Chairman's Award Concerns

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by waialua359

I sometimes question this for several reasons, one of which IMO, FIRST didnt deliver when it came to promoting its goals at its highest moment this year.

I want to follow on this comment one more time. I’m assuming “highest moment” you are referring to is the visit to the White House on February 7, 2012.

Yes, FIRST really messed this one up. The 2011 CA team should have been there, absolutely no doubt. How they made the decisions they did I have no clue !

Why is this important and to whom ?

The event was symbolically important to the generic STEM community. It signals to the world that the White House views STEM activities as important. That is the power of the bully pulpit. But there are real limitations.

Most Americans view the president as the all-powerful authoritative man who governs the country as he pleases from his oval office. The existing situation regarding the presidency and his power is actually on the contrary according to presidential scholars.

President Truman once said of President Eisenhower upon his election, "He'll sit there all day saying do this, do that, and nothing will happen. Poor Ike, it won’t be a bit like the military. He'll find it very frustrating."

After enormous effort preparing to go there, arriving, participating, and returning, we ask ourselves what are the outcomes ? From a public policy perspective it has some importance ( subject to President Truman’s comments ). The President seemed to really enjoy himself, getting away from the headaches of daily life, foreign policy, the economy, etc. From a personal, team, or local perspective it isn’t so impactful. There were maybe 100+ students there.

The White House event was a public policy moment. For the White House, for FIRST, the team, and other STEM stakeholders, pure and simple. Each of these parties have a strong case for making a public policy statement. This is important because......

Sure, the trip was important for helping build a public policy case for supporting STEM education. The White House trip was important and our trip to the Congressional briefing on 2010 was also. We went as public policy pawns, and there is nothing wrong with that. ( In reality the President has probably had a bigger STEM impact with Race to the Top. But will.i.am has probably done a better job of attracting students to FIRST than the President. )

I would strongly caution anyone from assuming it is the “high point of our life or career”. I would double that caution when describing it as the highest moment of FIRST. In fact I will state unequivocally here and now that it isn’t the highest moment of FIRST. It even doesn’t even come close.

The highest moment of FIRST is the profound and life changing moments that thousands students are experiencing right now. Nothing, absolutely nothing about the White House experience even comes close !!


epilogue: If you watch our Chairman's video we talk about the 120+ events we have done. A ton of working in the sphere of public policy, working on the culture, attitudes, etc. We have students that have been doing these things for as long as four years. It has led to a saying on the team "another day in the life of kell robotics". Not to discount the WH experience, it really did feel like "another day in the life ....."

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by ebarker

I want to follow on this comment one more time. I’m assuming “highest moment” you are referring to is the visit to the White House on February 7, 2012.

Yes, FIRST really messed this one up. The 2011 CA team should have been there, absolutely no doubt. How they made the decisions they did I have no clue !

Why is this important and to whom ?

The event was symbolically important to the generic STEM community. It signals to the world that the White House views STEM activities as important. That is the power of the bully pulpit. But there are real limitations.

Most Americans view the president as the all-powerful authoritative man who governs the country as he pleases from his oval office. The existing situation regarding the presidency and his power is actually on the contrary according to presidential scholars.

President Truman once said of President Eisenhower upon his election, "He'll sit there all day saying do this, do that, and nothing will happen. Poor Ike, it won’t be a bit like the military. He'll find it very frustrating."

After enormous effort preparing to go there, arriving, participating, and returning, we ask ourselves what are the outcomes ? From a public policy perspective it has some importance ( subject to President Truman’s comments ). The President seemed to really enjoy himself, getting away from the headaches of daily life, foreign policy, the economy, etc. From a personal, team, or local perspective it isn’t so impactful. There were maybe 100+ students there.

The White House event was a public policy moment. For the White House, for FIRST, the team, and other STEM stakeholders, pure and simple. Each of these parties have a strong case for making a public policy statement. This is important because......

