I’d like to express that I think such a rule would be a very bad idea. While I understand scidkelly’s concern, the problem is this would be extremely difficult to enforce.
Our teams will often switch robots around. For example, if our B team did horrible in a competition and the A team did great, A would give their robot to B to work on and A would build a whole new one. I don’t see anything wrong with this. The B team can learn from what they see in the A team’s design and make improvements upon it. Often the best way to learn is to try small changes on a working example.
Furthermore, how could rules ever be created and enforced for situations like this? What if the second team copied (or claimed to copy) the original design part by part? How could this ever be proven by either side?
I do agree that this is not the right way to run a team. However, this is a team problem, not a vex problem. It’s the responsibility of the mentors and the teams to improve students’ educations, not vex’s. It’s vex’s responsibility to ensure the individual competitions are fair and they do that very well.
The reality of the situation is, the only fair way to do it is to allow teams to come in to the competitions with whatever robots they have and not to switch once they’ve been inspected. This has worked more than well enough in the past. A team might be able to get an extra qualification spot here and there by repeatedly playing their best robots under different plates, but they still have to earn it and it’s not like there’s any kind of a massive problem here or anything.
I think you’ve covered my thoughts on the issue. It’s not an enforceable rule by any means, and is mostly pointless anyway. The only ways to qualify for Worlds (that I know of) are winning awards at the State or Regional Championships, win an online challenge, or have one of the top 30(?) skills scores.
Does someone want to tell me how to switch plates and qualify under these circumstances? Because barring qualifying for and winning a different Regional or running the same skills routine under different plates (really obvious when the scores are the same), I can’t even think of one. Which makes any rule like this kind of pointless.
Perhaps a way to do this is to give regional coordinators the power to veto certain awards or defer them to other teams (like in the case given by scidkelley), under the consensus of the local club heads. It’d be set up so that if the regional coordinator has to have approval of the majority of the clubs in that region. Obviously, it would have to be set up so that only the most extreme of cases are set up, but I would like to think that the regional coordinators and club mentors are not all corrupt to start ruining teams they don’t think “deserve” the award.
For example, say my club were to have one of our best teams (I’ll use 7701 as the example) take the license plates of one of the less experienced teams (I’ll use 7702 as the example) to get them qualified for the state championship. Most of the extremely involved VEXers in Indiana would probably notice something odd, and bring it up to the local coordinator. I’ll use Cornerstone Robotics as the example, so they’ll go up to Mr. Martus (he’s our regional coordinator) and give the case. Cornerstone will need to get the support of say, Warren Central and Jay County Robotics in order for Mr. Martus to approve a deferring of the award to the actual team number - 7701. Obviously, all of this debate would happen post-competition, so I’m not sure how that would work from a logistics perspective.
That’s my two cents on how we could avoid these issues, I’m sure some will disagree and some will agree.
I believe the argument is that teams are using this to earn extra qualification spots for the state championships.
I’m afraid I just don’t see how such a system would be practical. There’s just no time to do that during a competition and I feel like enforcement would be extremely varied between competitions. I mean, you’d basically need to hold a formal “trial” with all the teams and evidence. As you pointed out yourself, logistically it could never work and would create more problems that it solves.
If you want spots at State and switching plates would get it for you, why not just pick the second robot for your alliance? Or have them bring a pushbot to a competition and pick them third?
You can do this in a legitimate fashion pretty easily.
To be absolutely honest, I do not think it is an issue. Enforcing the rule is a decent way would be hard enough, but really do we need to make switching robots within a team illegal?
I’ll throw in a bit of my VEX story into this.
Round Up was my second year competing in VRC, and I didn’t have a good robot at all, and everyone could see it. And then 2921A (I was on the B team) decided “oh hey, we want to try a new idea” but everyone kinda didn’t want them to dismantle their robot since they had been winning competitions and it was a superb machine. So they decided to take my robot, dismantle that, build with those parts, and I could have their old robot. They asked me beforehand and we talked it all over, and I completely agreed. After that, I had a fantastic robot, I spent many hours working on it so I learned some good building techniques, so that the next robot I built was equally good. I would highly recommend this to any team.
I don’t think there would be any realistic way to enforce a rule for this and would end up with a bunch of name calling and finger pointing.
I don’t think most teams would have an issue with what you have described here. I don’t think this was the scenario that sparked this discussion. The scenario in question I think would be if 2921A had simply taken your plates for 2921B and competed with their team members and their robot using your plates. This is where I start to have problems from an ethical standpoint. I don’t think this can be fixed with rules. I believe issues like this are best handled between teachers/mentors/coaches in one-on-one conversations.