Re: Engineering Inspiration Award
 

Yeah Burman
Personally to win this award you need to have great verbal skills. The judges start with simple questions. Like:
"How do you try to get more kids on the team in future years?"
Then a little more complicated:
"How do you spread the meaning of FIRST"
then:
"How does the collaberative precess of your team not only benfit you, but other teams around the world?"
The judges willl just keep asking questions to see what level you are on. if you dont know an answer, DON'T MAKE IT UP. say to the judge, "I don't know, my my friend here, (inwert name here), does and he can tell you about what we do.

Re: Engineering Inspiration Award
 

Yeah we(1155) won it at NYC this year for doing predominately two things, the first of which was volunteering at an old age home and teaching the residents how to use computers, and for creating a robotics club within our school in addition to the FIRST robotics team, which lead to the creation of a robotics class in next years curriculum. The judges really seemed to like the second of these because it allowed for us to do something with those extra 95 kids that signed up for the team in the beginning of the year, which I'm sure all teams have. By giving them a slower paced introduction to robotics and engineering through one day a week meetings all year round instead of the six weeks of no sleep that the rest of us go through we were able to keep more of them interested, get more work out of them, teach them and by half way through build around 5 of them became full time team members. In my mind it is something that all teams within the FIRST community should be doing not only because of its benefits to the field of engineering but also because it gives devoted team members more extracurricular credit, a nice little plus that we at 1155 felt was proper reward for all the time and effort we put in.

Re: Engineering Inspiration Award
 

The Judges seemed to love how we have embraced females (All jokes aside) in our team. We hosted a Women in Science and Engineering Day at our school earlier this year, which blew the judges away. The judges also greatly appreciated how females currently make up 20% of our team, which is a 100% increase from last year. Also, our RoboNet and FUTURE programs helped us immensely. I also believe that our creation of not only 6 FLL teams in local schools helped, but also the creation of teams in Brazil and next year Rome and maybe Romania.

I am still in awe that we have won this award twice. I would like to extend my gratitude towards all the teams for everything they have done. For you all have spread the word of FIRST as well. We, as a collective community, have helped change the way the United States not only looks upon the influende of FIRST, but the influence of education. Thanks everyone for everything you have done. It is truly amazing what we can do not only as individual teams, but as a community.

Thank you once again,

Andrew
Team 75- The RoboRaiders