Competition tips

OnStage Discipline
Tips for OnStage by experienced judge Jason Flood, RoboCup Junior NSW 

Scoring
The OnStage Committee spends many hours each year reviewing the scoring system to ensure that it produces the best outcomes from the students, so it can only help to understand it very well.

• Get the team to assess the effort that they are about to expend on an improvement against the score that they are likely to get for it. Many teams will spend weeks on making better costumes when they could achieve more points by spending a few days tweaking their timings;

• Score their performance yourself. 

Log Books and Interview
The log book has a number of purposes in RoboCup Junior. As well as helping to prove that the performance is the students' own work, it reinforces what they have learnt and how they learnt it, and it gives them some experience in communicating technical issues.

• Start it early, and spend a little time on it every session. It needs to show the progressive development of their ideas to the final product.

• Have a practice interview 

Music
In my experience, producing the soundtrack for a performance is by far the most time-consuming task in OnStage, so the most important tip for this is to start early!

• Be careful picking one of the latest hits – you may find quite a few other teams had the same idea;

• Pick music that gives you the opportunity to introduce different actions or robots at different times throughout the performance. Two minutes is a very long time to watch the same thing over and over again.

At the very least, trim the music to finish with the performance. This can be done with Audacity (an open-source audio editor). It is a very powerful tool, however we only want to: Trim, Time-shift, Fade in/out, Measure duration.