Hey, I am on a middle school team in Nebraska (1028H) and we have done very well at every tournament we have been to. I have looked online, and compared to Nebraska, other regions like California and Texas are a lot more competitive. Do you guys think that they should have the winners of each state play each other for a spot at worlds so that less people qualify and then robots from non competitive regions don’t unfairly make it to worlds? Or on the other hand do you want more spots available to get there?
Thanks, Chris
The travel requirement is the main obstacle I can see. Many teams have a hard enough time convincing their school district to provide them the money to go to worlds let alone for another travel tournament. The additional time away from school is another factor.
I think that is one reason why they split the spots into the state level and not a larger country level for the US. Some countries like China have lots of teams and have a national qualifier prior to worlds for their 50 spots.
Some US states have combined spots from states into a region. Some larger US states have split the qualifiers due to long travel distances (California, Texas, Pennsylvania come to mind)
More spots from skills qualifying could be a way to draw more at large competitive teams. Moving IQ to its own few days could make more room at Vex Worlds as well.
http://www.roboticseducation.org/documents/2016/08/vrc-qualifying-criteria.pdf
I think I understand what you are trying to say here. There are a lot of teams that work really hard that would love the opportunity to get to Worlds and experience it, but don’t.
But not all teams get the same resources or amount of practice time or have as experienced coaches or a host of other advantages as others, so you may want to reexamine using the word “unfair”.
ChrisR246, I meant that teams that dominate in an uncompetitive region would not do nearly as well as other teams in more competitive states. So, any team that was better than the winner of the uncompetitive region might not even make it to worlds. As for funding, I don’t think that this is a factor because some teams are luckier than others, and some aren’t. For instance, one team is sponsored by NASA. We can’t control that because that team persuaded NASA for the funding.
I’m confused why you would want to deny someone the privilege of going to worlds. Its a great learning experience, plus it looks great on applications. that’s my two cents at least.
I don’t think there’s any reason to have this kind of competition. However I think the way spots to worlds needs to be redone; rather than base the number of spots be dependent on the number of teams in a region, it should be done by the quality of the robots in each region (maybe by skills ranking).
Good point mwang17. I think that worlds spots should be winning state and skills scores for only middle school. Not middle and high school combined.
As someone who has been both a coach/mentor and an event partner for many years, here is my perspective. VEX is still growing rapidly and has different states that are at different competitive levels. I personally like the present system for the following reasons that are more related to the growth of the program, which to me is the most important thing. The more students that we can get involved in this program the better. So, one, If you find a way to eliminate those robots from developing states from making it to worlds, those states will not have the benefit of seeing or competing against the best robots in the world to see what can be accomplished. Two, by linking the number of qualifiers to worlds based on the number of teams in a state/region, the states or regions are pushed to grow the program so that they don’t lose qualification spots. This still works when the program overall has reached its saturation point.
It’s simple the REC and VEX already allow for the “top” programs regardless of region to qualify for the World Championship via the top 50 skills rankings. I have talked with Many REC Reps including many of the higher ups in the REC about the State Qualification Model Simply because of my current team’s situation with it (5 State Championship locations are closer than our own State’s location). It came about due to teams going to multiple World Championship Qualifying Events or traveling hours to a “younger/weaker” region in order to qualify for the World Championship. The State Model takes easy care of those situations and it helps influence growth of the program in regions. If you want your area to have more spots, go out and get more schools/organizations involved with teams. *As a note here my team missed out on the World Championship last year by one ball (a 266 driver skills score qualified vs. ours of 262), and I would bet our machine was better than some at Worlds, but allowing the “weaker/younger” areas World Representation is the best way to grow VEX and the REC; so we were not “mad” we missed out on it to other teams at all.
Christopher.schinzel, that teams that get to Worlds do it through the system REC created. It may not result in what you believe is the best outcome, but it’s fair in that the system applies equally to all.
You seem to have concerns about the teams that dominate an uncompetitive region are not well prepared to compete at Worlds. Steel sharpens steel, as they say. So one thing you can do is pit yourself against the best competition available to you to get better. There is nothing that can be done about the random assignments in the qualifications rounds of a tournament. But, during Alliance Selection, a team that feels it is dominating a region could choose to not get into Alliances with the other teams they feel are also dominating and instead face those teams in elimination. That would provide stiffer competition and better preparation for Worlds. Of course you’d only do that after qualifying for State/Regional.
I do wonder shape sustainable the current system is. If VEX continues to grow in the US, they will eventually reach a reasonable maximum event size for worlds, and the percentage of teams that get to go will have to decline considerably. At that point it may make sense to introduce another qualification tournament level (eg Nationals or inter-state regionals).