FIRST Mistakes
 

One great thing about the FIRST organization is that they listen to our voice. If they do this this year and we do not like it then they will change it the next year. They did this 2 years ago when the game was team vrs time instead of team vrs team, we complained, and they fixed it. So if the idea does turn out to be a bad one, I am confidant that it will be fixed.

Shakes Head.......
 

My opinion on this is,
 

I don't think the changing of the Chairman's Award has much to do with judge's time. I'm not sure what reasons FIRST gave in their letter but my guess is that FIRST wants to encourage more teams to submit a Chairman's Award. Usually, building a robot and submitting a Chairman's Award submission is a daunting task. One that many smaller teams really can't do. In the past its taken a lot of work as most Chairman's Awards took the form of videos which required both a lot of videotaping as well as post production. However, by changing the Chairman's Award to merely be four sides of paper, it allows many more teams to submit the Chairman's Award. While this may be distressing to many teams that have submitted before, in the long run it will encourage more teams to take the time to sumbit a Chairman's Award submission.

Matt

Money.....who has money?
 

We are a small team from a smaller school. Many of the teams you guys are on are bigger than our entire high school. Our school's facilities, those that we don't have to remove everything from when we leave, consist of a single office with two desks. Most of you are in graduating classes that are larger than our entire school, and we go K-12.

In previous years, we have submitted Chairman's Award entries because they were a contractual requirement from one of our sponsors, not because we thought we had the slightest chance of winning. Last year there was a contractual screw-up and we did not have to submit. What a relief!. Unfortunately, I think the sponsor will make sure that does not happen again, one way or another.

I think it is great that they are scaling it back. I think it kind of misses the point when to be competitive a team has to have a sub-team the size of our whole team doing just the Chairman's award. Restrictions also force you to be more creative. I expect to see much more in the way of material restrictions this year, just based on this. If the rules don't pinch, they're not doing their job.

We are a good team, that I feel embodies the spirit of FIRST as much as anybody. We do all the same things other teams do but, like every one else, we have limited resources. We prefer to apply them to things that will gain something for the team and our community. Not spending hundreds of hours producing something that basically pats ourselves on the back in front of the judges.

Besides, in my experience, the award is based mostly on quantity of quality effort. Meaning there is no way a team of 10 can compete with a team of 40, even if they are of equal dedication to the ideals of FIRST. The judges, being primarily CEOs or other management types, tend to look at quantity more than quality.

If you have put in a lot of effort already this year I'm sorry. But you can take valuable stuff away from what you've done. If you're doing it right, your script or whatever you are working to, has the gist of the information you were trying to convey. You will just need to distill it further or present it in a different way.

The other thing this will teach you is not to get too attached to stuff before the real rules come out. Because after all, this is FIRST. Changing the rules is a way of life here. If you don't like it, go do BattleBots or something else where the game is always the same. It may be more comfortable, but not nearly as representative of life.

:D Ain't that the truth.
Hi neighbor!

By putting something into video, you are making it glamorous. When it is text, the judges can see it right there, they have what you accomplished in words. Four pages is a lot, actually. You can put a lot of text and a lot of pictures on there.

It also eliminates copyright issues because a lot of teams like to put songs in their videos, many of which they don't have the copyrights to.

As Krass said, it "levels the playing field" so to speak. All teams have an equal opportunity, without any bias by the judges.

People that are arguing for video editing, answer this...
If it takes you 10... 20... maybe 30 hours to create this video, then what are you doing for the community???? 30 hours is a lot of time... isn't it better spent helping the community? Furthering your chances for the chairmans award??

For us working towards a chairman's award accomplished the obvious - focusing the team on what's great about our team, where we need to put more effort in, getting the word out to the public about our team...

Working towards making a video was bringing some fun into the effort, discovering team members' talents we didn't know they had, drawing in school community's help to make thus educating them about what we do, giving tech whiz's an opportunity to learn something new, and tech beginners something to be excited about.

I say make the chairman's award a level playing field with the 4 pieces of paper, and have an award for the best video that can be used to spread the word about FIRST and your team in your community.

Hi Back, Neighbor!

I agree. I have no problem with teams putting videos or other promos together using whatever resources they have available. I think it should be encouraged and a separate award would do that nicely. (Sponsor suggestions anyone? Spielberg maybe?)

But it seems to me that when you have a multi-person sub team whose whole focus is on the Chairman's award and nothing else, that maybe somebody is missing the point. The focus should not be getting kids excited about winning an award or putting together a video. There's nothing wrong with it, but there are other venues for it. The focus is on getting kids excited about technology and giving them a sense that "I can do that".

Some might say "but what about the animation competition?" If you read the rules on the animation competition, the focus is on helping your team visualize their robot concept and how it might work. Cuteness counts a little, but accurate representation counts much more.

