Thanks to all of you new (and experienced) coaches!  FLL doesn't happen without your support for your team members.

The most important thing that you can learn about the Robot Game, that you should teach to your team is that
Only The Written Rules/Missions/Updates Matter.   (This will be written in the World Class game rules in some form.)

Teams that rely on videos rather than becoming extremely familiar with the Rules tend to have unexpected surprises when they get to a tournament.  Even the official Robot Game videos have usually been wrong about something.  Plus, if your team wants to discuss a ruling with a referee at a tournament, then the only practical source of information about the game is what is written down.

And, of course, we won't actually know the details of the World Class rules are until they are released a month from now.  Something always changes from year to year.  For example, there was a Junk Penalty introduced last year in Nature's Fury for Strategic Objects left on the field.  Will there be a Junk Penalty this year?  Will it be the same, or different?  We won't know for sure until we see the Rules [and the Updates....]


After all those caveats, however, this is a really good suggestion.  We cannot make "official videos" to explain the rules, but we can make videos to help your team understand how to interpret the rules, and how the rules will be applied.

I'll look around to see if I can find someone to help me with my rudimentary video-production skills, and I'll solicit topics from you, and we'll try to make some short videos available to assist you with your coaching and mentoring for this FLL season.

Steve Scherr
VA-DC FLL Referee Advisor

P.S.  FYI, the Gravity Test is important every year.  Often a team will violate it without really thinking about it.  Strategic/Precision Stop is uncommon.  There has to be a mission where it makes a difference.  Strategic Objects are really helpful, but they are so varied (and specific to team creativity), that we'd really have to pick out parts of the definition to focus on.



On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 1:16 PM, Skip Morrow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
This is my first year coaching. I have read the rules from Nature's Fury and watched the videos that explain the missions and challenges, but what I don't see are videos that explain the rules. Some of the rules would be a lot easier to explain with video rather than just the written rules. Is there any chance that this year there could be an official video that explains the rules?

Some of the rules that I think could benefit from this are:
Gravity test
Strategic object usage
Strategic/precision stop
And a few others.

Now, maybe these are obscure rules that rarely come into play. I don't know--I've never done this before. In which case, these particular rules may not be a big deal. But I still think an official video would help out.

Skip Morrow
.
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