Sometime recently, the VEX Robotics World Championship experienced a change at all grade levels which changed the outcome for future World Champions, Excellence Award, and Robot Skills Champion winners from qualifying for the 2024 World Championship to not qualifying at all. Before, there used to be an individual tab stating which awards qualify for Worlds 2024. Now, this tab is removed, and replaced with a clarification in the “Awards” tab stating “No awards will qualify to the 2024 VEX Worlds Championship”.
To preface, I am not necessarily partial to either award natures. With that being said, though, I do have a couple questions. Was this publicly announced anywhere? Did I miss it? I feel like this is a significant change that should probably be communicated to competitors. The bigger mystery is why this was done. I would really like to pick the brain of an REC Foundation employee on this decision, not because I disagree with it exactly, but because it is such a significant decision that makes me curious.
FRC champs is about 800 teams, so sending 3% from the prior year does not seem like a big deal. That would mean a few less teams from the wait list make it. Can you add why this is a bigger deal other than 5 < 24. (I upped the slots to Worlds via awards since FRC is only 1/2 way into their season)
@logician, reach out to your local RECF person and ask them. I’ve found contact with RECF directly gets faster answers than here,
Also the reason why they are doing this is due to how many teams don’t even try and still get in the world championship. Ahem Dr X Academy, I have been watching their season and they have only been to two competitions. They did not even win at states and they get a free invite cause they won the skills champion ship last year.
The FIRST Impact Award, formerly the Chairman’s Award, is the most prestigious award in the program and is the only way FIRST Robotics Competition teams can enter the Hall of Fame. To honor this achievement, Hall of Fame teams that earned their Chairman’s Award at the last ten FIRST Championships prior to 2022 are also pre-qualified teams. These teams are: 27, 359, 503, 597, 987, 1114, 1311, 1538, 1816, 1902, 2614, 2834, 3132, and 4613.
The ratio is 4/800 for vex based on previous accomplishment and 26/600 for FRC champs.
It also looks like the ~10 “original and sustaining teams” have been moved from instant FRC champs qualification to being on priority waitlist since I last checked. Not sure if that is effectively the same, @Karthik is theFRC expert.
Probably with giving spots to teams who won worlds is there is no guarantee the team will come back. Look at 38141B this year. They don’t have any of the people who won worlds on their team yet they got a spot. If you look at 515R though (who has someone from 38141B last year on it), they have worlds qualified 10+ times. If you win worlds, you’re not going to have a hard time qualifying next year.
Well…. The same for soccer world cup as well.
And even worse, since World Cup is held every 4 years, there is zero chance of having the same players back.
But it is always nice to have the winning team being invited back to defend their title?
Another way to look at it is - if they are not invited, then most likely it will be thrown to some random waitlist teams. Might as well give it the the champion as a reward.
But will there even be 2024 VEX Robotics World Championship?
@DanMantz was talking for long time how they want to put more emphasis on local competitions to make them more exciting Worlds class experience accessible to more teams.
Maybe, with all those uncertainties with world economy, China relations, and internal changes at vex, they decided it is time to reorganize the structure of the competition as we know it.
Yep and lots of places are doing this. Our Regional Championship had lots of added features for teams to make it a little more special. Awards this year were about 3’ tall which was pretty cool.
Snicker. They need to get the 2023 Worlds in the history book before they change for 2024. Lots can happen, but we all know that April is RECF busy month with a well deserved break in May.
Construction for the new [Kailey Bay Hutchinson Center] is projected to begin in 2024 and finish by 2028.
I got this from this article: Cost estimates increase to $2.8 billion for new downtown Dallas convention center It seems that the center that Worlds had been planning to be at is experiencing a tear down and reconstruction. Now, I’m too familiar with this sort of business, but I am assuming that this would affect where Worlds will be held in 2024 and beyond.
I always thought that it was strange to receive an automatic invitation tied to the team number. I don’t think that any of my teams have ever had exactly the same make-up one year to the next. Sometimes, no members are the same. People graduate, move, or can no longer dedicate the time needed.
It makes much more sense to offer year-after-year invitations for FRC than for VEX for a couple of significant differences in operation. Because of the significant expense in both robot building and event registration, there is typically only one robot per school/organization, and often students will be on the team up to 4 years. Additionally, there is often significant “mentor” involvement in the robot builds, with mentors/engineers working with a team for multiple years; certainly not true of every team, there are plenty of FRC teams that are entirely student run, but there are also some teams that compete with “built-bots.” So, a certain number of “powerhouse” teams dominate FRC competitions year-after-year, and the system of automatic invitations works well for FRC.
