Chairman's Award Concerns

[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.)

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... (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