FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - It is an academic competition that looks like an athletic event, complete with cheerleaders, pep bands and, of course, robots. It’s the Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology (BEST) robotics competition, and it is coming to high schools and junior high schools across Northwest Arkansas this fall.

"The BEST robotics competition is designed to show junior and senior high school students that they can use their math and science skills to do some fun and exciting things, while allowing them to target their course work toward engineering, science or technology before they graduate," said Bill Springer, professor of mechanical engineering and BEST sponsor. "All of this is intended to help each student find out more about themselves and discover their hidden talents."

Dozens of teams of high school students from across Arkansas compete as part of the national BEST robotics competition. The 2003 BEST competition includes three main events:

Kickoff Day will be held September 20 in the Bell Engineering Center at the University of Arkansas. This is when each team receives a description of the problem to be solved and a box containing all of the materials that they can use to solve it.
Mall Day is October 19 at the Northwest Arkansas Mall. The students debut their robots for the public and have their first test runs in competition.
Game Day, the actual competition, is November 1 at the Fayetteville High School. Winners will go to Texas A&M to compete in the national competition.
Conducted each fall, the BEST competition takes place at the state or regional level throughout the United States. Participating schools may enter only one team and each team is given exactly the same scenario and kit of materials. During the six weeks between Kick Off and the Game Day competition, the teams must use only the given materials to design and construct a remote-control robot to solve the problem.

"Limiting the resources and the project duration simulates the product design-to-market cycle found in industry and teaches the participating junior and senior high school students the value of teamwork and project management," Springer said. "There is a real sense of community at a BEST event that you do not find in other activities, and that element is not lost on the students participating."

In addition to producing a robot, each team must document their efforts to Boost Engineering, Science, and Technology in their school and community. Community involvement is a key part of the competition and each team presents their efforts before a panel of judges. This portion of the competition garners the winners the exact same awards as the field competition and is the premier event needed to win.

BEST began in 1993 when two Texas Instrument engineers in Sherman, Texas, decided to try and encourage junior and senior high school students to study engineering, science and technology. Their goal was to develop a format that would generate excitement, encourage crowd support, allow all interested schools (both large and small) to participate on an equal footing, restrict the length of time each team had to work on their entry and emphasize academics.

The BEST format limits the time to a six weeks, which is comparable to the length of a standard grading period. To eliminate school size from the equation, each participating school can have only one team (just like an athletic event) and each team receives exactly the same resources that are provided to each team at no cost to the school.

On Game Day, each competition lasts for three minutes, so each team must go all out to have a chance of winning. This also allows each team to play a significant number of rounds, even if they are eventually eliminated from the competition.

Competitions take place on a square field with four scoring areas and four teams on the field instead of two. This means that every team must play both offense and defense at the same time. Each competition also involves multiple game pieces and scoring methods, according to the specifications of the problem.

Hard to imagine? Sound a little chaotic? That is exactly how each three minute round of every BEST robotics competition is played. Four teams are on the game field, competing simultaneously, to gather as many of the multiple game pieces into their scoring area as they can, while attempting to keep the other teams from trying to remove them.

"Points are counted at the end of the round," Springer said. "If the game pieces are not in a team’s scoring area when the round ends, the team doesn’t get the points. Part of each team’s effort has to be to decide which of the multiple scoring methods they wish to implement, as well as how they plan to defend (from the other teams) the game pieces they capture. This element of the competition is extremely important to an overall winning performance on the game field."

The Northwest Arkansas hub held its first BEST competition in 1998, with 11 teams participating. By 2000, it had grown to 22 teams, involving more than 300 students. This year, a new hub, the River Valley hub, will host its first competition in Ft. Smith. According to Springer, work is currently underway to develop hubs in Eastern and Central Arkansas, with a long-term goal of having a hub competition within an hour’s drive of every school system in Arkansas.