[liviamarrs]

We presented at both the Alamo and Virginia Regionals. We were not expecting to win in Alamo, but we were surprised and encouraged with our response sheets. We had all perfect fields except for 2 sections where we were one off.

We were nervous about presenting in Alamo, because we just didn't know what to expect. I was not one of our presenters, but when I talked to them they described the judges as not asking any questions after the 5 minute presentation and even being a little distracted. For example, when we mentioned working to change SOLs (our standards of learning in Virginia) one judge talked for about 2 minutes about the Texas Standards of learning instead. The judges also didn't like how we had bullet listed our summaries to fit in more information. I think it also threw them off that our essay and presentation were organized differently. That's something we are looking to change in the future. I think that this really comes down to the differences in Regionals and understanding how to control the entire meeting. In the future we will be preparing our presenters for other unexpected judging styles.

However, the judges were very enthusiastic about our presentation anyway and called it "The Best Presentation Ever!" on our sheet. Our presentation is fairly old-school. We have a large picture book style presentation that describes the facets of the team as the parts of The Mech Tech Dragon. It's very heart felt and gets the point across succinctly and well.

We didn't change our presentation very much except to practice, emphasize the strengths in the areas that weren't given the high score in Alamo, and make the metaphor stronger.

At Virginia, our experience was standard and what we were used to. The judges asked questions and enjoyed our presentation openly. Our response sheet was perfect across the board and there weren't any critiques (although we do have room to improve). We were very worried because we didn't have one Engineering Inspiration judge come by our pit, and we were fairly certain after winning the Entrepreneurship Award that we wouldn't be winning another non-technical award. However, the real reason we didn't get to talk to the EI judges was that they already knew we had been selected for Chairman's!