Ok, so… at my middle school, we do Vex V5 robotics. The team that I am on is Girl Powered, however, we are constantly ridiculed based on our robot, our strategy, our code, and our engineering notebook. All of the teams at my middle school qualified for the US Open for High Stakes. Unfortunately, we are a public school, so we can only afford for two out of the five teams to go. My teacher decided to have a vote for what two teams should go. There are three functioning robots out of the five, including ours. We also have a higher autonomous code score, as well as a more sophisticated engineering notebook. But since we are constantly disrespected, we are nervous that the vote will be biased and not be based on skill and practicality.
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I’m sorry about that,
But there’s not really much the VEX forum can help you with.
Unfortunately even if it is a biased vote the teams at your school will know the robots/teams better than some random people on the internet.
However, hard work always pays off.
Good luck!
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Unfortunately, I can’t help you here. This feels like trying to market a robot, which isn’t exactly what this is for. Also, why would your coach ever hold a vote? In any situations like this, our coach would simply look at the overall scores from various matches and just send the top few. Of course, this is just my opinion, and your coach might have their reasons. But back to the original question, I’m not sure we can market a robot on VEX Forums for you. Sorry and good luck 
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It would be helpful for myself and others to know what kinds of mechanisms you have vs what your sister teams have.
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Sounds like you have a difficult task at hand. Here is my advice.
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Have the stats ready. For both your team and the other teams. Everything you can find. Compare your stats side to side.
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Don’t beg. Show them why they should pick you, don’t beg or ask for pity. It makes me sad to see girl powered teams that care more about image than robotics. There are a lot of girls who contribute to real, competitive robotics teams. Be one of those.
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Try to leave the Girl Powered thing to the side. Focus on the fact that you are a good robotics team, not a girl robotics team. That’s what really matters.
Be professional and confident. You got this!
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As others have said, we can’t really help you with overcoming the unfairness of the vote (aside from suggesting a different method for choosing which teams go and/or explaining why your robot is the best to the teacher/voters). However there are some great resources on the forums to combat the underlying funding issue you described.
Here is a link to a topic with some great resources for getting funding for your team/ school teams: Guide to Getting Sponsors
This isn’t the only such topic on the forums so I encourage you to search for keywords like “funding” and “sponsor” in the forums’ search tool.
Good luck!
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Totally agree, seems a bit odd for a coach to do that.
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Agreed. Show the stats and autonomous consistency compared to others. That alone, along with getting the most basic tasks will help sell your bot. I would also talk to the coach about how their their “coaching” should be the consideration based on several factors, one of which is all the stats you are at the top of. Good luck and don’t let any decision sway your interest in robotics!
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As we find out below, there are things the forum can help with. But you are right, your post isn’t one of them.
This is a classic “I have nothing to say post”. If you can’t help, why post?
Way too far down the thread, but finally @Micahy321 comes through with ideas!
And @Some_random_person jumps on and shows the power of search to find some ideas.
Not sure of the context of “this” is. Marketing a robot happens ALL the time. It’s marketed at every match “Our robot can do these things, how do we put them in our joint strategy”. In scouting you are telling possible alliance partners “Hey, we can do these things, they match with yours, let’s be an alliance”. Teams also market to outsiders for money (sponsor dollars). Learning how to market is a valuable skill that you learn in THIS robotics program.
“Plausible deniability” "I’m sorry angry parent of roboteer, but the teams voted on it, I had nothing to do with it. " Of course the plausible deny part doesn’t work with people like me "Hi, you are the coach, you are an adult, you have degrees, you just don’t turn the robotics team into a “Lord of the Flies” event. "
You will see this in the future at the “I’m sorry DarkHorse, the management (vague pointing upward), made the decision to not give you a raise, it’s out of my hands”
@RoboticRats - Sorry for the delay in getting to you.
You should campaign for the slot. You should present the good points about your robot, etc as mentioned above.
You should hammer home the Girl Power aspect. Your team is a role model for other girl roboteers. It shows that girls are just as adept or even more adept at building robots. You are part of that elite group of girls that have locked in a love of engineering, and the other STEM parts before High School. This has given you a huge advantage in keeping that interest through college and into the jobs place.
