World Festival Scores

[LOLComets]

Here are the top 24 scores at the world festival, and congrats to the China Team with a fantastic score of 323 points.

[BakingSodaVolcano]

Thanks for posting! The top 24 all breaking 200 points is pretty impressive. Now I can share that 323 with my kids and give them the challenge to try to break it this summer!

[jsanchez]

Thats impressive. We are participating in the FLL Open Championship in Florida this week, and my girls just had two perfect runs on friday for a high score of 273 pts. That would put us in 9th place. this is without bringing the container back to the dock or placing anything into the sink. Knowing how they are I can see them on Monday and tuesday trying to put something back on the sink to get an extra 18 pts.

[LOLComets]

Originally Posted by jsanchez

Thats impressive. We are participating in the FLL Open Championship in Florida this week, and my girls just had two perfect runs on friday for a high score of 273 pts. That would put us in 9th place. this is without bringing the container back to the dock or placing anything into the sink. Knowing how they are I can see them on Monday and tuesday trying to put something back on the sink to get an extra 18 pts.

There is always time to improve. Best wishes for the up coming competition.

[jsanchez]

Originally Posted by LOLComets

There is always time to improve. Best wishes for the up coming competition.

You are absolutely correct. I will leave too see what the ideas the kids come up with for those extra point, right now they get the 273 with just 4-5 sec. remaining.

[scherrsj]

At the World Festival closing, in a hint about the Senior Solutions robot game, Scott Evans suggested that teams might want to have their robots practice climbing stairs.

[timdavid]

Originally Posted by scherrsj

At the World Festival closing, in a hint about the Senior Solutions robot game, Scott Evans suggested that teams might want to have their robots practice climbing stairs.

Video of Scott's talk from the World Festival

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4dAj...ture=endscreen

In case you don't want to watch the video, some additional tidbits of information about next years game:

1. It will have almost no small objects (not like the large numbers of bacteria and viruses)
2. A perfect score will be impossible again
3. It will be 10% easier than this year

[timdavid]

The list of awards from the World Festival is available.

Congratulations to all the teams, but especially the top 3 teams for the Champion's Award:

1. Falcons - Japan
2. Blue Gear Ticks - USA
3. NXTremers - India

The Falcons and Blue Gear Ticks also finished second and third respectively in Robot Performance.

[Dean Hystad]

Originally Posted by timdavid

Video of Scott's talk from the World Festival

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4dAj...ture=endscreen

In case you don't want to watch the video, some additional tidbits of information about next years game:

1. It will have almost no small objects (not like the large numbers of bacteria and viruses)
2. A perfect score will be impossible again
3. It will be 10% easier than this year

It is difficult to articulate how disappointed I am that Scott thinks this years challenge was a success. I found nothing wrong with the missions. There was a nice variety and range of difficulty. I did not find the overall level of difficulty to be too high. Many teams were scoring in the 200-250 range. If you remove the busy work mission and adjust the max score from 308 to 400 that translates to 260-325. Nobody would be complaining about those scores.

What I did find so very disappointing was how the message that perfection is unobtainable and how that changes the focus of the game from solving problems to defeating other teams. Two things I like so much about FLL as opposed to FIRST are autonomy and the lack of direct competition. With my girls it was fairly easy to have them think of the table as the opposition. Early on they set a goal that they would have a perfect table run. It took four years and many lessons learned to eventually achieve that goal. What is the goal for my new team? "Sorry kids, you cannot get a perfect score. All you can strive for is getting a better score than any other team. Yes, I know that makes the robot game just like every other game. Yes, I realize that makes it more difficult for you to want to share your knowledge with the FLL community, but you are 9 years old and should be grown up about that sort of thing."

[timdavid]

Originally Posted by Dean Hystad

...What I did find so very disappointing was how the message that perfection is unobtainable and how that changes the focus of the game from solving problems to defeating other teams...

I initially didn't like the change from a reachable 400 score to an unobtainable 452, but as the year progressed, I became more accepting of it and even started to like elements of the approach.

I always thought the ideal mission board would be if a perfect score was possible, but extremely hard to achieve. Only a handful of teams in the entire world should be able to achieve a perfect score during the season. Unfortunately, I think it is extremely hard to design a game that achieves a perfectly calibrated level of difficulty. The result is that some years the game was “too easy”, and lots of teams achieved perfect scores. That’s not always a bad thing, but it does make it hard to differentiate teams at high levels of competition. When the determining factor for awarding the robot performance award at the World Festivals is how many times a team achieved a perfect score in their 3 runs, or how quickly they did it, the game was probably too easy.

While I think Scott took it a little too far this year in making sure no one could achieve a perfect score, his overall intent didn’t really bother me. I did overhear one child lamenting “those darn bacteria” to an official at the state tournament, but in general I don’t think it really bothered the kids on my team either. These are kids that are very intent on the robot game, but have never achieved a perfect 400 in previous years. For most of our season, getting close to 200 points was the goal. After that, it was just getting a score that would be competitive with the top teams in our area. For them, a “perfect” table run has meant that all the missions they ran worked, not that they achieved the maximum possible number of points. I celebrate those "perfect" runs with the kids, but I try not to make a perfect run the defining criteria for the success of the team. I don't want the team to think it is a failure if one piece of food falls off the table, or if one fish doesn't cooperate.

When I had asked the kids on our team what they disliked about this year’s game, their main complaint was that scoring was too difficult to do in their heads. They didn’t like the point totals of things worth 2,3,4, or 7 points. They thought having things worth multiples of 5 points was easier. This year was the first a scoring app was frequently used for our team.

I don’t think the mission rules and scoring really changed the focus for teams from competing against the board to competing against one another. There has always been an element of competing against other teams in FLL, especially in the robot game. Indeed, there have often even been competitive missions, such as the Rats this year, or the race for the patent last season.

Overall, I think what Scott did changed the focus from “can our one team beat the board?” to “what is the best anyone in the world can do against the board?” I find myself cheering for the teams at the World Festival and the other tournament to keep setting the bar higher. Teams have already surpassed what I thought was possible. I find it fun and exciting not knowing what the high score for the year will be.