outside designated areas, etc.

2.3 The Robot
2.3.1 The robots shall not be intentionally built to break rules in any way.
2.3.2 The robots shall be a product of the students’ skill, not the coaches’. It is acceptable for a coach to give advice to students, however students only should finalize design, build, program, drive, and present the robots.
2.3.3 The robots shall be designed, constructed, and operated with the safety of competitors, spectators, referees, and any the public in mind.

2.4 Team Behavior and Attitude
2.4.1 We shall strive to make VEX robotics competitions more enjoyable for everyone involved.
2.4.2 We shall strive to be a team that other people enjoy working with and competing against.
2.4.3 On the VEX forums, we shall be positive and helpful, and we shall always respect other forum users.
2.4.4 We shall not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, or age.
2.4.5 We shall properly acknowledge and credit the original creators of works and ideas that have contributed to the development of the robot.

Please comment to make any suggestion, addition, or constructive criticism regarding the Code of Ethics. We don’t want the ethics of VEX to be a unilateral decision; what is ethical is determined by everybody in the community, so we want the entire community to contribute.

2

I would agree with many if not all of the statements said above. However, I believe that there is an unspoken code of ethics that comes with competing in the VEX Robotics Competition. Most teams follow these guidelines extremely well. Unfortunately, there will always be some teams that don’t follow a code of ethics even if they sign it, should one become official. Its a nice thought, but I don’t really see a need for an official code of ethics. There are awards (Sportsmanship, Support, etc.) that reward teams for following some of the above stated principles, which I think is incentive enough for following them.

3

Amen, I won’t name teams but I have seen clones of robots from two teams from the same club or school. Robotics should be like should be like curling where you have to call your own fouls even if it was you who did it.

4

from my experience within vex, i find that there are groups of teams that respect the rules, have respect for refs etc and follow the majority of the info above. and then there are teams that act all pure and nice but are secretly double crossing people and not following rules intentionally this is normally to do with experience of the team, and how they are ranking at competitions,

i would love to see a document like this become official, but doubt it would ever happen as teams would still ignore it like they do with guidelines and rules …

5

I’ve seen robots that are very, very, very similar; but if you look at them side by side you can see differences as each team tries to make improvements to the robots. Two from our area are the 25’s and the 169’s. But go look closely at them, they are different. And that little difference is what makes one slightly better on the field.

In some circles you would see references to “value engineering” where you look at each component and the design and see where you can make improvements. A good example is the iPhone. If you put the entire family on the table they look pretty much the same from 4’ away. But a huge difference between the first iPhone and the 5.

So it’s not an ethics issue…

6

I’m in your area (Littleton, CO), you should message me (I can’t message you for some reason).

7

I think if all teams were to follow your listed so-called code of conduct, there would be alot more satisfied teams at the end of events.

8

over all I think it’s great, however…

what would you define as unfair? what if one team has a huge budget with an all aluminum robot with an x-drive, 4 motors with integrated encoders all the fancy sensors is facing a tiny little 2 motor push bot? what if the other alliance has a no show and/or mechanical failure?

I really don’t think it completely unacceptable for a coach do a little bit of any of these. however, it should be mostly the students. I know a few teams that practice together and the coach does the programming for all of them, at least one of the team members should know how to program. also the coach should never do these things because the members of the team were being irresponsible (like checking locking collars, redoing the wiring because a wire has been put through a gear).

some things I think should be added:

always show up for a match. doesn’t matter how well you are doing in a competition, show up for the respect of the other team in your alliance.
so make sure you have plenty of time until your next match before presenting yourselves to the judges or doing skills.

if there are mechanical/programming issues that prevent you from being in a match make sure the team in your alliance knows why you didn’t show up.

also do not start any pushing matches. if you are in one, don’t let the guy push you around, just don’t start one.

also on the forums, don’t ask poeple to give you tutorials, try using Google. if you need help and you can’t find what you’re looking for on Google(happens to me all the time) THEN come here.

make an attempt to have good grammar and spelling. there’s something called spell check. it doesn’t have to be perfect, I have dyslexia and struggle with grammar and spelling, I often need to ask for help from others around me to get close enough that spell check can help XD.
also take constructive criticism and be thankful for it.

9

I’m not sure I totally understand your point about the pushing matches. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding on my part, but defense is an important part of the game this year, and has been in past games. I don’t think teams should get a slap on the wrist for pushing other robots around during a match. By no means am I condoning actions that could potentially destroy another team’s robot, but go ahead and play defense if that’s what you need to do to pull out a win.

I would disagree with your point on the tutorials. For me, the Forum is a place where people go to share their passion for robotics, share ideas, and definitely ask others for help. Its really up to those who respond to requests for a tutorial to give help or not, but I support asking others for help if you need it.

10

Completely agree with this. Don’t really know why you would say pushing should be illegal.

Grammar includes capitalization and complete sentences, no? Or are you not referring to forum posts?

11

In regards to my earlier post if you have the time look up 7090 teams and you will notice they have the same skills score and team up a lot no offense to them but im kinda thinking they might have 3 clones with 96 point skills scores
(besides me does this scare anybody in the middle school division or any for that matter)

12

Those guys (7090) are legit. Not really having seen any recent renditions of their robots since December (maybe), I have a feeling they are gonna be nasty at Worlds in the Middle school division. The match of them (Best VEX match until this point - YouTube) against each other and Hawaiian Kids really opened up some peoples eyes, as far as setting a standard. Good luck to them and good luck to the rest of the middle school teams attending Worlds! :slight_smile:

13

I just hope that they don’t do the thing where they set it up so they can be on one alliance cause if so I think everybody is going to get beat.

