2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[Alex Cormier]

Going to close this down for a little bit of time. The arguments are getting bad and has lasted about 90 posts now...

Cool down and come back to it later.

[Alex Cormier]

Be nice or it's going away for much longer.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Alex Cormier

Be nice or it's going away for much longer.

Admit it you. You just wanted to close a thread and impose your will upon others. The mod powers are already going to your head.

[Alex Cormier]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

Admit it you. You just wanted to close a thread and impose your will upon others. The mod powers are already going to your head.

Nope. Not the first one I've closed, not the last.

We received numerous complaints from people about this thread and comments going on.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Alex Cormier

Nope. Not the first one I've closed, not the last.

We received numerous complaints from people about this thread and comments going on.

Oh borther.
How is this any different from the other bloated Negative threads we had other years?

[dag0620]

I'm going to simply list off the big things, with some constructive criticism.

• Chairman's Award Process: As a student who's been involved I know it can be a daunting process preparing and submitting for it, and this is on a team that's had experiences in preparing this. Talking to numerous teams submitting for the first time, you can tell it's a confusing process for them. While the submission guidelines are clear (and I'll give props for that) we need some way to help make the process, especially for first timers, a little less scary. Also a little clarification or transparency on the judging process would be awesome.
  
• Non-STEM Students: I've always held the position that FIRST has become more about just getting kids into jobs with Science and Technology. While I love Science and Technology, I am pursuing a career in marketing. The thing is FIRST is what helped me find this career and I owe all of my future plans and discovering my passion for marketing to FIRST. Much of the community knows, and celebrates stories like mine. However once and a while, I still feel like a failure of the program due to the fact I'm not pursuing a career in STEM. Maybe we could just work on our attitudes of this program getting students in careers other than Science and Technology.
  
• 8 Matches at Champs: Been beat to death, just wanted to add I didn't like it.
  
• The Rooms at Championship Conferences: Karthik's Presentation was amazing, hopefully more people will get to learn from his knowledge.
  
• Einstein: Long, overdrawn. I'm glad the awards and matches are integrated. I think the issues is that there was a lot of awards and speeches spread out before matches. Fixing this really just comes down to distributing the awards and speeches a little more between matches. I do understand issues can arise from this (such as Chairman's may be awarded after some matches, and I understand this may flow bad) but it's somewhere to start looking.
  
• FIRST Finale: Crowded, Expensive, Food was alright. I'm sure HQ will look at this and fix it though.
  
• Dean's List Ceremony: My only issue is if the ceremony is over the lunch hour, it would be nice if the recipients were announced within the hour and it ended on time. Not really an issue for me, however I know my friends who were volunteers were not able to see the winners due to having to get back to work at 1.
  

[Grim Tuesday]

Good call Alex on shutting this thread down for a while, it was getting downright vitriolic.

I could list off a bunch of petty problems I have had with the season but I think by far the biggest one was the lack of reverence given to the Championship Chairman's Award.

EI got a funny speech by Dave Lavery, the teams on Einstein got the big stage but it seemed like CCA was just the Chairman coming onto the stage, saying "well holy cow this team is great" and handing them the award. No long speech about how much Chairman's means (this is one place where I wanted a meaningful speech!), just up and down. And they didn't even play the video! Furthermore, it seemed misplaced in the award ceremony with lots of lower tier awards being given both before and after it. It neither felt like it kicked off the ceremony nor was the finale. Teams in our hall of fame deserve more than that. I hope Frank will post the video on his blog when 1538 releases it.

[CENTURION]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

Good call Alex on shutting this thread down for a while, it was getting downright vitriolic.

I could list off a bunch of petty problems I have had with the season but I think by far the biggest one was the lack of reverence given to the Championship Chairman's Award.

EI got a funny speech by Dave Lavery, the teams on Einstein got the big stage but it seemed like CCA was just the Chairman coming onto the stage, saying "well holy cow this team is great" and handing them the award. No long speech about how much Chairman's means (this is one place where I wanted a meaningful speech!), just up and down. And they didn't even play the video! Furthermore, it seemed misplaced in the award ceremony with lots of lower tier awards being given both before and after it. It neither felt like it kicked off the ceremony nor was the finale. Teams in our hall of fame deserve more than that. I hope Frank will post the video on his blog when 1538 releases it.

I was very surprised by this too. If it's the most prestigious award, shouldn't it command more recognition and build-up? Man, the speech we got for winning the regional chairman's award was at least twice as long as that one.

