This year's Robot Game has a lot of different choices that teams can make
as part of their overall strategy.
(Note that this message mostly talks about what the models represent, as a
way of understanding the scoring parts of mission M04, rather than
specifically talking about the details of the scoring conditions.)

 The basics of the Sorter mission are that, if your team collects any of
the colored Bars, then putting them into the Sorter and sorting them into
their respective Green Bins leads to positive results.  After doing that,
you might decide to try to send the useful ones (Yellow and Blue) off to
somewhere else, via your West Transfer Area.

  You want to be careful with the Black Bars--they represent stuff that is
hard or dangerous to recycle, like styrofoam, used motor oil. or rare
metals in electronic gear.  If you can leave them where they are, then they
don't get into your recycling stream, or contaminate the environment.  But
that limits what you can do.  So if you can contain and minimize their
effects, then you can do useful stuff with other materials.  There are
trade-offs in what your team decides, just like in real life.  For capable
robots, the cost-benefit ratio is in favor of trying to do something good,
rather than just keeping everything in stasis.

  The referees witness your team's strategy during the Robot Game, and
score the match based on the results.  The Robot Design judges want to hear
about your team's strategy--why did they make the choices they did in
construction of the robot, and in putting tasks together to achieve the
team's goals.  One part of that can be discussing whether trying to do some
task is worth it to the team rather than spending time on something else.

Steve Scherr
Virginia-DC FLL Referee Advisor

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 10:00 PM, Tonya Lapham <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am having a difficult time understanding how to score the points for the
> sorter mission.  It seems there several ways to look at this mission.  Any
> insights would br appreciated.
>
>
> Tonya Lapham
>

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