Hello! My team and I just finished our first competition today and were wondering about a few things. We lost the all around competition today, but made it to the semi-finals, and did not get the excellence award. However, one of the teams that did win the competition won the excellence award. We were told that if this were to occur, the top score in the whole state for the programming skills challenge would proceed to worlds as well. At this point in time, we are currently behind the highest spot, with the team that won the competition and the excellence award being ahead of us. The thing that confuses me is that, we had the same score, but we did it on our first attempt and they used all three attempts. Does the excellence award/them winning the competition cancel out the fact that they “beat” us in the programming skills, or does that mean that we don’t get to compete in the world championship this year?
They said they will send out emails in about a week saying who made it, but I am really nervous and I want to know now :(.
I’m not an authority on this, and I hope somebody will correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it if the tournament champions also win world-qualifying awards (such as Excellence, etc.) then that will open up whatever Worlds slots your state is given. So those open slots are then filled by first going to the season-wide list of Programming Skills for your state. If the top team on that list has already qualified for worlds, then they go down the list until they get to a team that has not yet qualified.
After they pick a team from the season-wide Programming Skills list, if there are still slots available, they then move to the season-wide Robot Driver Skills list for your state. And back and forth until they use up all their Worlds slots.
Maybe this system is different in different states, but that’s how I understand it.
You did not put your location so it is tough to answer all the aspects of this.
Yes, the stack moves up when the top team is crossed off. It does not skip the skill and go to the other one. You must choose one from that skill before moving on until the skill list is empty.
However in some states where you have Middle School and High School spots for themselves, the middle schoolers are taken out into their own bracket. And if there are not enough spots for middle schoolers, then they don’t get to go off the skills list at all. We had 2 spots in PA for middle school, 8 for High School so only high schoolers would have come off the list. But we did not even get tot the list as all spots came from the tournament finalists and excellence and design award winners.
Tie breakers are different than you might think. Since you had one run at the top score, you would have gone below the other team that scored that score more than once. It goers to next highest score, not an average of scores and more scores are better.
Example:
Team A: 24, 24, 20, 18
Team B: 24, 20
Because Team A’s second ever best score was another 24, they get ranked higher.
If that second 24 was not there for team A and team B had 2 runs identical to A. You will see team A had a third run, so they still get ranked higher with that 18 score.
Lesson is: do skills at every event and try and do it more than once even if it will score the same score. It is not clear how many runs people have at a score so keep running.
Thanks for filling in your team number. Under normal circumstances, since 918E won the excellence award, they should be crossed off the list and the stack should move up to 6891D.
Please do more skills runs in the future if possible to make yourself higher in the tie breakers.
But it is not quite as normal as you might think. 918E is a middle school team. Nevada has a single world spot for middle schoolers. 918E double qualified through a combined tournament and won MS Excellence and was part of the combined tournament.
So that tournament champ spot they got falls off due to the for MS Excellence and is added to the programming skills list for a team. But is that destined for a HS team only? If 918E only got tournament champion would they have qualified? You run a combined MS/HS state tournament so I can not say for sure what happens. Last year we had a team in PA qualify from programming skills in a combined MS/HS state tournament so it seems like it would be to any team in your state.