Sure, the trip was important for helping build a public policy case for supporting STEM education. The White House trip was important and our trip to the Congressional briefing on 2010 was also. We went as public policy pawns, and there is nothing wrong with that. ( In reality the President has probably had a bigger STEM impact with Race to the Top. But will.i.am has probably done a better job of attracting students to FIRST than the President. )

I would strongly caution anyone from assuming it is the “high point of our life or career”. I would double that caution when describing it as the highest moment of FIRST. In fact I will state unequivocally here and now that it isn’t the highest moment of FIRST. It even doesn’t even come close.

The highest moment of FIRST is the profound and life changing moments that thousands students are experiencing right now. Nothing, absolutely nothing about the White House experience even comes close !!


epilogue: If you watch our Chairman's video we talk about the 120+ events we have done. A ton of working in the sphere of public policy, working on the culture, attitudes, etc. We have students that have been doing these things for as long as four years. It has led to a saying on the team "another day in the life of kell robotics". Not to discount the WH experience, it really did feel like "another day in the life ....."

Ed,
First of all, thanks for sharing in detail. I hear you and totally understand.
And yes, it is what I was referring to.

Without getting into detail (something we can one day talk about face-face), my whole issue is the message they send to all of us, regardless of the impact it really has.
I can give tons of analogies about our experiences while working with our local government and agencies, sponsors, and the news media about the concerns you bring up and to what extent it has towards the stakeholders.

Does it really matter for concerns you bring up? Is it something we have control of?

When people, colleagues, friends, families and business leaders see what the goals of FIRST are, explicitly stated, and see actions that say essentially "Winning is everything," how would you explain that?

Regardless of any event that happens external to our team, we have reasons why we do what we do for our participation in FIRST.
The best personal example is this season, as we have done arguably more than any other year, and not even applying for an RCA.

[mathking]

From a team's vantage point, the best way to demonstrate impact is through documentation. Take lots of pictures and get written feedback. Make scrapbooks of events, news items, flyers, etc. Leave the notebooks in your pit area and allow other teams to look through them.

This is really, really good advice. Not just for purposes of documenting your Chairman's Award submissions but also for preserving your history. We did not do a great job of this in our first few years. (This was a comment we got a few times in our CA feedback.) Now we do a better job, and are trying to recapture our "lost" history as well. This year we started building an iBook that we hope to use it going forward to document our efforts. It was a fun project for me, because I got to reminisce about the past teams. It was great for the kids because many of them learned things about the team's earlier years they did not know. It is also making us think about our future, and focus more on plans. (That was also some of the constructive feedback we got from judges this year.)

We have also made a strong effort to keep track of our alumni, and this definitely has impressed judges. It also gives us a some hard data that is nice to have in the presentations. (I think that we also have an unfair advantage here, given that so many of our alumni go to Ohio State, which is local, and come back and mentor our team or other OSU supported teams. But it is something that is much easier to do in the Facebook era.)

We always struggle with what to include and what not to include. I try to push the kids to focus on the ongoing efforts, the things we do every year. The special things are great, but we try to emphasize the things we did while at least some of the current team members were members. Once your team has been around for a while, and has started getting serious about its FIRST mission, you will have lots of accomplishments. Sometimes those read like a laundry list. My advice is cut down on the number and focus on the ones of which you are the most proud and which best represent what your team has done.

For the past 8 years we have put together e-week (Engineering Week) lessons for elementary school (4th-6th grade) teachers. It does not take a huge effort. We have a few kids do some research and settle on an engineering activity. We write up a lesson plan and then offer the lessons as well as supplies to interested local teachers. A few hours work for a few kids (at least now that we don't try the counterproductive route of making thousands of individual kits and instead focus on classroom sets) and a couple hundred bucks (at most, this year was less). We have given away as many as 9600 kids worth of kits and as few as 800. This year was, I believe, around 2000. It is not something to rival helping to start up a regional or finding thousands of dollars to start new teams. But it is something that we do every year, and it has become one of "our things." So their are kids on the team who can talk intelligently about it when judges come around to our pits.

