At my last competition, I saw something interesting, the judges said that they are taking points off of teams that just used bots copied of the internet, I’m pretty sure that they did give slack to the teams who had aspects of other bots but this is a pretty interesting way that they are dealing with this issue
what are your thoughts? I think its a good idea to an extent!
This is a great idea, but it brings up the question of how to identify a copied robot vs. an independently-made design. You might be thinking that question is easy to answer - that anything which resembles another team’s bot posted on the internet is automatically a holecount. However, how many real unique permutations of a robot are there? There are a lot, but there are far more teams. It would suck to spend hours making a robot just to have your score reduced on suspicions about you copying someone else. I’m not saying that holecounting isn’t a problem — it is — but we don’t want to punish the innocent either.
No, this is a terrible idea. Teams will converge to similar robots anyways. You shouldn’t change a team’s desgn process because others built similar robots.
So, G4 is pretty clear about the robot representing the skill level of the team - that include robot design and coding. I think teams who just copying robot designs should not be surprised that they will be view less favorably than teams who making their own designs iteratively over the course of the season. For coding, use of libraries without really understanding the fundamentals of codings is another area of concern.
I think this is a horrible idea, for the original team who invented the design are they forced to rebuild? And if they do not have to rebuild wouldn’t they win every tournament. Not all robots are created the same.
This is not a good idea
Because what if a team made their robot pre-season and suddenly their bot is “Meta”
They are probably taking points off of their interview because one of the questions of the interview is “what aspects of your robot is original.” You could probably avoid this by talking about something on you robot that’s isn’t part of like the intake or mentoin that you made it different from others.
It also sounds like your saying that the are talking points off of the matches.
While i agree it is also stated in the rules that the robot has to match the teams skill, so if the team obviously does not know how to hande a really competitive bot then its just not very convincing that they built it.
No,at the beginning of the contest they said as clearly as possible, “we are taking points off of any team that uses a bot off the internet”. just like that, no and ifs or buts
What if a good team uses a meta bot? (Ex: middle school team Puck on Wheels
Let’s say that a team is really great at building and built a built a meta bot really earlier on and just kept that robot for multiple tournaments after the meta had been set. At those tournaments they didn’t do well due to them being not good at driving. In your opinion, does this count as not knowing how to handle a really competitive bot, or is it just that they are really good at building and terrible at driving.
I follow the personal kinda moto that eveveryobne deseves a second chance, but if a team builds a meta bot early on and does not do good over MULTIPLE, tourtoments, then i believe that they did not spend enough time understanding the mechanics of the bot and i believe that they could have had a much better time with their own bot, so as a judge if i knew there were other toutoments before this one that that team had most likely gone to, then im very stern that i would take points off, they clearly dont understand the mechanics of the bot and couldnt have even be botherd to learn how to drive it, now if its the first competition, and they are still learning the bot i fell like thats diffrent and i would not take points away, thats all if i was a ref and its in my opinion so take it with salt.
if they show a understanding of the bot then it’s diffrent, the competition was mainly taking points away from teams that had meta bots but had 0 clue how to use them, if a really good team built one and UNDERSTOOD it its fine.
BAD idea. Where in the real world do engineers start from scratch for every project they work? It is usually starting with some idea that is out there and thenm building on it. To me, it seems like the judges did not want to take the effort to see if the students took an idea and made it their own. Did they build on the idea? Do they understand the build and the principles behind it? Can they show the process of incremental improvement in their log book? You know, Define the problem, Brainstorm, Build, and Test. I encourage my teams to look on the internet. The goal is to get the creative juices flowing. To get them excited about what they can build / program. I will also talk to the teams, mock interviews, if you will. Do they understand what they are building and why it works that way. To flat mark them down is not helping create future engineers.
while yes i agree there is a rule in the rule book that says that the teams robot must match the teams skill so i agree that the team needs to know the mechanisms, proccess etc, but most of the teams that had points docked were teams that did not understand the robot that they built, and i mean understand, they couldnt drive nor explain what their bot did.
I like this, but I think it might be better to instead give points to robots that have different designs rather than removing points from those with similar designs. That way, it’s rewarding creativity rather than taking away from people using a design proven to work well. It would achieve a similar result, but I think more people would like it this way since it seems less negative.
or they could be good in both building and driving, e.g. snacky
then they wouldnt have points taken off
I might be comfortable with VEX/RECF making a rule that reduces the number of Win Points for teams who knowingly did something that goes against the spirit of the rules (but wasn’t bad enough to disqualify them from the tournament), but it would be unfair to their partners to deduct points from the partner’s match score, and unfair to their opponents to allow a team to benefit from violating the spirit of the rules.
Since you seem to know something about what teams had points taken off, I’m guessing you saw it was something outside of judging (since judges wouldn’t be allowed to tell a team anything about their actual score or whether they did anything that reduced it). Did you see that teams had their scores reduced in matches, or was it something else?
I don’t think an official state-qualifying event would be allowed to change a team’s match score based on how their robot was designed (unless they were part of a pilot program that was testing this idea), but they would be able to disqualify a team from the tournament if they violated certain rules where the rulebook says events can do this.
For judging, teams that based their robot on other people’s designs but didn’t add any ideas of their own (and didn’t even combine multiple ideas in a way that required them to do their own thinking), or who have no idea how to use their robot or why it works, are going to receive fewer points in certain areas of the rubric because of this. (If they do this in a way that violates the rules about the robot reflecting the skill level of the students, they might receive additional penalties, such as being completely ineligible for judged awards or being disqualified from the tournament.)
If an event I went to said “teams with bots copied off the internet will have points taken off”, and didn’t clarify this further, I would guess they were talking about judging, though I would ask someone for clarification if I was unsure and felt it was important for me to know the answer. (In your case, it sounds like you saw it wasn’t just judging.)
I suppose it would also be possible for an event to offer a custom award where teams earn points towards that award but have points taken off for one of the reasons listed above, though telling other teams about what teams had points taken off would have some of the same downsides as giving them information about their interview scores (though for a custom award, the people deciding on the award could choose to take that risk solely for their own event, other than the fact that there might be someone who accuses regular judges of being involved), or publicly taking away points during matches (except it wouldn’t interfere with matches or Skills).
YAP WARNING
yeah i was able to get a glance at the way that they were doing it and although i dont understand it fully due to it have been around 3 weeks ago and i wasnt totoally focussed on it but it did really catch my attention, so, this is how i understand it, if a team had a meta bot, that was not automatic grounds for disqualification, it was however, a mode for them to be put in a seperate list, (which is wehat i think i saw after inspection) on that list of temans, all of which used meta bots, around half that i was paired with were fuilly able to understand their robot, controll it well and use it properly. the other half hopwever failed to explain why they did certain things and they tried to explain it as they forgot or jusat did not remember when they clearly did not understand the mechinism they were tying to explain at all (no disrespect to the teams at all). this is what i think they took points off in judging for, they collected data such as if the team understood the mechanics of the bot, how it was being used, how to drive it, they spent their time wisley, etc, if they passed those criteria then they failed and had a certain number of points taken off
please do not take this as 100% factuall i am just a competitor who found what i saw and heard for certain strange and wanted to share it, but yeah, thats pretty much how i think they were able to take points off from the temas, i think its rule g4 or something similar that says that the teams robot must match the teams skill so it would make sense for them to impliment this rule as maybe a trial run/
if anyone has any ideas on why they did this let me know, i tried to ask my coach to dig a little more into this but i didnt really discover anything new!
