Nice. You are a gold star and an A+!
@Gear Geeks
You are confusing Student Centered with Student Controlled. We have students ask the officials questions at competitions, because it is Student Centered. We donât let students have the school credit card because that would be insane. Donât make the claim that students asking questions in an official forum is the same as giving them keys to the car. No one, myself included, is suggesting that we give 11 year old kids the cell numbers of the GCD members so they can constantly flood them with questions.
The GDC is made up of individuals from multiple organizations with diverse professional backgrounds (not all engineers making $100/hour). When they join the GDC, they are taking on a job. Jobs have duties. One of the job duties is to clearly communicate the game and its rules. The expense of that is built in to having employees who perform those job duties. Yes. It costs money.
Letâs play with your math in a different context. If it costs ~$20,000 to answer Official Q&A questions each season, and there are ~20,000 teams, the cost is $1/registered team, or between .6 and 1% of each teamâs original registration cost. This could easily be viewed as part of what teams are paying for in their registration fee. Even if it cost the GDC (which is spread out over several organizations, some for-profit and other non-profit), $50,000 per season to answer 500 questions in the O Q&A, with 20,000 teams (paying ~$2mil in base registration fees), that is WELL within the cost/dollar raised model of acceptability. In other words, this is the cost of operating.
(ps. thanks for the gold star. my screen name exists for a reason 
it was a gift from my mentor, and I deeply cherish it)
You are confusing Student Centered with Student Controlled.
Iâm not sure I agree. I think some PPs are confusing Student Centered with Student Controlled. I donât know where the line is drawn - but students doing everything is outside the realm of Student Controlled. I just wanted to point out that when things are beyond the capability of the student, that is when an adult steps in (safety, finances, stewardship). Perhaps, submitting Q&As is one of these cases. Perhaps, not. Perhaps this falls into the grey area between Student Centered and Student Controlled. It is a healthy debate to have.
@Gear Geeks
There is a line, I agree! Safety, team finances, program stewardship are all clearly on one side of the line.
Building a robot, programming a robot, driving a robot all fall clearly on the other side.
We have precedent for why the O Q&A falls on one side or the other: who gets to ask questions of officials at tournaments regarding rules during matches? I know at Worlds, it is the students who ask the questions. I know in the states I have been to, it is largely the students ( I feel so bad for the referees who donât shut down the adults right at the beginning and then have to spend several minutes explaining to little Samâs irate parent about why a rule is the way it is in the middle of a tournament).
Coaches/mentors/official adults have a role to play: teaching students the skills they need to effectively communicate with people who are âofficials.â So we have them ask the questions at tournaments, and we should have them ask the questions in the forum.
Thatâs my 2 cents.
If you are going to equate asking questions at a tournament to asking questions on the forum, I think the following distinction could (should?) be made. It is expected (and I teach my students) that if they bring up a question at a tournament, either during the Driverâs meeting or questioning a ruling on the field, that they need to read the rules first. As a referee, I would not expect to have to explain every rule in the Game Manual at the Driverâs Meeting. And if a team questions a ruling, it is commonly expected that THEY can point out the specific rule (or ruling from the Q&A) that they believe fits the situation. In the same way, I as a coach and mentor, in order to teach my students the skills to effectively communicate with âofficialsâ, make sure that they have read the rules. The unfiltered asking of questions over and over of things that could be answered by merely reading the Game Manual is NOT, in my opinion, teaching students how to use the resources at their disposal. And that is certainly a place for the adult to step in and teach the appropriate use of the forum. Since that has NOT been happening, the change in format has been adopted.
The issue of asking questions that have already been asked and answered is, unfortunately, partly an issue of the mechanics of this particular forum platform. The search function leaves a bit to be desired.
As I stated in an earlier post, what I would like to see are the following two items in this forum.
- A sticky thread that is updated rather frequently (once or twice a week) with the results of the questions and answers from the Official Q&A.
- A sticky thread on here where students can ask questions of us users-at-large (if they can not get their coach/mentor to ask) that we could answer by either referring them to the appropriate section of the Game Manual or referring them to the thread mentioned above or asking the question for them on the official Q&A, which would them show up in the thread above.
And yes, I do tend to talk in LONG run on sentences. This is my 25 cents.
Yup! Which is why a tagging system could be used to deal with this. If the tags are system-defined, the students (or whoever is asking the Q), would need to select which tag fits their Q (if it was a rules based list of tags, like GS4 or G1). Things that are wildly incorrectly tagged from the same users on a recurring basis could get them temporarily banned. This means users would quickly learn that in order to post, you must first know what you are really asking and where in the rules it is covered. Same set of expectations referees hold students to at the field. Holy cow, there would be consistency in their experiences! (added benefit: that might go a surprisingly far way to mollifying the angry teen horde)
I really donât understand how you are coming up with an hour for each q and a response. I would put the number at no more than 30 minutes. This would cut the cost estimates in half. While still a lot, I think that lessens the effect significantly. A group of forum users who moderate questions would also cut down the cost. The GDC would no longer have to repeatedly answer the same question. This system would just need to be added to one of the stickies at the top of the page. This would help keep this element of vex student centered and cut down the previously mentioned cost down significantly. An improved search feature, tags, and the fewer number of questions would also make it easier to weed out and prevent the bad questions on the forum. To echo the posts above, it would also be great if the q and a summary document was updated more frequently, the q and as were answered regularly, and a forum section here if the new system will be kept.
