As I understand it, if a State Championship can send, let’s say, 4 teams to Worlds (3 tournament champions + Excellence award) but one of the tournament champions also wins the Excellence award, then the fourth Worlds invitation would go to the team with the highest Programming Skills. But I’ve heard conflicting stories about which Programming Skills scores are used. Some have told me that the Programming Skills scores of only the State Championship are used. Others have told me that all the Programming scores of that particular state are used no matter when they were achieved and not just those scores achieved at the State championship.
Anybody know for sure? Or do individual states do it differently?
I had this same conversation a while ago with Jim C who is also your RECF rep but I can’t seem to find the docs on google right now.
The skills scores that send you to worlds are season wide high scores, not a single day one and done. So that is different from other parts of the state competition for eligibility. So double check with Jim for the place that said this since I can’t find it.
But you have a special problem in that your event is after world skills cut off date too as it is next weekend. So talk with Jim about this too since I am not sure if the worlds skills cut off date is in those rules or if it says after state championships.
Looking at programming skills, there is currently a tie in high school programming skills coming from events not being the MD State Championships (which has not happened yet) These are being contended by two awesome teams in Calvert Hall and Hereford Zone. Neither are in top 30 of the world at the worlds cut off date so you are at the state level in programming skills.
One way to fix this - score higher than the other guy next week if you can (and is not broken by any other rule limitations saying worlds skills cut off is the last skills score allowed). A score of 23 is a five skyrise high build with 3 extra cubes scored on the floor. Can these guys go grab just one more cube in the minute to get 24? Or build that one more skyrise piece?! (yes I know, much harder than it seems)
Tie breakers are a bit different too. The rules say go to the second posted score of each team and see if they are still tied (page 4). And then a caveat from Karthik in the second link.
I can’t see within an event programming skills runs on AURA’s API. Both scored 23 at a single event but I can’t see if they scored 23 multiple times or what their second best score was within the event. They scored 23 at two different events so you may need to get into the event information for the tie breaker.
Okay, that’s what it looks like they did for the middle schools but I wasn’t sure. To me, using season-wide highest scores seems to be the best way to do it, but I had heard some say the contrary. Thanks.
We had eight World spaces available at the BC Championships. 3xChamp, 3xFinalist, Excellence and Design.
The Excellence and Design winners both qualified due to being on one of the Championship or Finalist alliances, so we had two more spots to distribute.
I prepared a list of the top ten skills scores (top five programming, top five robot) on an easel so that everyone in the stands could see the list.
After we completed the awards, we brought out the easel, and then started counting down with the top programming score:
“XXXX has qualified already.” (cross them out, switch to robot skills)
“XXXX has qualified already.” (cross them out, switch to #2 programming)
and so on down the list. That way everyone in the stands got to see how the process unfolded, and no one had to ask questions afterwards. It also added a bit of drama to the process.
I did make the mistake of ranking a tie based upon which team achieved their score first, rather than going to the second score… but thankfully that was far enough down the list as to be largely irrelevant to the overall results.
This also gave us the opportunity to stress to teams, once again, the importance of doing skills challenge runs and point out that the teams that qualified for worlds based on their skills scores had actually NOT won the Programming or Robot skills trophies at any of the qualifying events.
Hopefully it results in a better understanding of the significance of achieving a good skills score.
I thought the already-qualified teams were removed before the process of alternating through the skills scores was done, so that qualifications would be split evenly between programming skills and robot skills? The way you’re describing could qualify either two teams through robot skills or two teams through programming skills.
If you have a link to a source for how this works then I’d really like to see it, because I don’t feel the RECF has been very clear about the process.
Process described by VEX Mundi would make sense. If 3 duplicate bids = 2 Programming and one Driver skill score from Global would be added.
If the event has a Driver Skill and Programming Skill Worlds Qualifying Bid, the scores come from the day of the event. The duplicate positions do come from the scores the day of the event figured in with the global scores for the year. Confirmed with REC Rep for our upcoming event.
The already qualified teams were removed in “real time”. The effect was identical, but perhaps more dramatic than removing them in advance.
The list of scores was based upon season high scores, not event high scores.
I have since been informed by a reliable authority that the correct process would have been to progress down the programming list until a non-qualified team was identified, qualify THEM for worlds, and only then switch to the robot skills scores and progress down the list until a non-qualified team was found. For our event, with two teams to be selected, this made no difference as the top unqualified team in Robot Skills and in Programming Skills were both qualified for worlds based on their skills score.
I would LOVE to point to a link that explains in detail how this process was supposed to proceed. As you might expect from point #3, however, I cannot. RECF usually does an outstanding job of explaining rules and details, so I expect that there will be a document explaining this process in step-by-step detail available for next year’s challenge. Hopefully it will also lay out when it is allowable to select alternate teams in the event a qualified team chooses to not travel to Worlds. (Of the eight teams qualified from BC, only six have chosen to attend.)
I’m really glad that it all worked out well in the end.
