Number of active teams

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC > Skyrise (14/15)
#1

Of the 10,000 or so VEX teams, how many of those will actively compete in a contest during this season?

#2

Theoretically all of them. Registration is a year by year thing so each team must be reregistered yearly. Therefore why register a team if it is not competing? For example my school has stopped using 1961C and therefore they no longer pay for the registration of that number. I would assume basically all registered and paid for numbers would go to at least one competition per year.

#3

There has to be a way to get it from the Vex database…

http://vex.us.nallen.me/the_data

Stats as of right now the site has…

What is not on here is count of registered teams where matches played >1

If I had a direct SQL access I could write a query but that is a bit dangerous to open up via a web request.

They don’t break out Vex IQ in here, just VRC and VexU.

I’ve often thought a “big data challenge” or “moneyball challenge” around the Vex competition data would be something really cool.

Use the data set here to tell me:

  1. Most active Vex team (easy)
  2. Most active Vex club (a little tricky)
  3. Who had the toughest road to worlds? (requires you to define toughness)
  4. Who dominated most in their region? (is win-loss or points scored or point differential the best definition of dominance?)
  5. Who has the most consistent autonomous? (if counted at entering worlds, do you want to count early events against a team?)
  6. Who has the toughest strength of schedule entering worlds? (very hard and requires definition)
  7. Year over year, what teams do you expect to dominate (missing information on team member graduation/retention)

There would be data quality issues of teams not reporting into the robotevents data internationally.

Now if we could get some data companies to sponsor a nice scholarship to make it worth the kids while. (At least $5k if not $10k) Hortonworks seems to be suddenly flush with cash after their IPO. :slight_smile: I am not sure how internationally awarded scholarships would work either.

It would have to be about the process and justification of answers and not just a simple answer as the questions are nebulously defined. Bonus points for using newer technologies like Hadoop, R, or other technologies. Data presentation visualized in Tableau, Business objects, microstrategy are cool too. But that requires access to expensive things.

#4

This information isn’t available. Tournament manager can export this data locally, but when you upload a tournament it gets lost. This has been the case since Gateway. In fact if you look at the csv file for matches under the results tab of any tournament on RobotEvents, you will see that the column headings are the Gateway ones (with some Sack Attack column headings too, although I don’t think these contained any data even during the Sack Attack season).

This is why Aura’s analysis of how important the autonomous bonus was in Toss Up and early this season had to use data from New Zealand events rather than international data.

From time to time people have asked for this issue to be fixed. It would be nice to have full score breakdown information, especially since the support for it looks like it’s almost there already.

Edit:

If you use http://api.vex.us.nallen.me/get_rankings?season=skyrise you will get one result per team per event, and then you just need to go through and count the unique teams to work out how many teams have competed at at least one event (that has been uploaded) so far this year. If you do this you will need to work around the maximum request size - the process for doing that is described here [http://vex.us.nallen.me/the_data/rankings.

Of course this number will be lower than the actual number of active teams, because some teams will be intending to compete but haven’t yet and sometimes events aren’t uploaded properly.](http://vex.us.nallen.me/the_data/rankings.)

#5

Like Oliver just said, there is an API of all the data (on the exact page you linked to even), so you can work it out yourself if you want.

There’s a lot more required for VEX IQ data, I’ve been looking at it but it requires a big database change. VRC/VEXU teams operate out of the same “program” (they’re basically just two different grades) with no overlapping numbers. VIQC and VRC teams can have the same numbers (and not even be the same school) so it becomes a lot more complex when that gets added in.

That was the whole point of the API - so people could make things that they otherwise couldn’t have. Hopefully people will start to do lots with it as the season starts to heat up and teams want more useful information.

#6

Two years ago, My school was 979. Then we got a new advisor to register us, and we got a new number, 6972. when we were registering for this year, we called vex and retrieved our old number. I therefore assume that after a number has been used, it stays with the user who created it and cannot be used again, or recycled.

#7

Actually, “abandoned” numbers are eventually recycled.

#8

Oh OK, thank you for the clarification.

#9

Just wondering how long does it take for the number to be recycled?

#10