[KathieK]

I urge everyone who has an opinion on the awards process to bring it to the end-of-year FIRST team forums.

The point here is not that the repeat winners shouldn't be rewarded for their efforts, on the contrary, they should, and deserve to, win a Regional Chairman's Award as long as they are building on their program each year. The point is that FIRST is now accomplishing one of their goals; that there are more and more teams who are of CA-winner caliber. They are out there emulating CA-winning teams. There may be numerous teams who are of that level "competing" for that award at a Regional. And the award process has some flaws.

Unlike the robot competition, which has rules to follow (the robot alliance which best achieves the goal of the game scores the most points and wins), the awards competition is subjective. You don't have rules to follow (in many cases the Award description is rather vague), you don't know who you are competing against, you don't see the submissions of the other teams so you can learn what is being done in your area and so you can learn from them, you can't sit in on the judges' interviews.

Perhaps there is a different way to recognize teams that are accomplishing FIRST goals - maybe by having one team chosen to be the Regional winner but also recognizing other outstanding teams from that Regional as well, "Regional Chairman's Award Finalist" or something.

I would welcome anyone with ideas for improving the process to e-mail me through Chief Delphi.