I see an upcoming blended competition - there are only 3 middle school teams for now. But they have listed “Excellence Award Middle School” and “Excellence Award High School”
From what I understand they cannot give “Excellence Award Middle School” if there are less than 10 Middle School teams - so I see no value in going there to try to get “Excellence Award Middle School”
Am I right or am I missing something?
That is a correct interpretation of the criteria for MS Excellence.
I do recommend MS teams prioritize doing their best and doing skills runs as that may be a pathway to their region’s Championships.
As a global competition format, one size fits all does not work. Each region, when considering their season schedule needs to consider how to engage all teams in their region.
What is not clear which region you are in. That would give a more considered response on how to best serve your MS teams.
This has happened to a tournament of ours recently (VIQRC MS+ES blended). The Judges’ interpretation came from this line of the Guide to Judging:
When only one Excellence Award is given out for an event with multiple grade levels, all teams are considered together without regard for their grade level
So even if there are not enough MS teams to issue an MS-specific Excellence, the MS teams must then compete with HS teams for a single non-grade-specific Excellence.
Thoughts welcome from experienced JA’s and EP’s… or a reference a relevant Judges Q&A.
My main question is - since there are only 3 MS teams right now, will the MS specific Excellence Award still be given or be scrapped?
I understand all teams will be under consideration for the single Excellence award if that’s what happens
As you have already observed, “they cannot give “Excellence Award Middle School” if there are less than 10 Middle School teams.” There will be only one Excellence awarded for that event, but as I noted, all grade levels will have a chance to earn it. That’s my unofficial understanding.
How did you figure out how many MS teams are at the blended event? We have this same problem in our region - a lot of blended events, but they end up being mostly HS teams.
Good question. I don’t know how OP figured it out, but an EP (Event Partner) can look at the event’s Registered Teams and see a count of registered teams by grade level. So you could just ask I suppose. But the registered teams sometimes change even up to the last minute, and you probably don’t want to keep asking.
I don’t believe there’s a quick and easy way for non-EPs.
I think you pretty much have to cross check all the team numbers with the World Skills Standing. And you won’t get info for teams that have recorded no skills for the season.
If you really want to get fancy, the RobotEvents API allows access to this data. Get an API key, authorize and then query /events/{id}/teams on Robot Events. That will return all teams for the event, including the grade level. This will get all team info even if the team never recorded skills scores.
Yeah, not ideal. It’d be great if they could just include a “Grade” column in the event Teams page, or in the XLS download for event teams.
If anyone knows a better way to get each team’s grade without being an EP, I’d be interested as well.
EPs have that information on RobotEvents. Otherwise you will need to look up each team.
If I check each team on robotevents.com I see something like below - High School teams have the red box, middle schools don’t
For the competition I was looking at, I checked each team and analyzed I see 3 MS teams.
Based on your responses, looks like there is not much value going there for me since I will have to fight with pretty good HS teams for 1 Excellence award
Thanks guys
Update: I checked the competition webpage today - they have updated to show only 1 Excellence award now. The “Middle School only” Excellence award has been scrapped. Looks like my analysis was correct.
