Voting ?????

[C Mac]

My team was very excited about this until they started to see the down side of some people. Teams all of a sudden getting a thousand votes a day? Come on, who do you think you are fooling. We have the word out in every way possible and are getting a lot of votes, but no where close to that. It is sad that some people just don't get gracious professionalism. We have parents who could rig the computer to do this also, and have offered, but we choose not to. I have told my team just hope the judges see this when choosing their 10.

[dcsastry]

I don't think it matters that much - I wouldn't worry about it becoming an issue as I am sure the judges are aware of this possibility.

According to the FAQ:

"Online voting may assist the judges in their selections, but online voting alone will not determine the winning team, runners-up, or NCFPD Food Protection Team."

[BremenBotz!]

We ran into this last year... Last year the restrictions were 1 vote per IP address. Our school is behind a firewall, so the first teacher to vote in the school counted. Nobody else in the building could vote until the next day.

I believe the entries are judged based on merit... The voting is just to increase exposure to FIRST and the teams projects.

Les ---

[FLLmom1]

Originally Posted by dcsastry

I don't think it matters that much - I wouldn't worry about it becoming an issue as I am sure the judges are aware of this possibility.

Unfortunately it does. The FAQ's state that half of the semi-finalists (10 out of 20) will be selected on the basis of the online votes they receive. Hope that the judges acknowledge the problem and select the semifinalists solely on scientific merit of their submission.

[Life is Good]

So it's a year since someone has posted on this subject but the same question still exists........how are teams really getting 50,000 plus votes and how are they getting 10,000 votes overnight? This is the first year we submitted our solution--I'm not a fan of popularity contests. It's hard to not get on the computer and vote, vote, vote.......you get the picture. FLL makes the statement to remember GP when voting, but how many votes do they consider to be within the "GP range" per person?
As coach, I am happy that my team is taking the next step in the process. Learning the patent process has proved to be an interesting journey and the kids are having fun putting it all together.

[Mike M]

Originally Posted by Life is Good

So it's a year since someone has posted on this subject but the same question still exists........how are teams really getting 50,000 plus votes and how are they getting 10,000 votes overnight? This is the first year we submitted our solution--I'm not a fan of popularity contests. It's hard to not get on the computer and vote, vote, vote.......you get the picture. FLL makes the statement to remember GP when voting, but how many votes do they consider to be within the "GP range" per person?
As coach, I am happy that my team is taking the next step in the process. Learning the patent process has proved to be an interesting journey and the kids are having fun putting it all together.

Agreed my kids figured out that the top teams were averaging over 500 votes per hour around the clock since the competition started!!!!

[timdavid]

Originally Posted by Life is Good

FLL makes the statement to remember GP when voting, but how many votes do they consider to be within the "GP range" per person?

In the FAQ, it states:

Voting is unlimited. You may vote for as many inventions as you would like, and vote as many times as you like each day.

However, it also states:

automated voting bots are NOT allowed

I picked a team from my state with a low number of votes and an interesting idea, and voted for them 20 times in about two minutes. For someone who is really dedicated, it certainly seems possible that they could manually vote more than 500 times in a hour. However, doing that for 24 hours straight, or finding another 23 people to do that every day, seems much more unlikely. Perhaps teams are convincing 500 people to vote 20 times each per day. It would be a feasible undertaking to coordinate at a school that sponsors a team.

At the time I write this, the top team has about 87,000 votes. It is interesting that of the 342 submissions, only about 30 of the teams have more than 20,000 votes currently. Team number 100 only has about 4000 votes. Almost half the teams have fewer than 1000 votes. So only a small percentage of the teams have figured out how to "get out the vote" and place themselves in contention for the 10 semi-finalist spots that go to the highest vote-getters.

Overall, I agree with the sentiment that the award would be better served by removing the voting aspect.

[BremenBotz!]

We opted not to submit anything this year. Our town only has 5000 people total. If they were ALL to vote once everyday, we still could not keep up. Not worth the effort and frustration. On top of everything else, the system was broke the first year and not allowing votes that should have counted.

Our kids have watched some really simple existing solutions receive accolades, while truly innovative solutions are ignored. There are other, less frustrating ways to generate capital.

[Life is Good]

The top teams scores increase at a constant pace, 24/7......hard to explain it to my team that got so excited when we hit the 1,000 mark and then 2,000 mark. We have posted on facebook and asked everyone to forward the message. That along with sending emails to everyone we know. The boys are going to try and share the word at their school, but not sure what kind of support they will get.
When trying to explain to them the "fairness" I reminded them of some of the tournaments we went to where the amazing top robot score received only one award: the Robot Performance Award. The high score didn't necessarily mean the "best", only that they could get points. Hopefully, the same will run true in this contest, the high numbers might not be the indication of the best invention!

[Tom Mosher]

Originally Posted by Life is Good

The top teams scores increase at a constant pace, 24/7......hard to explain it to my team that got so excited when we hit the 1,000 mark and then 2,000 mark. We have posted on facebook and asked everyone to forward the message. That along with sending emails to everyone we know. The boys are going to try and share the word at their school, but not sure what kind of support they will get.
When trying to explain to them the "fairness" I reminded them of some of the tournaments we went to where the amazing top robot score received only one award: the Robot Performance Award. The high score didn't necessarily mean the "best", only that they could get points. Hopefully, the same will run true in this contest, the high numbers might not be the indication of the best invention!

"Vote as many times as you like" is a strange concept in this regard.