By going to the US Open you can inspire more girls there, Other girl power teams will see positive reinforcement of that girl driven robotics teams are a thing, And when you come back from the US Open, you have stories to tell to elementary / middle school girl roboteers about how cool, empowering and inspiring it was to meet all of the other girl roboteers from across the US.
And push on the coach, isn’t inspiring roboteers, especially girl roboteers something that the coach wants to support? The RECF spends millions on Girl Power, why isn’t the school willing to spend some money too.
Good luck with the marketing. Hope other roboteers chime in here on their ideas.
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I’m sorry, I didn’t know that coaches were supposed to let fellow teams manage. As I said, if the coach was deciding, that’s fine. They ARE managing! This isn’t like your manager denying your raise, it’s your coworkers deciding, not only that, coworkers who are completely against you!
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I agree, it would really help show people your ideas.
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I have also been having that problem! I think that the best solution is to just show them all the positivity in Vex! I have had to redo my robot many times because the drivetrain or whatever, but I finally came up with a working plan. Funny thing is I am also a girl and also getting disrespected! If I had any advice, NEVER let someone judged you on the way you look, because in the end we end up doing better than the people that bullied you. [quote=“RoboticRats, post:1, topic:131808, full:true”]
Ok, so… at my middle school, we do Vex V5 robotics. The team that I am on is Girl Powered, however, we are constantly ridiculed based on our robot, our strategy, our code, and our engineering notebook. All of the teams at my middle school qualified for the US Open for High Stakes. Unfortunately, we are a public school, so we can only afford for two out of the five teams to go. My teacher decided to have a vote for what two teams should go. There are three functioning robots out of the five, including ours. We also have a higher autonomous code score, as well as a more sophisticated engineering notebook. But since we are constantly disrespected, we are nervous that the vote will be biased and not be based on skill and practicality.
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I would keep proving yourselves to them, and who knows!- maybe you will end up going!
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maybe try organizing some sort of fundraiser. our school does that for various things all the time, and that way you don’t have to decide which robot to leave at home.
Alternatively, ask if you can do a performance-based decision rather than a vote. at our school, only 2 of the robots get to compete (we had 4 built this year), and we determine them by doing what is basically a best-of-3 skills run.
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we have three girls on our team. I am not one of them. but I have been doing this for 7 years, in my first years I got shoved on the code team because no one else wanted to, but now I’m the team lead and we just won two tournaments, so my advice to you would be this: you may not go this year, the vote may be biased, but I would then try your hardest to become a better team. watch as many reveals as possible. we were disrespected and I have defended the girls on our team multiple times. if you can become better and they still don’t let you go complain to your
school or wherever you do robotics.
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That is sad that they choose to put their energy into something non productive. I guess, your best strategy is not to get upset or discouraged, and turn all that energy that comes toward you into the best robot, best strategy, best driving, best autonomous, and best notebook. Make them sizzle with envy!
Is this a matter of registration fee? Like others said, could you have an option to fundraise it.
Honestly, I would always choose to have cooperation and competition (with huge emphasis on cooperation) instead of strictly competition.
And, if it was up to me, I would offer everyone from the club a chance to go to US Open under the the two chosen team numbers.
Students on the choosen teams get to exercise their leadership skills in building competitive robot with extra help.
Those who join get the opportunity to experience US Open and be helpful.
Everyone will have a chance to cooperate, learn something new, and make more friendships.
An opportunity to work together (your Girl Powered teammates and the boys from the other teams) could be one of the best possible ways to fix an unhealthy social dynamics that permits all that ridiculing.
Sadly, I am not the one who’s making the rules, but do ask your teacher if it is possible, if your team wins, to bring some other students along.
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If you need moeny, it is possible to set up a GoFundMe, since a competition cost is only around 100-200 dollars per team
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I would recommend advocating for your team based on the ways in which you excel based on the things your audience most cares about. Point out the ways in which your team scored higher (in Skills or in matches), or your robot works more consistently, or your notebook meets the rubric the most effectively (or your interview, though that might not be as easy to demonstrate objectively). Every team is more likely to be biased in favor of the their own robot (and sometimes might be basing their perception of their own robot on what they think they can get it to do rather than what it’s already doing), but the objective match results don’t have that bias, even if they may sometimes be subject to outside circumstances. Also, the way teams qualify to higher-level events in the first place is by meeting certain predefined criteria better than another team (either through winning matches or earning higher Skills scores, or through doing better in an interview, which can involve more subjectivity but is still based on predefined criteria).
