We just ran our first remote skills event. (Actually Hybrid since our home teams that can be physical ran the event, I worked on the remote teams). It was surprisingly very easy.
Is there a huge demand for skills with people that have fields? I’m thinking it’s not a big deal to sit in front of a monitor all day and watch robots compete.
We did 30 min slots (inspection and 6 runs) and they went well. We did one slot of two teams in a 30 min slot (thanks 19355 and 96671B for helping out) they did a run while the other team reset the field.
Is there a demand for these events? I have free weekends coming up and I can get another referee to be the second person.
With the state championships coming up and teams falling behind due to regional restrictions, I’d say there is most definitely a demand for it one way or another. Was there judging at the event? If you include remote judging, that would make the events significantly more enticing to attend, although I’d say that the bare minimum remote skills is still pretty nice to compete in.
My gut is to offer any opportunities for teams this season. The load (aka demand) might be less given pandemic context and lack of access of fields, technology etc…
that said, incredibly important to off opportunity no matter how meager it seems to keep students/teams engaged.
My specific locality we have been remote only - this week small subset of students coming back this week and others weeks from now. My little contribution has been getting gear available to students to explore at home and diversifying - including buying and handing out six RAD Drones. and deploying as many clawbots as possibles and any new V5 Sensors… we are also working with gardening club (who have not had opportunity to explore common ground (pun intended) to have initiative to do robotics gardening - farm.bot as an example.
assumptions - gear in boxes in storeroom is not learning. take leap of faith and listen to student about new opportunities and invest in new ideas.
So, back to question - do all you can - roll out fields, tiles, game elements etc… keep kids engaged.
I have seen more Remote events on the weekdays than the weekends which frustrates me. My team can only do weekends and there are limited Remote events that are scheduled in the Weekends.
I’m running a remote event this year with 2 sessions, one session on Friday (3:30 to 7:30), and one session Saturday (12:00 to 4:00). This allows both types of teams to compete, without being too much of a hassle on the EP’s part.
Yep, I understand. I did remote judging at an event 2 weeks ago and it went really well. We all read the 7 notebooks the night before and scored them and on Saturday did the interviews. Teams were assigned 30 min slots to do their skills runs in and we assigned slots to get them home and into a Zoom call.
Takeaways were:
Look at the Rubric and at every meeting look at what the rubric is asking for and make those entry into every days entry in the notebook.
Keep the notebook current. If you are at a January event and you tell us in the interview that you worked all across Christmas and the last 3 weeks, don’t give us a notebook that stops the first week in November.
Show all the work. Don’t go “We decided to build the meta competition robot” How did you find it, how did you decide, what criteria did you use? Otherwise I’m looking at the entry going “Ok, so Mom said build this one and you get zero points”.
Show that the notebook was useful. 22 October - This 12 wheel omni drive base isn’t working out. It does not turn well and it’s slower than our calculations. We revisited our drive base discussion from 15 June and decided to reorder the choices based this new info. We are now building a standard X drive.
On our skills event last Saturday we had our hands full of just doing the multiple Zoom meetings and keeping the locally playing people in-line with the remote playing people. We are going to try to do judging for the event. I have a RSM meeting today to ask if we can do the event on Saturday and do the interviews on the Friday before or the Sunday after.
Foster, I do not know about the rest, but yes we have been trying to get a robot ready totally virtual learning at our school, and we have been trying to find remote events that do not charge too much to enter at least 1 this year for my kids.
)