Back in the early days, before there was any money for having custom molded plastic parts manufactured overseas, only to become waste at the end of the season, the game elements were common, reusable items like Softballs and tennis balls. Yeah, they become waste, eventually, too… but at least they have a useful lifespan greater than one year. Many of the field elements were wooden, locally manufactured and biodegradable.
And lunches were always healthy meals involving plenty of fruit and granola.
Okay, um… maybe not that last one. VEX can reduce waste, but they know customers like shiny blingy plastic bits produced as inexpensively as possible. Until that changes we’ll keep on importing brightly coloured, over-packaged, one-and-done non-biodegradable landfill. Never underestimate the ability of a good business to adapt to customer demands!
We tend to slowly place them in our coach’s classroom in odd places over the next season. Once we finish that usually team members can just bring them home.
Some examples: on top of the projector, on top of a bust, under desks, and on hooks that used to hold whiteboard compasses or rulers
There are plenty of things to do with objects once they’re done. I have a bad collection habit, so I keep all mine anyway, but this helps with various online challenges like the reuse challenge due this June. @60470S_Semicolon had a fun use for orange cubes once TT ended, maybe they’ll send a picture…
We use caps for organized part collection, TT buckets for general storage and affectionately known “trash tower” obviously for collecting trash in the robotics room. NBN balls turned into fun toys for athletic activities (which may or may not include pelting each other), same with Clean Sweep objects. Stars might of also become pelting objects.
So what I’m saying is keeping and repurposing is my ideal method of taking care of old objects, but what if you don’t have the space? We’re looking to donate some of these to STEM schools who are new to robotics and want to give the students a good learning experience with strange objects. Post them to eBay or something similar, there’s always a collector like me willing to take them off your hands. Might I even add that they can serve as fun kid toys, stacking cubes, rolling the balls around, making weird creations.
There’s always an alternative to throwing them out, what will you choose to do?
Our organization has an informational booth/exhibition at the Monroe County Fair each year (except last year, of course), and we also do a robotics exhibition at Bowling Green’s “STEM in the Park” event (a full vex field, IQ field, and lots of clawbots for the visitors to drive). We give away most of the small game elements at these events as souvenirs. All the steel, of course, can go to the steel recycle, we collect all our steel scrap for a couple years then turn it in for a few dollars. We’ll save legal-thickness plastic, like the turning point flags or the ramp from IQ’s “bank shot” but most of the rest usually gets discarded. Except for the “fence” from Starstruck: that turned into a robot cart for our U-Team during the recycle challange. A couple cups from last year turned into lamps, too.
I use the field elements as souvenirs for the students. We all autograph them, and then each one takes one home. The leftovers I use for displays and I give one to all of my supervisors.
@Sidoti, if you decide not to release water game with rubber ducky game objects for the next next season, please, consider some sort of interlocking foam bricks that kindergartners could use to build forts and castles.
A student asked if they could keep a tower takeover block. I had the idea that each team member could sign the block as a souvenir. This way, the kids get something nice to remember the season, and I don’t have to store it.