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Here's my 2 cents on the whole issue.
I personally would support a move not necessarily to make mandatory the Chairman's Award but to make teams show that they are carrying out the mission of FIRST.
While I hear and can understand where people are coming from when they talk of essentially dumbing down the Chairman's Award idea with people forced to slap something together and all that, I also understand that Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers both preach every year in the openers that FIRST is not all about the robot itself, but in creating the robot bettering the lives and the people that the project influences and/or touches.
What, then, is needed to make sure this mission is being carried out?
FIRST already has a partial solution to this, called the Chairman's Award.
Here's an approach I haven't seen here yet: Make Chairman's Award submission mandatory, but not necessarily the participation in the competition that surrounds it. This would take the stress off of those teams already stressed out enough about sponsors et. al. and is really not that difficult at all to do.
All the Chairman's Award asks you to do is come up with four pages of what your team does to better the community in which it is located. Most teams are involved in community outreach, likely many without necessarily knowing it. On top of that, the award asks not for any special layout (although it can aid the presentation for the award itself) but for CONTENT. That is what FIRST wants to hear.
FIRST needs a way of evaluating the success of the program that is not based on the robot itself. A mandatory submission, be it a graphical masterpiece or a few pages of paragraphs done in Wordpad, would help FIRST evaluate where it is and where it needs to be. They need feedback....it isn't that difficult to give them some, now is it?
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