How is everyone’s rapid relay season going? Good? Bad? In-between? Mine is going pretty well.
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I’m still annoyed over the “A borrowed Loader is yours for the day” rule. It made it hard get loaner loaders at a recent event.
It’s also interesting that the loaders get involved with watching the robots, they don’t see the other loader trying to signal to them that there is a ball waiting to be tossed to them.
I was impressed on the mishmash of colors on robots. In the early years of colored parts, teams had “school color” coordinated parts. So the robot would be all blue and yellow and looked semi-professional. With the colored parts now just from recent games, the robots look they ran amok in a Sherwin Williams paint store. Color splotches everywhere for the win!!
Saturday was a parts milestone, the first time I have seen the magnets on a competition robot. Team 282S, Ligh7speed held their brain in place with magnets on a roll in, roll out setup. Very clever.
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Pretty well, actually. We have competed in 3 tournments so far, and here are the results:
We got the second highest match score in Indiana on Saturday.
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I thought that was just my students
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Uhhhh, this year has been horrible. I’m a Rhode Island team, and in these past two years, we’ve competed with the Massachusetts teams. This year, we can’t qualify for worlds through teamwork matches, as the Massachusetts league only wants to send MA teams. (skills still count tho, but we don’t have any regions we belong to at the moment so :/). My team had our first comp two days ago, and we placed near at the bottom, because we had no driving practice, and our auto aligner sucked. Luckily, we have another comp in January, so we’ll work out the kinks before then.
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After our first league, we got first in our skills
3rd in teamwork finals and here is our match (first and second place matchup):
Honestly my team along with the other team were sad, we had many practices with the team and scored max like 80 or so points, but nothing happens your way, ever in robotics so we were fine.
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Oops I ment 4th place not third! Sorry for the mix up
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It’s going pretty well. I’m currently working on a robot that might beat the world record. I also have a competition on Saturday
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Just curious, will it be a back roller, or a flywheel?
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It’s going to be a back roller.
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That was a tough break and felt bad when I saw it happen.
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Same on the borrowed loader. We broke down and added a 3rd student. Now we need to get him caught up so he doesn’t destroy the interview scores. If they would have allowed us to borrow for a match, we had lots of teams willing to help. But not when it excludes them from their own team.
My kids were very frustrated 1st competition with the teams that didn’t understand scoring and refused to pass. They had one team that refused to pass and stayed in the loading zone where they couldn’t load a ball. They did win finals though (so yay, state bid), it was fun to watch the game played how it was meant to (my team used their flywheel to pass directly into the other teams double catapult.
As a ref, I hate this years game. We had 2 scorekeepers plus myself and it was difficult to track everything. And there is no recourse when the kids argue that we missed a pass (very likely was the same ball that had already been a pass and had not left the field but no way to verify what they thought vs us). I miss the days of being able to recount blocks.
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Yea, RECF has this idea they can do real time scoring and it fails and they give up for a few years and try again. I also am not a fan of this game, I like the count the points at the end of the game method.
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Having eliminated color parts from IQ was a huge mistake in my opinion and has really taken some of the fun out. I’m tired of the but LEGO has all these colors……
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Not so great. We are on our 3rd rebuild with 6 hours of practice before our competition. 
We built the hero bot for one of our competitions, and we got second to last place.
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On a positive note, the VEX GO is still color heavy. You can get some parts in the little kits
Just a reminder that the connectors and pins are not as strong as the VEXIQ ones.
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