we are planning another round of improvements for the 2024 soccer rubrics for the judged categories and overall rankings. A draft will be published in this thread some time in December. I am already creating this thread now so we can link to it from the rules to make sure teams coming to the international tournament know about the judged categories.
@david
Hello and have a good time
I don’t know if the proposal I posted here was seen by the committee or not. I think it would be good if you take a look.
The process of identifying teams for recognition has been simplified. We settled on this algorithm after running the numbers through several scenarios of team rankings and judged scores. Please feel free to do your own calculations to see if there are any concerns we may have missed. There is also a glossary to help decipher the use of specific terms.
Another big change is doing away with all but the poster rubrics. The focus is now on the expectations of what teams should do to be considered for recognition. If this is found to be favorable, our plan is to add resources to help teams prepare; you see the beginnings of one of these resources with the appendix of allowable interview questions. We’d also like to provide guidelines on what design documentation should be. Please leave feedback and suggestions on what is presented and what else we may include to help teams prepare.
Finally, we’re considering allowing teams to nominate others that may exceed expectations in the leadership & outreach criteria and give peer feedback especially on posters. Please let us know your thoughts/questions/concerns on including peer feedback/nominations in the judging process.
Hi @javadrah. We did read through the document you prepared and gave it consideration in the draft of awards that was just published; I hope you’ll see there are many agreements between us in the new award criteria.
I read the draft and in my opinion it is a huge improvement towards the previous one. It is well written and easy to understand and highlights the criteria for becoming an successful team at the Robocup competition.
Firstly, this resource will be valuable for both new and experienced teams to meet the required standards.
Additionally, it may be beneficial to mention LaTeX as a tool for easily producing professional-looking documentation. If you are looking for an example of technical documentation written in LaTeX, I recommend the one produced by my former team last year: here. Please note that while it does not meet all the required points, it demonstrates what is easily achievable with LaTeX.
In my opinion, it should not be necessary to publish all CAD data. The focus should be on explaining why you approached the problem in a particular way, rather than another. Other teams can use your explanation to find a suitable solution for themselves without copying previous teams completely. Based on my experience over the last few years, teams are usually willing to share their experiences and discuss their designs and approaches.
This is just my opinion. I would love to hear other opinions on this topic.
Hi Everyone. We just finished compiling and sending out the results and feedback from Eindhonven to each of the team’s mentors. If you didn’t submit a digital version of your poster, please do so with the link provided in that email. Now that you have the results for your team, any feedback/comments/suggestions on the evaluation system are welcomed.
What you may see in updated documentation guidelines based on what I observed from teams:
if you include an image, information, or formula that you didn’t create, it must be cited.
consider creating more videos of testing designs, etc and linking them in your documentation; kudos to the few teams who did that this season. Teams could consider using an unlisted YouTube channel or similar online platform. Taking videos may be a good alternative for teams who dislike typing everything out.
avoid general statements like “we encountered various challenges” or “this was greatly improved”; if it can be quantified, measure it!
a detailed BOM is always appreciated. It is OK to say you had some components selected or using some designs from last season. It is NOT OK to include component and design choices that weren’t done by students described as if they were.
please consider describing the process and tools used to help new teams; pictures of students working on the designs are encouraged.
there was no NO PAGE LIMIT for soccer documentation! There is a page limit in other leagues but the goal this last season in soccer was to see as much of the raw documentation as possible (e.g .hand written notes, pictures of white board drawings, failed design attempts, etc). Our judges didn’t need to read through everything in detail - those details are for others to learn from and you should be documenting them for your team as well. This may have been why several teams didn’t include design information on all aspects of the robot - electrical, software, hardware, strategy - someone should be able to recreate your robot with the documentation you provide.
If done correctly, your documentation for a season should be lengthy (>20 pages). It is OK to highlight the design aspects you’d like judges to notice. This will also help teams discover what is unique about your robots.
Thank you for all of those who helped judge interviews, posters, and documents this season!
Hello,
Hey sorry mike the no page limit is just simply false since in the official award criteria you can find in appendix A at the end a text that clearly states that the design document should be no longer than 10 pages long. We really struggled to keep the limit and unfortunately had to cut a lot of stuff we would’ve liked to include. I would like to see it removed next year as you thought this year.
Yikes! You’re correct! I’m sorry that stayed in the official guidelines; our views shifted as the season went on and I obviously didn’t do a thorough enough review of what was drafted at the beginning of the season before publishing it. Being able to duplicate a robot with just 10 pages of information is challenging and I’m glad you’re in agreement for this change.
Fortunately, (again - unless I’m mistaken which is why I shared out the results), the final overall rankings should not have been impacted significantly by this misunderstanding; there may have been a few documents marked satisfactory or developing for leaving out design data b/c of this limitation but it shouldn’t have effected their overall rating and therefor overall rank. If anyone wants us to take another look with this misunderstanding revealed, then I’ll be happy to do so.
Thank you for pointing that out and I’m glad the issue is documented here so we can ensure the change is made (or clarified) for this season.
Edit - if there is any information you cut out that you’d like to share with other teams, please email me an updated document and I’ll replace the file in our folder so it should be available when it is published to the repository.