In our organization (which started as FRC, the switched to VEX), we often have a couple year-over-year teams, and we tend to retire the “letter” at least for a couple years when a “senior team” graduates.
I can not express in words how sad these 22 words make me. “Mentor Bots” “Dad-Bots” etc. is not a thing. Hasn’t been a thing since I was in FRC in 2004, I have family that still does FRC, I’m still in touch with FRC teams. T H I S __ I S ___ N OT___A___T H I N G.
Every year, like in VEX, there is a “EveryBOT” which is a prototype BOT. Teams can take this design and build on top of it, take ideas from it, etc. The EveryBOT like the Herobot from VEX is not going to win events.
Roboteers build robots. FRC is much more mentor like, and to be honest I like that. I’ve never found the slavish adherence by parents about “student run” means dumping $1,200 worth of parts on a table and going “hey, build a robot”. That’s setting roboteers up to fail at a high cost.
I’m a multi year mentor to a number of robot teams. And there are cases where there is a span of 2-3 years of members on a team. Winning at Regionals / Worlds isn’t a “get to Worlds Free” card, it’s an incentive to be better, do better, and pretty much don’t embarrass the seniors that graduated by being 81st in your 82 robot division.
I’m actually surprised by this thread. Complaining about 4-5 teams that get an auto invite to Worlds? Is that how fragile your season has been?
Let me help you get over that:
Build a Better Robot.
And let me say to those of you saying “FRC is a better robotics program, they deserve Worlds berths, you messy little VRC robots don’t” (I paraphrased some) have missed the entire tenant of Woody and Dean on building a culture around engineering success. They believe that from snapping a Lego brick, turning a screw, CNC machining an entire robot from a single titanium ingot, every experience in engineering is important. Lets celebrate that.
The complaints about teams not trying because they are already qualified is crazy to me as well. My comment about it having a tiny effect works both ways, it affects almost no one so it can’t be that bad. Its been a cool reward over the years and I know some teams have used it as a way to spend more time exploring weirder designs which I love. If a single team uses it as an opportunity for a chill victory lap that is okay, not everyone has the same energy to give every year.
Not true. Here is a reliable source clearly explaining part of the problem. If you want the full information feel free to reach out to me on any of my other social media platforms. I can’t link it as outside links from the first forum aren’t allowed.
As forceful as it was said, the phrase “not mentor built” meant nothing. I spent about half of my time on [team number] photographing and observing. I was shy about jumping in to speak and having had no prior engineering or robotics experience, I didn’t know how you even begin to design a robot. Most of my ideas were taken straight from the game animation, so obviously they wouldn’t work in reality. I watched as mentors hovered over students and sometimes broke off to test their own ideas. [Name] often proclaimed that the team was student built, usually followed with “I never even touch the robot.” When I hear absolutes like this, I will always be watching to see if you told the truth. As a kid with a camera and a stubborn streak, I made it my mission to get a picture if he ever touched the assembled sheet metal. I’m sure I have hundreds of photos of him working on the robot with various equipment, but reliving all this trauma has taken a big enough toll that I don’t have the strength to search through my thousands of photos of my time with [team number] and VEX
Not sure how this is relevant to the current conversation.
Since the worlds qual is tied to the number, there are scenarios where the team has done nothing to earn the qual (with 0 of the same memebers). Would you like it if world’s spots were handed out at random?
It has actually been quite successful; I have managed to earn 5 worlds quals this season. Working on building a better bot as always. though.
I don’t think anyone has said that in this thread.
But as I have mentioned earlier - all team sports world champions are invited back for the next world championship (or world cup).
And most of them are like 4 years apart.
The spots are awarded based on country and not players.
And let’s go by statisitics - we have around 4 to 5 teams that will earn a worlds ticket via previous worlds.
So out of the 4 or 5 teams - exactly how many didnt try? and what’s the percentage of them not trying when we look back from 2008 till now?
I really dont think we should be making sweeping statement or generalising just because we see an occasional bad examples.
And like I said earlier - between giving the spot to a the worlds champ or to a random waitlist team, I will always chose the former 10 out of 10 times.
This is how waitlist spots work though. Random teams are selected to receive an invite to the World Championship when the event capacity has not been reached yet. If the choice is having those 4-5 spots go to previous World’s winners or random teams off the waitlist, I’d choose the former. Even if the team composition the next year comprises of all new members that did not win, it is still a nice reward to the organization/team for producing an excellent robotics progam the year before.