MDFLL Head Referee – Reminders, Tips, Greetings
October 24, 2012
Hello Everyone!
While I’ve been lucky enough to meet and speak with a few of you, I still haven’t had the pleasure with the vast majority of Maryland’s incredible FLL coaches. I’d like this time to serve as an introduction or reminder that I’m available for questions and ready to guide you in the right direction.
At this point, I imagine most of you are well underway developing your projects and robots and have come across a variety of questions and concerns that need to be addressed. My focus is on the robot game: rules, procedures, and field setup. Questions about judging will need to be directed to our head judges – expect an email from them shortly explaining how they prefer to be contacted. I realize that the rules can be confusing and seem contradictory. To make the situation more perplexing, you’re often told not to interpret rules that clearly need some form of interpretation. I want to help you as much as possible, so, please, feel free to direct your robot game questions to me. Knowing what kinds of issues teams are encountering and understanding your difficulties with the robot game helps me train Maryland’s FLL referees.
I would, though, like all coaches and teams to be familiar with several documents:
- Read the field setup, mission explanations, and rules document available as aPDF.
- Regularly check for rule updates and clarifications at the Robot Game Updatespage. This page changes regularly so be sure to visit it often.
- Scott Evans, the game designer, posted a YouTube video describing each mission. In conjunction with, not as a replacement for, reading the mission explanations and rules (first bullet), this video might clarify lingering confusions.
- Familiarize yourself with the Robot Game Scoring Sheet - the referees will use this to calculate the points each team has earned at the end of the match and acts as another method toward understanding the game.
- Finally, use the 2012 Senior Solutions Challenge website as a starting point for all of your FLL queries. All of the links I’ve given you come right from here.
Do you still have questions or need a bit more support? If I was a coach, I probably would! You are encouraged to email me with any robot game related questions. If I don’t know the answer immediately, we’ll find it together!
Thank you all for your hard work, dedication to STEM, and willingness to have fun. Coaching FLL is no small task! I am pleased to be working with and for each one of you! Feel free to just say hello even if you don’t have any questions.
Many thanks,
Jason
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