On a more philosophical level, I recently changed my signature to: "I always tell the kids, when you don't win the Chairman's Award that's not a bad thing. If you think you are deserving, but someone else is better, that mean's the message of FIRST is really getting out there." That is what I try to communicate to the kids. Other than this year, we probably had our strongest submission in 2010. (To my mind we were more "deserving" in 2010 than in 2009, when we won.) But 291 won the award. I talked a lot with one of their mentors and a bunch of their kids, and I had absolutely no doubt they deserved the win. There was another year (2008 I think) when 612 won, and I remember a couple of our kids saying "Could we ever be that good?" after talking with 612 about their efforts.

On to some of the good ideas. I will try (can't promise, because things are busy right now with trying to organize the trip to the Championships and negotiate the start of track & field season) to have our presentation record a practice presentation and post that to the web. I think this is a good idea. (When we publish our iBook it will have a lot about what we have done, and will include the presentation and team essay.) In our annual training day one of the sessions is about the Chairman's Award submission. I strongly encourage everyone to submit at least occasionally, even if you *know* you can't win. As other posters have mentioned, the process is valuable in itself. Almost every year, when we are rereading the essay or the kids are practicing the presentation, we reach some conclusions about things we will do differently the next time.

[Levansic]

Originally Posted by mathking

This year we started building an iBook that we hope to use it going forward to document our efforts. It was a fun project for me, because I got to reminisce about the past teams. It was great for the kids because many of them learned things about the team's earlier years they did not know. It is also making us think about our future, and focus more on plans. (That was also some of the constructive feedback we got from judges this year.)

-- snip --

... (When we publish our iBook it will have a lot about what we have done, and will include the presentation and team essay.)

Our team put together an iBook this year, to better describe the team and it's works over the last two years, to other schools without teams, potential donors, and parents. This rich media is awesome, and it puts to shame our essay and video that we submitted for the Chairman's award.

Producing the iBook gave us the chance to do some team archeology, as we put summary pages together for each year our team was in existence. Some years, the team existed and competed, but left no trace. Most years, there was a team picture and a description of that year's robot, but not much more. Our last three years were heavily documented, and the competition robot was the least notable item. Our team's progression moved from focus on the game to focus on philosophical tenets of the team, and how they are used to enhance STEM education. I like to see this as a maturation, and a better match with the goals of FIRST.

We haven't published the iBook to the iBook store yet, but it resides on every iPad that graces our pit. We are quite proud of it, and would highly encourage teams to investigate this media.

--Len

[N7UJJ]

Another reason to submit a Chairman’s essay:

Few students join the robotics team because they want to create and perform a five minute presentation to a panel of judges. Yet, those who do wind up on the Chairman’s sub team seem to acquire skills and confidence that are priceless.
Just as teams recruit engineers to mentor the design and building of a robot, we had sought professionals who have expertise in making presentations.
Just one example:
When Cynthia was on the Chairman committee, we asked one of our sponsors, a major bank, if there was someone who could help the team with our presentation. A pair of major executives offered to help. Their help wound up being several meetings and “lunches” at some very nice restaurants. The tips on improving the presentation were invaluable, but the friendship and exposure to executive work was eye opening for the kids.
Cynthia, who graduated and went to ASU’s college of construction, felt a bit out of place, being a rare woman in the program and just about the only Hispanic. A few months into her freshman year, one of the professors asked her if she would be willing to help make a presentation to one of the colleges major contributors. She replied that she would but wondered why she was being recruited. The professor replied, “You went through FIRST and have experience with presentations and we need a student we can count on.” She was on the faculty team and they got their grant. Cynthia graduated last year and is now a project manager building a new Intel plant in Arizona. Her exposure to executives who are decision makers was as important than her exposure to engineers.
Preparing and delivering a Chairman’s presentation can be an authentic, important, life-altering experience that few students experience. It is perhaps more valuable than building the robot. It really matters little if the team wins the trophy… it’s the experience.

[Dale]

I think what's really needed for the Chairman's Award is some form of peer review. The judges aren't in a position to determine the amount of creative embellishment in those essays and presentations nor do they have time to do so. As a previous poster mentioned, can they can't always figure out the timeline of things a team does.

