This was our first year and it seems that Squared Away is very approachable for a new team.
Watching youtube of previous years, it seems Ringmaster looked very hard and had many “dad-bots”. Was that true? What did a normal bot look like that year?
Which years were better/worse from a game standpoint in your opinions?
Any year could have dad bots but I don’t think Ringmaster was especially big for it. I loved that game because it gave loads of opportunity for exciting coding. The colour sensor came into it’s own, using the motors as servos for sorting and so on. Saw some really clever stuff.
Bankshot was probably the one that spawned the most questions.
I think that this could go for any game. Every game has a few (or a ton) of teams that had “dad-bots.” With my little brother having participated in Ringmaster, I noticed that many of the teams from his school build the robots that had 3 sections that would slam down on the rings and pick them up. There were at least three other teams that had the same concept but different robots, like every other game. Like I said before, pretty much every year has a lot of “dad-bots” regardless of the game.
All games will have “dad-bots”, but I agree that Ringmaster had loads of them.
The most common design (that I saw during the season, my team also had one as well) was probably this one as explained above by @germany:
Pictures are not mine.
Playing the game wasn’t extremely hard, yes it was harder than previous games, but once you figured out a good strategy and had designed a working, reliable bot it seemed like any other game.
A good game should be fun to play, be a challenge to build, and provide problems to solve. There will always be robot designs that are super complex and elicit “parent/mentor-built bots” comments (this is true even in VRC, FRC, etc.). Even Next Level is no exception. It was a super easy game to play… and the Vex standard robot, Flex, was able to play it extremely well. But even in NL, there were robot designs that were more complex than others.
I think the point of “more non-student centered” has more to do with coach/parent involvement and to an extent clone robots from the same organization as opposed to the game itself. I remember watching a Youtube video from Bankshot, and it was from an elementary school event in the UK. I think an organization from China participated with a couple of teams, and both had the same super complex robot… and the parent or coach was quite involved in coaching the student what to do, etc.
I was at that event. They were incredible robots.
I think a good game is one with more than a single solution.
Ringmaster seemed to have many different successful robot designs
Next Level had one successful design (claw in front, 4 hooks in back)
Squared Away has many solutions. This season I have seen every Hero robot, including “Ike” at competitions. One of our teams qualified 11th at our very large state championship with a modified claw-bot.
I think that made Squared Away a good challenge.
One of the best performing robot in my cluster of bots was a modified version of Ike to help the center of gravity issue.
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