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Loved the competition. I would have liked knowing the food situation from the website before the competition. Also judges were not wearing safety glasses in the pits or in the competition space.
ReplyDeleteEverything ran pretty smoothly. It would be nice to see teams stay until after the awards ceremony. When teams win awards and they're not there to receive the awards, the students are losing out of some great feedback on their hard work. I really like the overhead camera shots of the playing fields, not many tournaments use this view and its a great way to see the whole match unfold.
ReplyDeleteBy far the most professionally run tournament that we have been to so far. We were very impressed by the organization of the eventm the attention to all the details, and how smoothly everything went. The only real complaint that we had was that there are definitely problems with the field controllers. I heard from several teams that they lost control of their robot during competitions for no explainable reason (and it was not due to motors overheating as some of the robots that had this problem were not running many motors at all). Vex says there is no problem, but judging from comments on the Vex forum, many people do not agree. I hope for next season that they will address this issue.
ReplyDeleteI had the same problem with our robot shutting down towards the end of the tournament. We found out that, for us, it was because we were running the VEX competition template, 20sec autonomous and 120sec manual. After the 20sec autonomous was over in the tournament, they stopped the clock, waited a few seconds then started the 120sec manual mode. Our seconds where being chewed up by the short break between the 20 and 120 second sections of the tournament. I’m not sure if this was the same problem others were having or not. Other than that, I think things ran smoothly. I also would’ve liked to be a little more prepared about the food situation.
ReplyDeleteGreg,
ReplyDeleteDoesn't the 120 seconds start on a signal sent to the robots from the field controller? If what you said was the case, then we would have experienced this at other tournaments as they did the same thing. I will say, though that we did experience the same thing - at some point during the 120 second manual time, our program started running our autonomous code again. Maybe we did something wrong with the program and if so, fine. I just want to know why this is happening so that we can fix it before it happens again.
I was very pleased with the tournament. I thought the volunteers were great and very helpful. As we all know, staying after school for many on days on end until the evening hours with students can fray nerves and patience. It was nice to have smiling, helpful faces at the event. A couple of suggestions- 1. We should have another practice field. It was difficult for some teams to test their robots in between rounds because the practice field was being used for other events such as the programming and robotic skills challenge. 2. This suggestion is not really for our state run competition but rather for the vex people who designed the field. Some of my team spent all day programming their robot for the programming skills challenge. I found that complex programming was not really encouraged in the layout of the field of play. Teams could just program a robot to drop the bricks in for points without even moving. I am not faulting the teams for doing this, I just think Vex should consider the layout of the field a little more carefully to encourage skillful programming. As far as leaving early-I admit I felt a little bad about leaving after we were all done and this is the first competition I have ever done this. It just was hard to convince a bunch of tired teenagers to stick around for another hour and a half in a hot gym facing a long ride home (and I admit I was pretty tired too since we stayed up pretty late the night before). Perhaps in the future we could have some other skills competitions during the final rounds to encourage teams who did not make the cut to stay for the award ceremony.
ReplyDeleteThe CCSU tournament was very well organized and run. The overhead video was excellent. My only suggestion is that we set up the bleachers so first several rows are reserved for the teams on the field and that people are not allowed to stand at the ropes blocking the view for those sitting on the bleachers. Maybe some space on the side can be designated for photographers only if they need to be up close.
ReplyDeleteWow - what a great day!!! I took 5 students from different Project Lead The Way classes who were willing to give up a Sunday. The amount of time we spent before the event was about a week every day after school for an hour some times two. The one comment I kept hearing, besides "THIS IS AWSOME!!”, was “I can’t believe how fast the day went by.” We arrived about 8am and left about 5pm. I had my doubts about how long of a day it was going to be but after having participated, I'll do it again in a heart beat. This was truly a great day of fun and learning. To see students from all across New England having to "team up" and strategize a plan for success couldn't have been any more appropriate for today’s technically literate students. Teamwork, communication skills, hands-on construction techniques, following directions, programming, trouble shooting, safety, brainstorming, problem solving, this is the stuff Tech Ed teachers dream of!!!
ReplyDeleteThe only suggestions for next year would be having 2 of these events, one at the beginning of the school year (possibly a smaller venue) and then again just before the national event, like this year. This might drum up more interest within our state.
In regards to the VEX conference for participating VEX teachers, I would again have this early in the school year to encourage participation regardless of adding an earlier event. During this conference there was a break out session for programming which was priceless. Could we have such a break out session at the second follow up VEX conference and have teacher bring their own robots and laptops for more personalized training?
In regards to this year’s VEX competition at CCSU – Don’t Change a Thing – It was run flawlessly – nice job.
THANKS to ALL of YOU who made this even possible,
Jim Zambarano
New Canaan High School
VEX Team 162