I'd like to see every essay posted for public comment before the regional. Maybe the only ones who are able to comment are the folks so designated by the coach in TIMs, similar to award submitters and then only on essays from teams at their regional. Those folks could make both positive and corrective comments on others teams essays in a forum.

Those comments would then be available to the judges and give them topics to ask the team about during their interview or in the pits. I'm not sure if the team should be able to see the comments. Just the fact that teams knew their essay would be public and could be commented on would cut down a lot on the exaggeration we see in some of the essays. The judges shouldn't take any comment as gospel but merely a place to start a conversation and maybe then only if they kept hearing the same thing from multiple sources.

Obviously there is room for mischief here with competing teams tearing apart one another's essays. It might be best if they needed to be approved by the main TIMs contact or their designate before they could be posted.

Another thing that I think would be a helpful requirement is a timeline as part of the submission. This wouldn't come out of your character limit but might be part of the executive summary's teams fill out. It would be a bullet list of things the team has done broken out by year.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Dale

I think what's really needed for the Chairman's Award is some form of peer review. The judges aren't in a position to determine the amount of creative embellishment in those essays and presentations nor do they have time to do so. As a previous poster mentioned, can they can't always figure out the timeline of things a team does.

I wholeheartedly agree with this.

[Katie_UPS]

Originally Posted by Dale

I think what's really needed for the Chairman's Award is some form of peer review. The judges aren't in a position to determine the amount of creative embellishment in those essays and presentations nor do they have time to do so. As a previous poster mentioned, can they can't always figure out the timeline of things a team does.

I feel like this would put teams in a lose-lose situation. If a team calls you out for lying (whether you did or not), then you're chances are ruined. And by the same token, calling out a team puts you(r team) at risk for being called "un-GP".

Also, malicious teams would ruin the system, because not everyone is a okay with losing (even if its to the better-prepared opponent), and although GP operates under the ideal of adjusting the average by bringing the floor up (instead of the top down), some teams still don't get that.

[Dale]

That's why I'd suggest the main contact for the commenting team be the gatekeeper for comments. Again these comments would just be for the benefit of the judges to drill down a bit deeper in one area or another. They could also be confirmation that a team did a good job on this or that.

At the very least I like what FIRST was trying to do this year but didn't pull off where every team's chairman's award and video (or maybe it was just the winners) was published after the fact.

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by Dale

I think what's really needed for the Chairman's Award is some form of peer review. The judges aren't in a position to determine the amount of creative embellishment in those essays and presentations nor do they have time to do so. As a previous poster mentioned, can they can't always figure out the timeline of things a team does.

While I cannot, of course, speak for every regional I can say that my experience as a judge for the past two years in Seattle has confirmed every hope and expectation that I had when I coached/mentored a team. The judges are just as critical, dedicated and determined as you would expect.

Specifically, I have had the honour of being on the RCA judging panel the past two years and am pleased to assure everyone that we are well aware of the significance of the RCA.

Teams that have won have tended to do a very good job of documenting their accomplishments with thank you letters, event invitations, photographs, media clippings... in fact, I would tend to say that for true RCA contending teams the issue is not one of "how do we embellish our accomplishments", but rather one of "which ones do we leave out" due to space and time limitations. We have never been in need of "fact checking" due to the documentaiton provided by teams, but do go through the top few applications with a fine-toothed comb. I can't speak for my colleages on the panel, but if a team were found to be playing fast-and-loose with the truth it would be a quick and easy way to eliminate them from contention.

I appreciate the concern being expressed in this thread... and would not oppose seeing winning RCA submissions published in an open forum. I question the need to do this formally, as I doubt there is an RCA winning team that would hesitate to share their documentation at the end of the season if asked politely. (We never won RCA, but we often published our submission on our website anyway...)

However I do wish to reassure people that the judges did not just fall off the back of a turnip truck...

Jason

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

I appreciate the concern being expressed in this thread... and would not oppose seeing winning RCA submissions published in an open forum. I question the need to do this formally, as I doubt there is an RCA winning team that would hesitate to share their documentation at the end of the season if asked politely. (We never won RCA, but we often published our submission on our website anyway...)

