FRC Blogged - More Award Updates, FIRST Choice, and a New FRC Xbox Game!

[lil'est lavery]

Originally Posted by NoQuestions

This news has sent at least one of my students into a sort of depression - he's a senior that is the captain of the animation subteam. He doesn't have any experience with anything else. He now fears that he will be 'useless' this build season. I'm not really sure what to tell him. This is highly disappointing. I wish we could have known about this sooner so that people could have had a chance at pre-season training.

We now have the 'Digital Media Award', but it's just not the same. Oh well. I suppose it's time to adapt.

I know a lot of people are disappointed to hear this news. Team 116 takes a lot of pride in its animation team and has been discussing multiple options as far as what these students could do on the team that they would still be interested in. I would recommend considering keeping your animation subteam together and trying to find another reason to create an animation. Some of the things we discussed were creating an animation to go along with our chairman's submission or simply an animation to show to kids/interested parties at outreach events. I think the animation portion of the competition played an important role in encouraging a variety of people to become involved in FIRST and I'm sad to see it go, but hopefully teams can still find reasons to continue making animations. Good luck this season.

[116anim_award]

Originally Posted by lil'est lavery

I know a lot of people are disappointed to hear this news. Team 116 takes a lot of pride in its animation team and has been discussing multiple options as far as what these students could do on the team that they would still be interested in. I would recommend considering keeping your animation subteam together and trying to find another reason to create an animation. Some of the things we discussed were creating an animation to go along with our chairman's submission or simply an animation to show to kids/interested parties at outreach events. I think the animation portion of the competition played an important role in encouraging a variety of people to become involved in FIRST and I'm sad to see it go, but hopefully teams can still find reasons to continue making animations. Good luck this season.

Team 116 has decided on a course of action: we will be holding our own competition this year for animation. The thread is here.

[Kevin Thorp]

There are a lot of good reasons to create animations: to impress FIRST judges, to help with team "marketing", maybe create a public service announcement for your local TV station, or just for the joy of learning.

But contests really motivate us. Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic for the Orteig Prize. Scaled Composites, the first private company to launch a man into space, did it to win the X-Prize. How exciting would it be to build a robot if you weren't competing against other very tough teams?

I see on the 3D Animation forum Team 116 is organizing a contest. That's awesome, but others might also want to help out.