There are a lot of beautiful robot run videos on YouTube showing a team's top score being executed flawlessly from their home with some great theme song playing in the background.  Those are great for inspiration, but I prefer actual videos from matches because this shows a lot of the issues that a team will face, and is a better teaching tool to get your team prepared.

The Hydrobots scored a very impressive 240 points at their qualifier at Anderson HS.  Alas, I did not see their 2nd round run, but I did capture their 3rd round which only scored 30 points.  I show it hear because there are more teaching points to make (and I don't have their 240 point run) ​

0:07 - The match starts.  33 seconds elapse with at least 3 attempts to start the first mission, before the boys relinquish the field.  This is sometimes hard to practice, but definitely have a game plan for how many attempts you will try before moving on.  The boys appeared both patient and mature in their decision, so it's still an impressive show of maturity for such young participants.  Brian mentioned on FLL Connect that they could have also used a master/menu program.  This is something judges at the World Festival expect from the Programming Award recipient, not as the reason for getting the award, but just as a sign that they are a contender.
0:40 - The first pair of technicians give up the field to the next pair.
0:45 - Furniture is talking.  This is easy to miss, no one called them out on it, but just be careful, this is not allowed.  Once a technician becomes furniture, no more human attributes are allowed.
1:05 - Notice the nod that their robot arm carrying the big water does.  This probably helps to assure the placement of the arm at the beginning of the run.  Great use of automated setup calibration.
1:06 - The second run leaves base
1:11 - Tripod mission is completed
1:16 - 1st Wall reckoning for alignment, you can also hear a team member telling his teammate "it's okay", which is great evidence of supporting your teammates
1:28 - The flower mission is completed
1:32 - Intentional touch penalty so the robot doesn't have to navigate home.  We only saw this once before when SynTex Squad did this at LASA.  This is very well executed, from the time of the touch penalty to the launch of the next robut run is only 12 seconds.
1:44 - The third run leaves base.
1:48 - Big water released from pump
1:50 - 2nd wall reckoning
1:53 - Pump addition pushed to North Wall
1:55 - Pump addition moved into target, though upon close inspection it doesn't make it all the way in.
1:58 - 3rd wall reckoning
2:03 - Touch penalty, to recovery from stalled robot.  This transition took them 17 seconds and it's a very impressive use of teamwork, both team members work very effectively and don't get into each other's way.
2:20 - The fourth run leaves base.
2:25 - Touch penalty, which may not be impressive in itself, but they identified within 5 seconds from leaving base that something was wrong and because they were still transporting their payload were able to take it back for a retry.
2:30 - Relaunch of forth run.
2:35 - 4th wall reckoning for alignment.
2:38 - Time is called by the announcer (Kristi)

Great to see such a young yet mature team.  They had great mastery of my two favorite forms of mechanical automation:  starter blocks and wall reckoning.  I didn't see any line following or line squaring which in my opinion are very inefficient for the amount of advantage it can buy you.  They do have light sensors, but it looks like they use it to gauge where they are on the field, but not for alignment.

Their robot never moves very quickly, which is probably on purpose to assure the alignment.  This is usually the case with high scoring teams, slow and deliberate especially after an alignment has been made appears to produce higher scores.  The only time I have seen a very fast robot was last year's team from China.  I don't recall their rank in the regular game, but during their encore game the day of the awards ceremony they were runner up.

This was not a high scoring run, they did have touch penalities, but I am not sure which one of their missions didn't score.  Marlon mentioned that they didn't score the flower in the 2nd round run, so there potential score is higher than 240.  They are a team to watch at Regionals.  Typically 5-10% of teams score 2x above the median score for the game, but this is miles above that threshold.  See FLL Scores for the latest statistics.

I am a very generous mother.  I have given my son the gift of failure 3 years in a row.  But I can't really take all the credit, the first 2 years were unintentional.  There are plenty of stories about winning and books on how to have a winning robot, but this is the story no one else is telling and I am proud to have experience it so that I can share it with you now.

