[Robert Thacker-]

I feel that teams should look at these awards as an engineer and not an art student. Something may be really cool to look at, but is it well explained? Can you clearly see all the compoents? Does everything you see that should have a function on the robot clearly explained and shown? What about where the systems are attached to each other? Are the 2D's coinciding and helping this out?

And what's really important is knowing that this is an award about honoring excellance in student design and documentaing this whole process. An award winning team should be the BEST in displaying this process and displaying the final design in such a way that it could be recreated from description. We should vote for who should be the winner and not a team we feel sorry for. Even things like stress analysis is important in understanding what kind of abuse a robot will take. An award winner should use all the features given to them in the Inventor submission itself. And any team who steps outside of Inventor, like using 3Ds Max, really shouldn't be concidered, in my opinion, b/c they did not commit to learning the entire program. And the judges have said that if a team uses any other software, even other CADD programs, it will severly hurt their overall score anyway.

The Inventor judges had once told me that they do not have the Inventor Award at regionals b/c there are not enough people to judge who know the program to be able to make a decision at a regional competiton (that and not too many teams put in an entry). But isn't this just putting that same fear in place? Do all teams really know the program (I mean the teams that do not even commit to the entry)?

So I feel we should look at these basic ideas and keep them in mind when looking these designs.

Those are all of my thoughts.