Challenges

Challenges are an additional component to the competition, designed to encourage and incentivise teams to start building and developing their robot sooner.

Submission

Challenges are submitted by teams through a dedicated Discord forum-style channel. When challenges are submitted:

  • Inform the team as soon as possible that the challenge has been received:

Consider your submission received - we'll judge it soon and let you know 🙂

  • Record the challenge submission in the challenges spreadsheet (example from SR2024)

  • Post about the submission in the #changing-judging- year-specific Slack channel. The main message should be the TLA and the challenge type, with a link to the Discord thread in the Slack thread.

  • Add a tag to the relevant Discord thread noting the type of challenge

  • Judge the challenge, and then inform the team of the result

Judging

At least 2 assessors need to confirm that a challenge has passed before it's reported back to the team.

Challenge feedback may be given in person (for example, at a tech day), however this process must still be followed for a submission to be considered valid.

Note

If a submission doesn't complete a full challenge (because they submitted in 2 parts), don't report its status until the entire challenge has been submitted.

Pass ✅

If the challenge has been considered a Pass:

  1. Record the pass in the challenges spreadsheet
  2. Reply on Discord with the appropriate wording:
    • We confirm you have passed the Movement Challenge, congratulations!

    • We confirm you have passed the Mechanics Challenge, congratulations!

    • We confirm you have passed the Vision Challenge, congratulations!

  3. Tag the forum post as "Passed ✅"

Not pass ❌

Tip

It's better to phrase a challenge as having "not passed" as opposed to "failed"

If the challenge has been considered not a pass:

  1. Record the not pass in the challenges sheet

  2. Reply on Discord with the reasons why their submission was not passed. Make the reasons precise and actionable as far as possible.

Unfortunately, we confirm you have not passed the vision challenge. The reasons are:

  • First reason;
  • Second reason.

We encourage you to resubmit as soon as you have addressed these problems and we will re-mark your challenge.