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