[cadandcookies]

I can agree about Dean's List needing to be on time-- our team's Dean's List finalist and myself were presenting Chairman's for my team at 1, and, frankly it was incredibly disappointing to have to leave the ceremony without finding out whether she had won or not. And then we had to wait ten minutes while judging got sorted out (I think one of our judges was at the ceremony, and we didn't have even close to a full judging panel).

Admittedly that particular affected a maximum of three teams, but I can't help but think it probably affected several drive teams as well. Hopefully FIRST can find a nice medium with the Dean's List ceremony.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

Good call Alex on shutting this thread down for a while, it was getting downright vitriolic.

I could list off a bunch of petty problems I have had with the season but I think by far the biggest one was the lack of reverence given to the Championship Chairman's Award.

EI got a funny speech by Dave Lavery, the teams on Einstein got the big stage but it seemed like CCA was just the Chairman coming onto the stage, saying "well holy cow this team is great" and handing them the award. No long speech about how much Chairman's means (this is one place where I wanted a meaningful speech!), just up and down. And they didn't even play the video! Furthermore, it seemed misplaced in the award ceremony with lots of lower tier awards being given both before and after it. It neither felt like it kicked off the ceremony nor was the finale. Teams in our hall of fame deserve more than that. I hope Frank will post the video on his blog when 1538 releases it.

Agreed it was really strange. There was no build up to the presentation and it honestly didn't highlight much about what the cows do.

[IndySam]

I think everyone agrees that the number of matches at Champs is a joke.
One of the ways to solve that is to reduce the number of teams attending but all I see folks focusing on is waitlist teams.

From what I have read hear most of you seem to think waitlist teams are the problem with quantity and the quality of teams, this is simply not true. Eliminating all the waitlist teams would have gotten you maybe 9 matches which would have made zero difference in the luck factor. Also the waitlist teams were not the reason for the quality problems, there were so few of them this year they were not the problem. In fact I would submit that many of them were quality robots.

The simple fact is the rookie awards and the golden ticket robots (second picks who ride on the coat tails of the winners) are the reason for the quality problem, not the waitlist teams. But can we deny these teams that did win a rightful spot at the Championships? Do we want to not let these rookie award winners come and experience what its about and get inspired? It's a difficult problem at best.

But I think the only real solution is the district system for some of the country and qualifying through super regionals for non-district teams. Then significantly reduce the quantity of teams at champs, maybe even give the rookie award winners their own division to play in. That or find a place (and volunteer base) to increase the number of divisions at champs.

[Grim Tuesday]

Oh, one other thing I noticed completely absent this year was divisional spirit. When the MC's introduced the teams from their respective divisions it was highly anticlimactic because they did it in reverse...They brought them out onto the field then led them out. Very weird, we thought it was a rehearsal or something. I also heard about one Gali-Leo or Archi-Medes cheer the entire Einstein. I think the division spirit is a really cool dynamic on Einstein and the MC's from each division need to lead it off.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

Oh, one other thing I noticed completely absent this year was divisional spirit.

I find this funny because Blair was doing such a good job of building it up in Galileo. I was a bit stunned to see it fall off on Einstein.

[OZ_341]

I am the lead mentor and founder of Miss Daisy. I usually don't do this, but I felt the need to reply to several comments made about our team, but I wanted to do it elsewhere and in a positive way.

I do not want to start anything here because I want this thread to remain open. Don't make Alex close this thread, its an important discussion.

Here is the link to my reply.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=116527

I promise that my response is positive, but I really would like the people that made negative comments or think negative comments about successful teams to read it with an open-mind.

Thank you.

Alan Ostrow
Team 341

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

...it seemed like CCA was just the Chairman coming onto the stage, saying "well holy cow this team is great" and handing them the award. No long speech about how much Chairman's means (this is one place where I wanted a meaningful speech!), just up and down. And they didn't even play the video! Furthermore, it seemed misplaced in the award ceremony with lots of lower tier awards being given both before and after it. It neither felt like it kicked off the ceremony nor was the finale. Teams in our hall of fame deserve more than that. I hope Frank will post the video on his blog when 1538 releases it.

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

Agreed it was really strange. There was no build up to the presentation and it honestly didn't highlight much about what the cows do.

My mother was a CCA judge.

There was a much bigger script and it was, for some unknown reason, not read.

Anyone sitting near us on the floor can vouch for the fact that she was NONE too happy about it. The judges worked very hard on a script to emphasize the work they do, and it was not given.

She wants me to apologize for that, even though it's not her fault. Believe me, there was a much bigger plan for acknowledging them.