Year One.    I was VERY naive my first year coaching.  I dropped the ball on getting my son registered for the school robotics club so by the time I found out, the only way he could be included was for me to be a lead coach so another team could be formed.  How hard could this be?  I love Legos, my degree is in Electrical Engineering, I started programming when I was 11-years-old AND I had 5 years of experience teaching Computer Science at ACC.  I was more prepared than anyone I know to take on this challenge. 
What I didn't realize is that 9-year-old children get distracted within 30 seconds of you lecturing to them, they think they know more than you and will ignore everything you tell them to prove it, and they feel no need to hide it from you when they are bored (with a few exceptions).  Out of utter despair a month before the competition, I started inviting children for one-on-one coaching in hopes that someone could get points on the board (surely this teamwork think was a pipe dream) and I committed the ultimate sin.  I did some of the work (okay, I did a lot of the work, but I did let them do some of it). 
Well, I don't have to tell you how that turned out, but I will.  The children that I *coached* on how the robot worked made absolutely no mention of the design features during the robot design interview, and the children that ran chaotic through my meetings were very well-spoken, could answer the judges questions directly and even rescued the project presentation when one of the kids forgot his lines (though it's possible he never knew them).  But mostly they were really good at just winging it which wasn't enough to make much of an impression on the judges.
I never back down from a challenge.  After I went through my 5 stages of grief, I emerged more determined then ever that I would fix everything that went wrong the first year.

Year Two, First Reboot.  This time I started a private club because I wanted to make sure I didn't have any equipment issues (from 5 year laptops that had no WIFI, bluetooth or USB ports) and that I could remove children that weren't there to learn robotics.  I had good intentions, and I knew that I could not help do any of their robot design or missions for them, which I am proud to say is probably my only achievement that year.  But my ultimate sin is that I still wanted to win and once again started getting too involved in the Project presentation and in the process probably alienated some parents (most of them don't speak to me anymore).  I realized my error at our last rehearsal before the competition when the boys weren't very focused and a parent directed them to "show that you did the work" and her son said "but we didn't."  I knew all was lost at that very moment.  Perhaps their disinterest wasn't that they all had ADHD, but that they didn't feel any ownership of something they didn't work very hard for.  And they couldn't feel gratitude for the help that they didn't really request.
Okay, I learned my lesson, I can't do any of the robot work AND I can't do any of the project work.  How can I possibly get it wrong again.  I was going to be ready for year three.

Year Three, Second Reboot.  This time I would insist that they did all of their robot work and project work, but I had a lot of energy and determination to spare, so I busied myself planning workshops and scrimmages.  I had already judged at multiple events at the end of my second season to gather as much knowledge as possible so that I could *advise* my team.  I was going to coach the core values team that knew intimately what Coopertition meant.  But as I hosted each event, my teams ran and hid in their rooms to play.  I had no pictures of them helping to build the 15 competition tables for the league, because they didn't (though their parents did help and for that I am very grateful).  I started the season with no expectations of winning that year, but had at least hoped that they would have lots to talk about in their Core Values interview.  They didn't.  Because they didn't do any of the Coopertition work, they didn't find any of it worth mentioning.
A week before our qualifier after my son had spent most of his meetings goofing off because as he puts it: "I thought you wanted me to have fun.  That's a core value right?" and all their missions were broken because they had made so many changes without retesting, I finally told him to go ahead and program as many missions as he could alone since we didn't figure out how to do it as a team.  We were unlikely to qualify, but wanted to see what he could do if there was no pressure to perform.  He finished 110 points worth of missions 3 days later.
As we had our last meeting the night before the qualifier I heard him say to his teammates, "Why weren't we programming since Week 1?".  We went to our qualifier and scored 65 points out of the possible 110 that he had prepared and did not qualify as I expected.  The difference is that unlike previous years when he felt no ownership of the work and hated losing and didn't want to participate again, this time he came away from the event inspired (it helped that the Immortals showed them their project and also asked them about his project).  His eyes had been opened.  He presented his own work, but realized he could have done better and couldn't wait to prove to himself that he could.  He asked me when he would age out and was excited that he has 3 more tries to get to World.
Trying to put a positive spin on it, I told him he was very close, had he been able to execute on his planned missions he could have qualified.  He replied, "I don't want to qualify on the robot score alone, it has to be the whole picture.  We need to meet next Friday and start preparing for next season now!".  We will at least wait until after the holiday.

There are only 3 categories of judging.  I am totally ready for year 4.  Rebooting now...

Stay tuned for the rest of the story, we have 3 more years to write it.

