How much has your Vex teams grown over the years?
Have you seen improvement, stalled/ plateaued or slumped?
This is only my second year in VRC. Only my first serious year.
A big deal this season, for me, was networking. I now have connections across the State of Ohio, throughout the US, and even a couple international contacts.
And, while I may be “a rando who spends all of his time on the forums and didn’t even make it to Ohio State” (as was allegedly said about me on the unofficial Discord, which is objectively accurate), I have grown a lot in both design and scope this season alone, even if my competitive record doesn’t show it.
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+1. Almost the exact same here. Making connections is big for both being good and enjoying the competition.
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Two years ago, my team somehow managed to make an iq robot worse than the starter bot. Now, we’ve made it to worlds the past two years
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The memes have kept growing in depth and magnitude.
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Year over year, the quality of the teams at my middle school have improved significantly, and does not appear to be stalling.
Now growth can be measured in many ways,
- build quality/techniques
- software quality
- game strategy
- driving skills
- project management
- teamwork
- …
the list goes on…
Watching personal and team growth is why I am involved with VRC.
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At my middle school, I feel like every year the teams do much worse because of a lack of communication between the experienced and new members that causes the new members to have hardly any knowledge of robotics.
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and that should be the role of the adult coach and mentors to help bridge that gap.
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TBH, my HS team has really not changed.
We always qual for state and US Open, once in a while for worlds.
Not really any new members (usually we get 1 per year).
Our IQ teams have exponentially grown though. We have all letters through i filled for our number and we get more teams every year.
My team has made some huge improvements from last year. For Worlds in 2018, my team brought a really sad bot that only had a 4 bar lift. We did win a few matches but it was our first year so our overall knowledge was pretty limited. (Sorry to anyone who was partnered with us)
This year, we managed to put together a pretty decent robot for Worlds that we are pretty proud of. The build quality is better than last year, we have well planned autons, and we’ve been overall working well as a team this year. We usually get a ton of new people each year so next year we want to have 4 teams instead of 2.
Now we’re just trying to find a couple sponsors to help us travel next season so we can go to more tournaments. We’re also trying to host the very first national tournament in Vietnam and try to spread the program throughout the country to other cities and schools.
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My school has only had a team for the last 3 years and it is very surprising at how much we have and have not grown. We qualified all 4 of our teams for state the first year and 3 out of the 4 last year and this year. we had 30 kids in robotics the first year, 20 the second year, and 5 this year. Our bots used to sit at the bottom of rankings at alliance selection but now we regularly have 3 teams in the top 25 and 1 or 2 in the top 10. we even had my team finish 3rd at a competition that had 50+ teams at it. our build quality has increased, our programming has increased, our skills scores have gone from 40 - 48th to being 20ish with my team finishing 15th in the state and 600th in the world. we still have not made it to worlds yet but we are going to give it our best shot this next year.
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