You can also advocate based on things like being Girl Powered, or things like being kind to other teams, but this argument might not be as effective if you’re talking to someone who wants the decision to be based solely on performance (or especially someone who dislikes situations where factors other than performance are taken into consideration). For anyone who does care about factors off the field, however, I feel like your team should win their vote easily based on what you have described, considering the benefits of seeing other girls succeed in robotics (like @Foster mentioned), as well as the positive influence you would be providing by not ridiculing or unfairly criticizing other teams.
To eliminate the problem of teams needing to stay home entirely, I would recommend doing anything you can to enable funds to be raised for more than just two teams to be able to go (whether the 3 with functioning robots, all 5 teams, or even 4). However, I understand that it might not always be possible to raise enough funds in time, and that some schools or school boards might not be able to send more than a certain number of teams even if the funds are able to be raised (and they might have logical reasons for this, but even if they don’t, you might not be able to change their minds, so you might need to adapt to these rules for now). If there would be a way to allow some or all students from teams that aren’t going to accompany the teams that are going, this would be a good idea, too, though some of the costs involved in sending teams to the event would be based on the total number of students rather than the cost per robot.
You can also talk to your coach and/or to the other teams to try to convince them to vote based on objective criteria like this for all of their choices (or for your coach, even changing the decisionmaking process to incorporate this instead of just making it a vote amongst people who may be biased against a certain team for unfair reasons, whether knowingly or unknowingly). However, I do understand some of the reasons why a coach might want to leave a decision up to the students rather than making the decision themselves (such as if they believe it will help the students learn something, or even if they want to avoid situations where a parent holds them solely responsible for their child not getting to go to this event - though if they chose to put it to a vote rather than basing it on something like a Skills score, they are responsible for that part of the decision, even though the students are responsible for the results of the vote). And even if there would be a better way to decide which teams go, I could understand if it turned out to be too late this year to change the way the decision is made.
I’m hoping your team is able to go this year, but even if you aren’t, you could use the extra time to discuss plans for future seasons or other learning opportunities, and I’m sure you’ll be able to do even better in the future!
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ok first of all… wow you wrote an entire essay on this
if you’re confident about having a better robot, an objective format would be better if you can convince the others. however, if you are all fairly similar in performance (which i’m guessing is the case here, because I can’t see why anyone would want to compete with a bad robot), see what the best aspects of each design is. then, assuming you don’t all have completely different designs, you could try combining these “parts” into 1 bot.
another apprach you could take is finding a role for the guys with nonfunctional robots. It’s possible that they still have some good designs that you could incorporate, and if you can convince them by making them feel included, you’ll likely win the vote.
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Hi! I want to say thank you for all the helpful ideas and strategies!!! My team and I reviewed all the responses and chose the most fitting ones. Once again, thank you! We have successfully been voted to go to the U.S. Open! I appreciate everyone who provided helpful feedback on this matter.
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This is the hardest part for us teachers to watch. Worse, many of us know it will not change in the outside world. There will always be the “in” crowd and using ridicule to suppress is the favorite tactic of this era. If there is no obvious excuse like skin color, gender, age, etc., words like woke, rino, maga, etc. become the excuse. There is one thing you must learn how to do:
push forward while enduring
Know it or not, they are getting you ready to be innovators in the real world as adults. You cannot control their vote, just as you will not be able to control their purchasing choices as adults. Listen to the criticisms, if you can – even the worst ones can contain a grain of truth you can use to make your team better.
Talk to a trusted teacher about “locus of control” to help you see where you can make a difference, what you just have to live with (good or bad), and when you should just ignore.
It is painful (I know!) and the temptation to just quit will be strong, but these kids are giving you an advanced, college level, class in handling the real world. Take advantage of it, survive, and the world will be yours.
Hang in there!
Rob Thomas
Milton High School Red Hawk Robotics Club Advisor
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