LEt the games begin!

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.