[Aaron Vernon]

I obviously have too much time on my hands, but here is some of the information that you asked for, Joe. I took the results from the FIRST website from 1998 through 2002. I didn't add anything before 1997 because the team numbers changed between '97 and '98, and I have yet to sit down and match old team names to current numbers. Either way, this is a snapshot of the last 5 years of FIRST.

The spreadsheet has 5 worksheets:
Totals - by Award - This lists all of the winners of every award from '98-'02. (Note that the most of any award that a single team has won is 6. Teams 47 & 254 have won 6 Regionals, and team 67 has won 6 Leadership in Controls Awards.)
Totals - by Event - A list of the winners of every award by event. This allows you to see how often a certain team has won an award at a specific event.
Totals - by Team - A list of every award that each team has won. Note that three teams are tied with 23 awards (teams 16, 47, and 67).
FIRSTStar rating - This is the pivot table with all of the information you could want. This totals up the number of awards each team has won. Also used to calculate the FIRSTStar rating (see below for equation).
FIRSTStar ranking - This ranks all of the teams who have won awards (excluding scholarships, Autodesk awards, and single-person awards) by their FIRSTStar rating.

FIRSTStar Equation
The FIRSTStar rating is a weighted average of a team's awards divided by the number of years that team has competed. Thus, a team who has 10 awards in 3 years would rank higher than a team with 10 awards in 5 years.
The key, however, is the way that I took the weighted average. Using some guidelines from how FIRST calculates eligibility for the Championship I came up with an equation.

FIRSTStar Raw Score = 5 * (Group 1 awards) + 4*(Group 2 awards) + 3*(Group 3 awards) + 2*(Group 4 awards) + 1*(Group 5 awards)

Group 1 awards = National Champion, Chairman's Award Winner
Group 2 awards = Regional Chairman's Winner, Chairman's Award Finalist
Group 3 awards = Regional/Division Champion, National Finalist
Group 4 awards = Regional/Division Finalist, Technical awards (Creativity, Quality, Controls, Tomorrow's tech, Ind. Design), #1 Seed, and Highest Rookie Seed
Group 5 awards = everything else

After you have the raw score, you divide that by the number of years that a team has competed. This gives you your FIRSTStar rating.

FIRSTStar Rating Top Ten
1. 16 (Even if Bomb Squad had competed last year and won nothing, they would still be in 1st place!)
2. 47
3. 67
4. 254
5. 71
6. 343
7. 175
8. 365
9. 111
10. 945

FIRSTStar Stars
I added a relative score from 1 to 5 stars to the spreadsheet. The calculations are as follows:
5 Stars- Greater than or equal to 5.0 FIRSTStar rating
4 Stars- Between 2.5 and 5.0 FIRSTStar rating
3 Stars- Between 1.0 and 2.5 FIRSTStar rating
2 Stars- Greater than 0 and less than 1.0 FIRSTSTar rating
1 Star - Zero FIRSTStar rating (i.e. no awards)

This should be a good start for discussion as to which teams are the most successful. We could use this as our own FIRST RPI poll to use in "handicapping" teams during the season. Luckily, we won't base who wins the Championship on what the computers say.

-Aaron Vernon
Team 224 - PSGA/Piscataway HS