Quote:
Originally Posted by ebarker
Why even bother submitting a Chairman's Award if we're not gonna win?
At a minimum it forces the team to sit down and ask
"what have we done to promote the mission and vision of FIRST ? "
"are we heading in the right direction ?, are we supporting our students right ?"
and so on. It is a way to stop and think about what we are doing as a team.
You don't pursue the Chairman's Award. You arrive at the Chairman's Award.
|
Great points.
2006, my senior year in high school, was my second year in FRC. I was the president of Team 971, Spartan Robotics. We were not the team we are today, we had few mentors, little industry support and very little design experience to go around.
I decided that year that we would submit for RCA and WFFA, two awards the team had never submitted for. I told the team that we did not expect to win these awards, but we submit anyways because continuity and history is important. It would provide a benchmark for the team. "Here's what we did last year, this year we need to do more/better".
We have prepared submissions for these awards every year since. A few times they did not make the submission deadline, but the effort and preparation was there. The process of documenting our team, our history and our impact was there. We have this information readily available, at our disposal, for presentations to the school board, administrators, PTA and anyone else who asks about what we do.
The mentor we first submitted for WFFA in 2006, Michael Schuh, was recognized in 2011. We're still chasing the RCA.
As others have mentioned, the preparation of the submission and presenting to the judges is the most valuable part of the process. It forces teams to evaluate the impact they are having on their students and their community.
I like to think of the Chairman's Award as the team's "performance review": An evaluation of what the team is doing to achieve FIRST's stated goals of inspiration and culture change. The judges select one team at each regional, recognizing their outstanding efforts (like the "employee of the month"), but this in no way discredits the efforts of all the other teams who did not receive the RCA.