This season will be my second season competing in the VEX Robotics season, and my first competing at the V5 level. Last year, in IQ, one of the first things that I noticed, and which was a frequent source of mild annoyance for me and the rest of my team, was the lack of transparency around the judging process. While I do understand that some students could argue with the judges unnecessarily, it can sometimes feel (in my opinion at least) that winning judged awards isn’t a realistic goal to aim for when going to a competition, because I am never told what I need to do to get better at winning the Think Award, as an arbitrary example. I have read documents such as the Judging Process and the Notebook Rubrics, but sometimes award results just didn’t seem to line up with the listed criteria. I would be interested to hear about anybody else’s take on the matter, and whether you think that judged awards would be better (hypothetically) with more clarity.
There’s no “could” needed, VEX is a highly competitive event for many teams and they dedicate months to their robot. They will nitpick and harass the judges over anything to argue they should’ve gotten the award.
Speaking as a coach, this is unironically the right perspective. Awards are so awesome when they happen, but the actual awards are somewhat arbitrary between the very top teams and what you need to focus your students on is the joy of competing against themselves by improving at each tournament. Hit higher skills scores, win more matches, have the robot survive the whole day, etc. It’s not about the awards and it’s not even about the robot, this is just a fun way to get kids learning resilience, engineering, teamwork, presenting, and a million other life skills and memories.
Speaking as an occasional judge, there is just no time to write up feedback that would be appropriate, fair, and able to be publicly shared. Most tournaments the judges are still deliberating all the way through finals. They definitely can’t write down an explanation for each time to do better. It sucks, as a teacher and coach I have always wanted what you’re asking for, but I also realize it just can never be done and anything that is released will be used to harass the poor volunteers.
In the Pushback Season for VEX V5, me and my team were able to get judged awards more reliably than we were able to get tournament performance awards. It was my third year in VEX, and it was my best season so far, so I have built a catalogue of tips and tricks over the years. The below strategies got us Think award at Nationals, and Create award at Worlds, so they certainly do work if you follow them well. It is genuinely more reliable to get judged award than most people realise, you just need to score full marks in the rubric.
- The rubric is everything. Read the rubric multiple times, cover to cover, summarise the rubric with AI, FULLY INTERNALISE THE RUBRIC. This is important for the next steps.
2. For Notebook Content, open the rubric on one side, and the notebook on the other. Notebooks do not need to be as long as people make them out to be, they just need to appeal to the rubric.
3. Notebook formatting. Judges have very little time to go through notebooks, so if you simply a. format the table of contents for the notebook to match rubric page one, and then b. add tags to every page to appeal to rubric page two, then you already have most of the points scored for the notebook.
4. For the interview, KNOW YOUR ROBOT IN DEPTH. Everyone should have a good knowledge of ALL aspects of the robot, and the roles within the team should expose the EXPERTISE that comes with being in your field. For example, as the builder, my team leader understood what PID loops are for, but as the programmer, I understood the Maths behind them, how they are implemented, and why we chose that particular style of odometry over EKF/MCL odom.
5. Practice the interview extensively with your teammates, split into two groups and test each other on the interview. Use AI, feed it the rubrics and make it be the “judge” as you get interviewed. Practice, practice, practice.
The above strategies worked for us, as aforementioned, we aimed for Think award at Nationals, we got it and qualified to Worlds. We aimed for Think award at worlds, but we could not run the skills auton at Worlds, so we got Create award instead. Make sure to follow these VERY CLOSELY, the only reason I performed worse in earlier seasons was that I hadn’t realised these properly, and my team was just not locked in enough on the above tips.
Btw, check out my code from last season! This is the reason we won Think award at Nationals ; )
PS.
Feel free to PM me for advice…
Think award at UK nats? Also if you have disc or something I’d love to speak more about your project code as I think its really interesting, do lmk!
sure! would reccomend whatsapp though, because i rarely check the forum nor discord… dm me on discord, then i can give you my number.
discord: physicslegend29
I agree, we do the exact same thing. One thing we mainly do is make pages like "why we chose this drivetrian’'. The only thing I consern on our notebook is size, because 3 weeks in to the override season, we already have 80 pages and just finished our drivetrain. But I think the direct rubric labels make it easier with the judges.