Last Saturday I referee'd for the first time.  I am usually in the judging room, but they were short on refs, so I thought it might be fun.  I am always nervous about making the wrong call or making a kid cry, but none of that happened to my relief.

In the judging room I only see the perspective of what the kids intended, but not the actual outcome, so it's eye opening to be able to see what scored and what did not.  I am going to align what I saw on the game table with how I assess a team in the judging room.  Hopefully this will allow you to correlate each robot design principle with outcomes on the table.

The most popular missions ordered in their likelihood of success:

1. Filter mission - I only saw two failures of this mission of all the attempts.  One was that the filter was not pushed in with enough force for the lock to fall down and the other was that the sliding door was not pushed in far enough to actual lock (prevent the door from being pushed the other way).  I witnessed these from some advance teams, so I don't think it was a problem with knowledge.  My best advice on this is that some of the easy missions that you might have gotten to work early on in the season may start behaving differently later on as the robot chassis evolves, so don't forget to retest all of you missions integrated as full 2 1/2 minute run.
2. Fountain mission - This is actually my favorite mission, it might be slightly ahead of the broken pipe mission with slightly more than half of attempts succeeding.  I like this one best because it looks deceptively easy and produced the most diverse range of solutions which is always fun to see what kids come up with when a simple robot arm won't do the trick.  It's tempting to use a robot arm on this mission, but I saw a lot of mis-fires when the big water didn't drop in perfectly straight thus failing to provide enough momentum to lift the center ring.  Unlike the forgiving filter mission that can allow for re-tries, this is harder if your missed water is stuck in the way.  You could technically try to drop another one on top of it, but that would produce unpredictable results.
3. Broken pipe mission - I would say this mission succeeded on half of the attempts.  It's deceptively hard.  I can imagine these probably succeeded a lot more at home then on the game field.  This one isn't as hard as the toilet to get aligned but it IS all about alignment.  I would say the robot that most impressed me with this mission was an "out of the box" robot chassis with a simple hook between the "out of the box" medium motor lift arm.  It operated effortlessly and flawlessly.  I just can't remember which team I saw do this, but it goes to show you can still get a compelling mission done by focusing on the simplest solution.  My only suggestion is don't have your robot get on the ramp because it will exaggerate any alignment inconsistencies when you are trying to get the robot home and you might have to take a touch penalty.
4. Rain mission - There weren't very many attempts of this, but I did get a couple of teams scores on this.  I don't want to give too much away out of respect for the teams that went first, but I will just say that moving the center yellow bar is not the only solution.  Kudos to the teams that thought out-of-the-box to find another way that required less precise movements.  The funnest moment was hearing the crowd chanting "Make it rain!  Make it rain!"
5. Toilet mission  - I only saw this mission succeed twice.  This one is especially difficult because it is far from base.  If you attempt any mission on the East half the table you should absolutely be using at least one if not multiple forms of automation. 
   1. You absolutely must ensure east-to-west alignment.  This can be done either with a start jig (mechanical automation) or syncing with the the center black line as you passed it (sensor automation).  If you practiced with a mis-aligned mat (they are required to be centered with east-to-west) AND you used the west wall, then you are in for trouble.
   2. North-to-South alignment can't be neglected because of the tendency of the robots to either not be aligned perfectly straight or the robot could possibly have unbalanced wheels (due to age or other inconsistencies the wheels turn at different speeds) that will cause the robot to drift north or south as it makes it's way east.  A great mechanical automation here is wall reckoning since there's not much on the models themselves you can sense. 
   3. You could also create a jig attachment that mates up to the models just right to not care about the drifting robot, that would be cool, but I haven't actually seen it yet.  As a judge I am always impressed by mission specific mechanical automation, because it is easy to visually recognize right away during judging that the kids thought of it themselves since it is less likely they copied a technique from a previous year.
   4. Another opportunity for innovation is making the activation mechanism more tolerant to mis-alignments.  If you are using kit parts, it a bit challenging, but don't neglect what you can do with rubber parts (wheels or the 1x2 rubber beam at the bottom of last years shark tank) and hoses and rubber bands (yes, you can use Lego rubber bands!), that can provide infinite possibilities for innovation.
6. Faucet mission - There was one attempt, but no successes at my table.  What can I say, it's a hard mission, but if you can do it, it will impress the pants off your judges.