I would say her professional experience lead her to that rough number. Working from memory and without doing any further analysis, thatâs where Iâd peg the number as well. I would be highly skeptical of a significantly lower number. And it could well be more.
Some of those questions required multiple communications between the members of the GDC. I believe some of them required actual face-to-face meetings between multiple parties to get the right answer. At least a few undoubtedly took research into previous answers for the sake of maintaining consistency. Given the length and detail, various of the answers couldnât have been proofread and link-checked in under 30 minutes, much less researched, âsolutioned,â drawn up, and authored.
Having been responsible for answering very specific questions in other environments, and also for creating costing and pricing for help-desk and on-line support, I am comfortable that one hour per question for such a highly-specific context is a conservative estimate. I believe @Gear Geeks career has left her similarly informed.
I wasnât trying to be exact. I was trying to demonstrate that there are tangible financial impacts to asking a question on the Q&A because Iâm not sure that many people have made that connection. My estimate is likely low because an employee costs much more than their hourly rate (50 to 100% more - for holidays, sick time, vacation time, medical benefits, retirement benefits, bonuses, life insurance, employer portion of social security, etc, etc). And I do believe one hour per question is probably conservative since there are multiple people involved in answering the questions and nothing ever happens as fast as you think it should. Yes, Iâve done quite a few estimates like this in my 34 year engineering career.
I am currently registered for this season, but it still doesnât allow me to create a Q&A post.
It is on robotevents https://www.robotevents.com/VRC/2018-2019/QA
I would recommend a stickied channel of the forum where users could ask unofficial Q&A questions.
If a question is worthy of the Official Q&A, someone with access could ask it there (preferably mentioning the original poster as well, if they have time).
In my opinion, a channel would be better than a single thread, because (1) with a channel, it is easy to see which questions have been answered, and (2) channels are often easier to navigate than long threads (especially on slow devices).
And yes, I meant channel in my earlier posts.
I like your idea about a thread or channel reposting the answered Q&Aâs, too. That one might actually work better as a thread, so that it could be stickied to the top of the Unofficial Q&A channel.
Iâm starting to think that this plan might be better than some of my original suggestions, although it would still be good to have an easy way to prevent the people who can access the Official Q&A from asking unnecessary questions (like a temporary ban or additional warnings). Itâs also still important to make sure student-centeredness isnât lost by the Q&A system.
Are you the account that registered the team? If not, then youâll be unable to post, if my understanding is correct
You donât have to be the account that registered the team. You just have to be listed as the primary, secondary, or financial contact, and then be invited by the team through Robot Events.
Here are some instructions on how to do this:
Urgh. Gotta go talk to my mentor then
Reviving this thread to give some updates. (itâs crazy how fast âinternet timeâ flies, this thread was only posted 2 weeks ago but it feels like itâs been a while since we were having these discussions)
- Event Partners now have the ability to post questions.
This was, quite frankly, a gap that we shouldnât have missed, that you all caught right away, and Iâll take the blame for that. EPâs are some of our most knowledgeable and invested followers of the competition, so inviting their questions is a no-brainer (to quote Paul). An added benefit of this is that head referees now have an official avenue to post questions. If you are a head referee not affiliated with a team, you can ask the EP for the event where you are refereeâing to post on your behalf.
If you are a head referee not affiliated with an event (i.e. not actually refereeâing), or a community member not affiliated with a team (i.e. not actually a competitor), you are welcome to continue contributing via unofficial channels or by emailing [email protected].
- Issues with posting questions.
A few people in this thread and elsewhere have been unable to post questions. I have been able to reach out to each one individually via PM and help to resolve their issue. Common issues seem to be the following:
- Not being actually logged in to the account. Check to see if the top right says âLoginâ or âMy Accountâ.
- Not being logged in to the account listed as the âPrimary Contactâ. Some people may have multiple logins (a team email vs a personal email or whatever). While this is not recommended for various reasons, please check that you are logged in with the correct account.
- The âPrimary Contactâ is listed as an email address, not an actual RE account. Please make sure that you actually have a RobotEvents account, and are logged into it, when creating a team. Your REC Foundation Regional Support Manager can help to untangle this if you need help.
- âDownload by Tagâ now active.
This is a somewhat minor one, but still pretty cool (I think, at least). If you click a question tag, it will pull up all questions associated with that tag. When you click the orange âDownload PDFâ button, it will now give you the option to download all questions with that specific tag. Tags can only be created by GDC moderators, to avoid having separate tags for âR8â, âR-8â, and âdecorationsâ.