14

I think you’ll be surprised just how good some middle school teams are going to be at Worlds. I think there’ll be some teams that can give them (7090) a run for their money. If I remember correctly, I think some of the middle school teams back from Gateway Worlds could give the HIGH school teams a run for their money scoring wise!

15

Having the same skills score doesn’t necessary means they must be clone.

I have seen them up close in action during one of the Singapore Skills Challenges, and yes - from far they do look very very similar, but if you look into the details, then there are some slight differences.

And by the way, having the same skills score from the same school doesn’t mean they must be clone. More often than not, it is due to the teams using the same route, and hence the same score.

Give 7090 the credit that they deserve. They are a nice bunch of kids who are happy to let others look at their robots and tried their best in answering all the questions that you have for them.
And I believe they must have worked very very hard to achieve these scores.

16

I am the coach/advisor for the 7232 teams. We have three robots going to worlds. They are based off the same bot. We do this because all 12 of my team members built them. Why not build one amazing robot for everyone based of each members input?

Any one of the students can explain the function and purpose of each part. Plus if somone is gone for any reason, any person from any team can help out. I have students that are in many things, not just robots. Matching robots doesn’t mean copy cat or coach built robots. Heck I fill out paperwork and read forums while they work!

17

Let me start off by saying that I agree and adhere to basically all of these, but that I would never want to pledge to them.

  1. WAY too vague. (E.g. See 2.2.2. What if I will be late to the match if I help someone who desperately needs it? What do I do? If I pledged to this thing, I need to keep it.)

  2. Punishment. To be effective, you need a “punishment” that fits the “crime”. What is VEX going to do, kick any team out that breaks the code? Teams can start accusing other teams, and suddenly their match schedule got a bunch of no-shows. Also, for these rules to be followed well, you can’t have some teams pledge and some teams not pledge.

  3. I don’t actually see anything inherently wrong with the coaches building the robot. I wouldn’t like them doing it all, so I would join in. (For the record, our team builds our robot, with help from mentors.)

Let me start off these with saying that I tend to adhere to them, but…
2.4.3 It can be hard to be positive and helpful to people who won’t click the “search” button, or use words other than “help my codes is broken and you must fix it or tomorrows competition will be ruined because i procrastinated”. Then comes the question, “Am I supposed to help everyone in every help thread?” To be helpful, we must.

2.4.4 Like it or not, this little phrase is not going to change how most people act to others. Also, I see this as being very construed if there is a punishment in place for it.

2.4.5 Sometimes I don’t remember where I saw a cool little thing on someones robot that I want to implement a version of. I am suddenly breaking the code right there.

  1. Clones of robots: for all we know, these unnamed teams’ students all worked together on one good robot, and then “cloned” it a few times.
    Whether or not they copied, I don’t really care because that is a part of the design process, no matter how “cheap” it feels.
  2. Calling your own fouls: Sometimes you don’t know if you fouled or not. Also, just try getting a team to call pinning on themselves.

These games are aggressive; pushing is fun. :slight_smile:

18

That a very well thought out list of items you got there. At one point or another, I have witnessed most of the things listed and it just isn’t fair to the other teams. Sometimes the easy way out of things is the best way to overcome obstacles, but that only builds bad habits.

There was one tournament this year where out auton did not work and we had lost but the calculations were put in wrong at the end of the match. We went up to the refs and told them that we had lost that match and did not advanced to the semi finals so we went into the tie breaker. There were two great out comes of that, though: first, our allegiance were the tournament champions; and two, there was a new middle school team there and they were involved in the mix up. The coach of the team came up to me afterwards and he said something like this: “Thank you for clarifying the score. If it had not been cleared up, we would probably not go to another tournament.” That made me feel great! Not only did we win, but we saved a new team from leaving competition when it was only one of their first few.

so yes, remain truthful and you never know what might happen.

19

Thank you so much to all of the respondents! We are aiming to generate some discussion and get some feedback for our code of ethics and we really appreciate the posts.

The general concept of ethics is such as to not be the end-all law that regulates thought and actions. I tagged these two definitions from dictionary.com:

ethics = “a system of moral principles”
moral = of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong;

The purpose of this document is to establish some of these right/wrong principals so teams can do what they choose with them. However, it is not in anyway designed to be mandatory.

JoeTPR: Thanks so much for the insight! We will take another look at the parts you mentioned. Regarding your comments:

Ethics, like previously stated, are not laws. They are principles that deal with the distinctions between right and wrong. On the contrary, laws (also from dictionary.com) are: “the principles and regulations established in a community by some authority and applicable to its people, whether in the form of legislation or of custom and policies recognized and enforced by judicial decision.” The key difference here is that laws are made to be enforced by judicial action, whereas ethics are simply distinctions between right/wrong. Which, in turn, is why the Code of Ethics is so broad. An example of this is IEEE’s (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) code of ethics: IEEE - IEEE Code of Ethics. This is even shorter (10 points). At the same length, is ASME’s (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) code of ethics: [

You’re right, the Code of Ethics will not stop thought. However, if we can prevent at least one discriminatory act, it is a success in our minds. One of the main things that leads to a successful community-driven competition like VEX is inclusivity. We feel like this phrase affirms this belief.

Does anybody else have any feelings about these points? Or any of the others?

Thanks,
Team 3946

](http://bit.ly/1i40dfS (10 points).)

20

Interesting discussion, and here is some food for thought: the entire Honor Code at Caltech is, “No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community.”