Our team just noticed that the world skills standings don’t separate driver skills from programming skills. Does anyone know the reason for this?
This year robot skills is the combination of programming and driver skills scores. It’s in the game manual.
Not 100% sure but one reason is they believe that a good number teams will be able to get max scores in Driver Skills. In adding them both together it makes it more difficult for teams to get both a max score in Driver and max score in Programming Skills making it more challenging.
Also instead of inviting 30 from Driver Skills and 30 Programing Skills to worlds they will invite the Top 50 from the combined score
There are several reasons for this change. One, it will place a greater emphasis on Programming Skills. Under the old system. many more teams would run Robot (Driver’s) Skills than would run Programming Skills. Under this system. the top scores will, by necessity, be from teams that have completed both.
Two, although only the top 50 get invites to Worlds, this should actually result in more actual invites as under the old system, the most unique invitations that were sent out (of the possible 60) was 47, but was most often less (due to teams finishing in the top 30 of both skills). Data from the event partner summit, July 2016 in Louisville. And third, for the event partners who run the State/Regional Championships, it will be easier to fill the field from Skills as they will no longer have to bounce back and forth from Programming Skills and Robot (Driver’s) Skills, but will be able to just go right down the list.