2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[SarahBeth]

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

I agree with this, completely. We submitted for the first time this year and it was very very overwhelming and it took reading the manual many times to figure out exactly what we were going to be judged on, and trying to figure out what the presentation judges were looking for - and even THEN I missed the fact that there's another release that needs to be signed for your DVD to be shown if you win, which is IN the manual but kinda buried.

Some clarification would have been so helpful throughout the process. Thankfully, we were able to talk to some teams who had done it before and they were happy to help us out - and it was an excellent experience all around for our kids. Now having done it once, doing it again hopefully won't be that daunting and we won't be rehearsing our presentation at 11pm the night before in the hotel lobby. (I swear, my students wanted to kill me for the fact I made them do it in front of people)