All, I really liked this year's table in that it offered a very broad "dynamic range" of mission difficulties. There were some pretty-darned-easy missions (storm, blue/gray person, nearest carbon ball) that were within reach of novice roboticists who were just learning to drive, ranging all the way up to tough missions (raising the house, finding agreement, returning the ice core, moving and verticalizing the drilling machine) that caused serious head-scratching to even the most experienced teams. That the top scores at VA/DC State was 330 speaks to the challenge of completing that broad range of broadly distributed missions in 150 seconds. Some teams came close to "running the table," but I didn't hear of a single team who went to tournament with a practiced plan to earn 400 points. Having spent three or four months biting my tongue as a coach--doing my best to guide and inspire rather than suggest solutions, and now that we're past the States, I'd be curious to hear what sorts of strategies were used for those harder missions. Marie shared Vector 67's ingenious devices for the house and agreement mission, and a simple but clever grab-n-drag method for towing the drill back to Base. Our team, the BLT, combined those three missions into one: A flap-like panel attached to a front-mounted motor was raised and lowered as the robot drove repeatedly past the arrows, turning them one click on each pass; the number of passes was entered by tapping a touch sensor before leaving Base. Driving eastward toward the drill machine, a flexible loop jutting from the right side of the robot hooked the red lever, raising the house before slipping free. Gaps in the flap attachment allowed it to skewer and lift the drill machine for carrying back to Base. Like Vector 67, BLT placed objects bound for the research area on top of a ramp; the robot drove the ramp to the ice cliff, then pushed the objects, and itself, up and off the ramp. What other strategies were invented? -- Cheers, Mike Blanpied Reston, VA 2006 #4809 Nano People 2007 #1666 Power Bunnies 2008 #5013 BLT--Brilliant LEGO Team ______________________________________________________________ To UNSUBSCRIBE or CHANGE YOUR SETTINGS, please visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-l.html and select "Join or leave the list". If you want to join the VADCFLL-ADMIN-L mailing list - to which FLL administrative announcements will be distributed - visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-admin-l.html and select "Join or leave the list".