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…