Calculator use in competitive robotics (FIRST, Vex, BEST)

[Chhaya, Harshal S.]

Hi all,

Are any of you involved with robotics competitions (FIRST, Vex, BEST etc.)?

Does your team use TI calculators for the scouting process?

Scouting involves data recording, calculations, comparative analysis, real-time insights, data visualization and having quick access to all this would be helpful to a competition team.

It looks like a good fit for a handheld computing platform like a graphing calculator but I haven't seen this in action.

I got a question about this and wanted to check with you all.

Thanks,
- Harshal


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Harshal S. Chhaya, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (Emeritus)
Product Manager, STEM and robotics
Manager, Robotics outreach
TI robotic vehicle for education: http://education.ti.com/rover

[Marian Prince]

Harshal, 

I coach a middle school (gr. 6-8) FTC team.  In Michigan, FTC is restricted to middle school students.  It never occurred to me to use TI calculators to do the scouting process.  THANK YOU for sharing that great use of technology!

Marian

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[Chhaya, Harshal S.]

 

Hi Marian,

 

Thanks for considering this. The coach I spoke with wasn’t very familiar with all the features of TI calculators but felt that they might be a good platform for collecting and analyzing scouting data at competitions.

 

We briefly looked at the list editor on TI-84 Plus family and talked about writing TI-Basic (or Python) programs for analysis. We will have more follow-up discussions but if you have specific ideas for either TI-84 Plus family or TI-Nspire CX II, please feel free to email me directly.

 

I am excited for this possible new use of TI technology at these competitions.

 

Thanks,

- Harshal

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[Deeley Judith]

I am involved with Vex, however, had not does this yet.  

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[Chhaya, Harshal S.]

 

All,

 

Thanks to some help from Marian for the evaluation criteria, I have developed TI-Basic programs

for the TI-Nspire CX II and the TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculators to help with collecting scouting

data at a FIRST Tech Challenge tournament.

The intent is to make is easy to collect all the relevant information for offline analysis.

 

The programs are specific to this year’s CENTERSTAGE challenge.

 

If you know of an FTC team who might be interested in testing these out, check out

https://github.com/hchhaya/FTCScouting

 

I would love to hear feedback on whether or not these programs are helpful in collecting information about other teams.

 

Thanks,

- Harshal

[Sean Bird]

I tried the link, but could find a tns file. I was interested to compare what you did with what could be used for scouting this year for VEX.

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[Chhaya, Harshal S.]

 

Hi Sean,

 

The TNS file with the program for this year’s FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) challenge is at:

https://github.com/hchhaya/FTCScouting/raw/main/CENTERSTAGE/TI-Nspire%20CX/FTC_Scouting.tns

 

The program asks a few questions and populates an L&S page with the answers.

The questions are specific to this year’s challenge and are based on a template that Marian Prince shared with me.

(Big thanks to her!)

 

I love your spreadsheet for collecting similar data for the Vex Robotics competition.

Thank you for sharing it.

 

Has your team used this already? Do they prefer it over their previous methods of collecting scouting data?

 

Regards,

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