Chairman's award questions
 

I am from team 3218 and I had a few questions about the questions on the Chairmanship award.

1) on the essay saying "describe the strength of your partnership..." I was wondering partnership with who? the team, FRC, community?

2)Also on the essay itself, what is the essay supposed to be about? because for me all it says is "Essay"

Thank you

Re: Chairman's award questions
 

The Essay should tell a compelling story about all aspects of your team that relate to fulfilling the mission of FIRST. Examples are available here on Chief Delphi by searching, and on many team websites.

"Partnership" includes, but is certainly not limited to:

• Sponsors
• Students
• Mentors
• Parents
• School
• Community
• Other Teams

Re: Chairman's award questions
 

For partnership, have you partnered with any outside organizations to spread the message of FIRST? Or maybe you can talk about your partnership with your school to spread STEM education. I would sit down and make a list of the organizations or businesses that you've worked with, and figure out the impact that partnership has had on your team or your community.

The best way to learn about the essay is to quickly browse through some submissions by other teams. Here's a few examples:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2677

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1937

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1691

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1612

Just browse them quickly and you'll see different writing styles and different methods of presentation, but the same message - "this is who we are, this is what we do, this is why we do it - and this is the impact we've had."

Re: Chairman's award questions
 

I was wondering are there any rules for the music that can be used for the chairman's video?

Re: Chairman's award questions
 

From Section 6.4.3 of the Administrative Manual:

Re: Chairman's award questions
 

I'm going to re-post an answer I gave earlier today regarding music in respect to the Creative Commons licensing mentioned in the copyright section of the administrative manual.

To quote Creativecommons.com:

"Creative Commons is a new system, built upon current copyright law, that allows you to legally use “some rights reserved” music, movies, images, and other content — all for free. CC offers free copyright licenses that anyone can use (without a lawyer) to mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. For instance, a musician would use a Creative Commons license to allow people to legally share her songs online, make copies for friends, or even use them in videos or other compositions.

[...]Most importantly, you need to use music that is not licensed under a No Derivative Works license. This means that the musician doesn't want you to change, transform, or make a derivative work using their music. Under CC licenses, synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music, so you can’t legally use a song under a CC No Derivative Works license in your video."

Here's some resources I've found helpful:
http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ (My personal favorite)
http://www.bensound.com/
http://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos
http://freemusicarchive.org/
http://ccmixter.org/

1) I think you're referring to one of the questions posed by FIRST: "Describe the strength of your partnership with your sponsors with special emphasis on the 2013/2014 year and the preceding two to five years"

FIRST encourages sustained working relationships with whoever sponsors your team. This may include financial sponsors, companies that provide space or supplies, and/or the companies that your mentors work for. How do they help you grow as a team? And, more importantly, how do you help them? Do you put on open houses for the company, display their logo on the robot and team apparel, provide an opportunity for their mentors to fulfill community outreach goals? Sponsorship is a two way street -- tell FIRST how you implement that!

2) From the administrative manual: "The Chairman's Award is presented to the team judged to have created the best partnership effort among team participants and which best exemplified the true meaning of FIRST through measurable impact on its participants, school, and community at large.

[...]The FIRST Robotics Competition is not about machines; it is about the experience of people working together toward a shared goal. Documenting and preserving your team's FIRST experience becomes an important component of the over-all FIRST experience."

The essay portion is your change to tell the judges exactly how your team has exemplified the core values of FIRST in the last 2-5 years. The most important part of that passage, to me, is the "measurable" statement. You can put some oomph behind your statements by adding numbers: how many hours has the team spent volunteering? How many people have you introduced FIRST to? How many students go on to major in a STEM field?

The essay requirements are vague for a reason -- they give you the opportunity to play around with what you want to say. 10,000 characters goes faster than you think!

Re: Chairman's award questions
 

Is anybody else having a glitch with STIMS in submitting the Chairman's award? For some reason, my second answer is always the same as my first.

Re: Chairman's award questions
 

A few people have reported this issue. You may want to contact FIRST prior to submitting to ensure that your essay and summary submissions are submitted correctly.