Some more discussion:

I did talk with Scott Evans, the game designer, after the previous
technology upgrade, from the RCX to the NXT brick.  The NXT was clearly
superior, with more memory, integrated sensors, and so on.  As has been
mentioned, the first year that NXT was introduced there was a "fairness
bonus" for teams using RCX.

FLL and FIRST looked at the season results that year and did some analysis,
and there was no indication that there was any scoring advantage for using
the NXT brick over the RCX brick.

Why would this be?  The consensus among the Design Judges was that team
experience with the technology was way more important than the new
features.  There wasn't any learning curve for the new features, the
experienced teams could reuse MyBlocks and other coding styles directly
without changes, and just plain familiarity with the device was what was
helpful.  Note:  it isn't clear to me whether the analysis looked at
differences between rookie teams using one device or the other.

I can say that last year was the first World Festival since the
introduction of the NXT brick that I didn't see any RCX-based robots at
that high-level competition.  (There might have been one there, but, if so,
I didn't see it.)

I suspect that this is why there's no penalty/bonus this year--we just
don't know what the effect might be of the platform difference.


Over the years, among high-scoring teams, I almost never see a design that
doesn't involve some changes of attachments.  Most of them left all three
motors on the core robot body, for simplicity, but not all.  There have
been many that changed out attachments with motors, and had a good design
and had practiced enough to do it quickly and smoothly.

Certainly the best scoring teams at a tournament generally have not relied
on a beat-the-clock strategy to eke out the last few points, even though
that is really exciting during a match.  That's probably either because the
robot was very efficient, or it was too dangerous to risk losing points
available from completion of their last robot run.


This year as a referee and design judge I will be very interested in seeing
how teams take advantage of the allowance for the fourth motor.  Will it be
an advantage in flexibility and speed?  Will it be an extra complication in
design, making the robot a little bit bigger, and maybe requiring some more
complexity in attachments to use or compensate for it?  I don't
know--that's one of the things that keep FLL fresh for me at every
tournament.

Steve Scherr
VA/DC FLL Referee Advisor

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