Accurate visualizations help refine the final product and contribute to the goals of the program. We use them in my job at all levels, from the CAD designer trying to figure out a joint, to a program manager wondering just how we're going to launch that missle. We spend a tremendous amount of effort on product visualization, but very little on videos on our community service projects. We do those too, but the ratio is like 2,000 or more to 1 in terms of man hours.

If we used a similar ratio of robot building to Chairman's award on our team, we'd have one student working on it for 10 hours. I think we can actually do that. It might even be competitive.

I think a lot of great points have been made here about the importance of the Chairman's Award irregardless of its submission format.

- Nothing is being done to stifle anyone's creativity.. nothing is being done to stop anyone from making some cool videos... Why not still do that and if you need to attract sponsors, or students, or showcase your efforts you can pop in this tape and impress everyone.

- It's just a new challenge, like FIRST presents every year. Yeah, maybe people are not English majors, but you are not going to go through a technical education these days without learning to write... a major problem with many tech students (engineers, etc) is they come out not knowing how to communicate their ideas to anyone.

- This format will hopefully even out the field.. as some posted earlier, it will bring a level of equality. It should also make the submission easier (so people don't not submit an entry because they know they don't have the video editing experience or ability to produce to the quality many can) and encourage more submissions.

WPI has been in FIRST since the very beginning. Last year was the very first year we submitted a Chairman's Award entry. We didn't submit a video either. We submitted an interactive webpage with bulleted points and photos on each page and voice overs explaining in more detail (kind of like a decent powerpoint presentation & lecture).

I guess my point is to take the advice of a lot of the people that posted here. This really can be for the better for everyone, regardless of how much time you've put into a video so far.. all is not lost, nothing is really. It's just another challenge.. like alliances were in '99, 3x losers score in 2000, like 4v0 in 2001... etc etc...

While many people have been working on Chairman's Awards for weeks (or months) now, we also start doing robot design work before we even know what the game is. We experiment with drive systems and other new things.. never knowing if we will be able to use all that work when the game is revealed in January. But it is good practice, a good time to learn and teach, and we can always use it some other time for another robot (or purpose even). The new Chairman's Award format can be looked at in the same light..

We don't have a multi-person sub team with the only focus on the Chairman's Award. It was me and a student, trying to get others help. Now we have a retired teacher and a few more students doing video. It was helping some get the point. The very cool video software we just received courtesy of a mentor was a vehicle for getting other students to begin to get interested in what their team is about and what to aspire to. We have lots of newbies, few veterans. The process of doing the video and going after the chairman's award is, to me, more important than the cool video and winning. Which, come to think of it, is what will be more team's experience now that the submission doesn't require video.

*wince* That's the one we haven't come close to getting off the ground - animation or CAD for that matter. This is our first year that we have one borrowed computer, a donated laptop, and the use of 3 member's laptops when they bring them. Our past years' animation/CAD software went to a past student leader since our facility didn't have a computer. We're going to try to hold on to our program's programs now, in order to have them availalbe to begin to familiarize team members with them.

We went to year round for the first time this year. We successsfully analyzed our 2002 robot, and what we would have done differently, analyzed what wasn't working for our team that needed to be changed, and made good progress on all that. We had expectations of experimenting with robotic subsystems, a lot of which didn't come to fruition. However we got a LOT done organizing our mess of a facility into something wonderful, and working towards something unexpected robotwise that just might fly.

Altho we didn't accomplish all we wanted to, the process put us "out" there for the public to see, and, for instance, we're getting a walking, talking robot donated to our team cuz she heard about us. Playtime and exhibitions!
Like life, it's a journey not a destination, celebrating the end results you wanted, the end results you didn't expect, and picking yourself up and journeying again.

Leveling the field? Maybe not....
 

A lot of people have said that turning the Chairman's Award into an essay would level the field. But have you thought that it might level it too much? For instance, if your team did something really cool, you would write about it, but the judges might be like, "Oh, that's sort of interesting..." and not make a big deal out of it. With a video, they could see the actual impact of it. And, you could see the actual interaction with the community, such as parades or demonstrations. And isn't interacting with the community and spreading the word of FIRST what Chairman's is all about?

Re: Leveling the field? Maybe not....
 

The concept of something being too level, even, or fair eludes my grasp. Honestly.

Ultimately, it's a subjectively judged award. People judge it based on what they see from the submissions, what they bring to the submissions, and what they're looking for in a Chairman's Award recipient.

Two teams may do the exact same community outreach program, though one may present it better in writing than the other. There's nothing we can do about that, I'm afraid, and it's just one of those facts of life.

If, however, one team submits a professionally edited video with a budget that can rival Star Wars, while the other submits a type-written entry - I'd be amazed, really, if the team who submitted the video tape was not preferred.

Therefore, I maintain that standardizing the submission media in a way such that it gives every team in FIRST access to submit themselves for consideration does level the playing field in the only way a playing field can be leveled.

The idea of something being too fair or balanced is silly.