I am 5th year mentor and I think switching to BO1 was one of the worst mistakes that RECF has made.
If they wanted to remove an incentive for the teams to intentionally lose matches (to be the 3rd pick) they could have computer randomly select the 3rd pick, with alliances having only two opportunities to decline the selection. That would inject an element of luck and randomness in the much more fair, controllable, and uniform way than the BO1 does,
From the spectator point of view there is no pleasure watching 16th alliance being steamrolled by the 1st. And I don’t think both alliances are happy either, because 16th knows that there is a high chance that they will be swiftly defeated and 1st dreads to lose this early in BO1 eliminations due to a whitescreen or disconnect.
However, we would enjoy seeing multiple BO3 matches in the top of the bracket and 3rd pick strategies always add an element of the intrigue (and make alliance captains even better strategists).
I think an opportunity for the (mostly beginner) 3rd pick teams to be the part of the top bracket play experience and sometimes qualify beyond their wildest expectations was one of the best aspects of the VRC. The decision to do away with the 3rd pick removes a lot of educational and inspirational opportunities from the game.
One of the most memorable moments from the local tournament a few years back was a Final-1 when 3 top seeded robots become disabled (overheated or disconnected) and meccanum push bot won the match. That was the first time in the season that #1 seed lost!
Of course, #1 alliance easily won Finals 2 and 3, but that was expected. Everybody felt relaxed and had a great day at the competition.
On the other hand, BO1 is a high stress environment where you could be out after one mistake and months of the hard work and careful preparation could be negated by an unlucky equipment failure at any moment. If RECF thinks this will attract more rationally minded people (including girls) to the VRC, they must be getting their input data from an alternative reality.
If the true goal of the VRC program is to promote STEM education, then competition must be structured in a gentler way, where you have a plenty of second chances that will isolate you from the random equipment failures, that few students understand, and none have any control over.
To anyone who will tell me that BO1 prepares kids for the real life, where in many cases you have no second chances, I will reply that you misunderstand the process of education.
You would never call it a good education, giving six graders keys to the real cars and telling them that if they could learn how to drive in the next three hours all by themselves, they will get the license, and if they don’t - then the next opportunity to get the license will be in ten years. That sounds just crazy! Chances are they will crash the car, which would leave them with physical and emotional scars for rest of their lives. In the best case scenario a rational kid will call you a lunatic and walk away without taking the keys.
That example is an exaggeration, but it illustrates what good educational process should not have: high stress, high stakes, limited time, lack of guidance, high physical or emotional risks, no second chances.
The best educational process needs to have just the opposite: low stress environment, positive motivation, plenty of access to reference materials and adult guidance, structured age-appropriate course material with enough time to absorb it, and gradual shift to more independent work as kids grow. Finally, there should be lots of opportunities to test student’s knowledge, without the pressure or risk of ruining their final grade, even if they make a single mistake in any of those tests.
We want to give kids more chances to succeed, not more chances to fail!
Unfortunately, VRC has:
High stress BO1 environment with random equipment failures.
Insane pressure to make it to the States and then to the Worlds.
Lack of the structured course material relevant to the current season.
Lack of easily searchable knowledge repository open to all contributors.
Very limited build time and mentor help for the majority of school based programs.
At this point I could imagine somebody will tell me that VRC is about kids learning independently and point to a few exceptionally good teams. To which I will reply that, first of all, behind majority of those teams are well structured programs with dedicated mentors, and for any team that still made it in spite of strong headwinds, there were five that got discouraged or disappointed and dropped out along the way.
Sometimes it looks to me as if on the first day of school you hand out each student an apple and then, three weeks later, you give an “A” in physics only to those who were able to rediscover Newton’s Law of Gravity all by themselves. Every once in a while you may find another Newton but, guess what, most of the time they will simply eat those apples, and there are plenty of smart kids among them who could do very well in physics if you properly teach it to them.
Where you see the triumph of the perseverance of the few select teams that became champions, I also see a lot of missed educational opportunities for both the champions and the rest of the kids.
The reason I posted this long aside in the BO1 vs BO3 thread, is that I see this change as the step in the wrong direction.
I think that, instead of fixing structural deficiencies of the VRC program, this change actually makes them worse with the results that contradict goals and objectives stated by RECF such as encouraging quality STEM education among wide populations of students.