I like this idea solely so teams can see all the accomplishments of the Chairman's teams so they can learn from them and be inspired. A good portion of the submissions end up being posted anyway but they are just so scattered it's hard to find. We need a website like The Mobius (http://themobius.wordpress.com) but for Chairman's teams.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

I appreciate the concern being expressed in this thread... and would not oppose seeing winning RCA submissions published in an open forum. I question the need to do this formally, as I doubt there is an RCA winning team that would hesitate to share their documentation at the end of the season if asked politely. (We never won RCA, but we often published our submission on our website anyway...)

I can assure you there are RCA winning teams who have explicitly told me they don't publish essays online when I inquired about it. I will not mention team numbers. This is something I feel is against the spirit of the award.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

I can assure you there are RCA winning teams who have explicitly told me they don't publish essays online when I inquired about it. I will not mention team numbers. This is something I feel is against the spirit of the award.

While I personally agree with you (and am not implying you think the following), I do want to point out that not publishing the essay =/= team maybe lied in the essay. I do know teams that are more than willing to share their documentation (photos, raw video, articles, testimonials, etc), but like to keep their writing style under-wraps. I have even been informed of this reason directly.

The style of the essay itself can be incredibly unique and beneficial to a team's chances, so I can understand why teams wouldn't want to see their style imitated (even in the most benign interests) but have no problem sharing the content.

[emusteve]

This would probably have been more relevant earlier on in the discussion, but I just discovered this thread, so here goes...

Going back to the original post, our team had a direct experience with having another team claiming responsibility for an event we initiated, paid for the venue, sent the invitations, set-up, supervised, etc. We included it in our Chairman's submission. The other team had their presentation scheduled before ours. When our kids made their presentation, the Judges told our kids to "Be more original, and DON'T COPY TEAM XXX!"

This infuriated the Mentors, but we're not allowed to defend our kids, even if we DO have the receipts and pictures. The Mentors quietly steamed, while the kids morale dropped to a new low. But everyone was gracious, and didn't say a word. We just sat and applauded as the other team was awarded Chairman's.

I relate this simply to illustrate and inform how deeply such an incident can affect a team. We haven't submitted a Chairman's application since. It just hasn't meant that much to us.

We're not a large team, and we're hardly ever noticed, even though we do lots of good things. We don't have a large quantity of projects in any one year, just not enough time. (Though we have quite an accumulation over time, I've always been under the impression a team should only submit their activities for the past year. Otherwise, you're just riding on the backs of your previous member's accomplishments.)

It's taken many years, and two generations of students, for the effects to fade enough for students to start to talk about making a Chairman's submission, and to look at some of the ones from the past. Perhaps we'll submit one in the coming season.

The one award that has always meant the most to me personally (meant more even than winning Engineering Inspiration), was the year we won the Johnson and Johnson Sportsmanship Award, because that speaks directly to the character of our Team and Students.

Feedback encouraged.

[Dale]

Teams that have won have tended to do a very good job of documenting their accomplishments with thank you letters, event invitations, photographs, media clippings... in fact, I would tend to say that for true RCA contending teams the issue is not one of "how do we embellish our accomplishments", but rather one of "which ones do we leave out" due to space and time limitations. We have never been in need of "fact checking" due to the documentaiton provided by teams, but do go through the top few applications with a fine-toothed comb. I can't speak for my colleages on the panel, but if a team were found to be playing fast-and-loose with the truth it would be a quick and easy way to eliminate them from contention.

I'm delighted to hear that the judges in Seattle take their duties so seriously. I'm not sure all regionals Chairman panels dig into the claims made by their top contenders or even how they would do that for out of the area teams. Just the suspicion by students that some claims are exaggerated is reason enough, in my opinion, to let the sunlight in.

Hopefully the Chairman's award is really about what you do in your community, not how you communicate what you do in ten minutes. Teams worried about having their writing style copied are worried about the wrong things.