WORLDS Awards

VEX IQ Competition Discussion General VEX IQ Competition Discussion
#1

I want to give a big kudos to the REC Foundation for the way they did the awards this year in divisions.

https://www.robotevents.com/robot-competitions/vex-iq-challenge/RE-VIQC-17-4884.html

If you look at the awards tab you can see that they did a lot of the awards by division, and Excellence was really the only award that was exclusively over the entire tournament. This gave a lot more kids the opportunity to bring home an award without having to go to second and third place. Also, it was probably a lot easier on the judges to have to pick from 77 as opposed to 300+. Great ideas all around.

Also, the way they did divisional finals and “finals” finals was really good too, with the wildcard spots to get some more good teams up there.

#2

I agree, this year’s World Championship had some really good changes.

  1. splitting up VRC & Vex IQ. The schedule was a little tight, but it was nice to be in the spotlight

  2. game reveal AFTER the finals. I was never a fan of doing the game reveal before the tournaments were over. The kids wouldn’t be able to sleep the night before the last day of competition. It was impossible to shelter them from the new game as everyone would discuss it. This is a major change that I hope REC keeps.

  3. divisions: Great job REC. The bigger the tournament gets, the harder it is to accommodate all those teams. Making 4 divisions was the right decision. The only question is how many teams is too much for future years? I think 75-80 was a good number.

  4. awards: I like the idea that more teams would go home with awards. Our kids put in a lot of time and effort, as do the mentors and volunteers, so its nice to have more team’s seasons validated with an award. However, I think excellence should be given per division with all of the other awards. I understand the importance of that 1 team being the best, but how do you choose the winner considering the fact that teams were judged by different groups.

  5. playoffs: I think there should be more wildcard teams. Perhaps 4 division winners plus 6 wild card alliances from highscores. Or maybe top 2 from each division (2x4) plus 2 wild cards.

I’m not grumbling, just praising the positives and trying to address what could possibly make an amazing experience even better.

Thank you REC Foundation for everything, you are making a difference in the world!

#3