Something New – Chairman’s Award Eligibility

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Perhaps it's just how it's worded, but I didn't get a great feeling from this part of Frank's statement. I like to see teams recognized for what they do anyway, not do special things to get recognized. For example, we mentor elementary school teams in our local area because it's the right thing to do, and we want to get more students involved in robotics, not because we're competing to win an award for doing that. The minute you start mentoring or outreach for the purpose of winning an award, in my mind you have already lost.

I totally agree with this. When I was preparing our 2013 submission, I had to steer everybody-- including mentors who have been with the team for years-- away from the mentality of "we're doing it for Chairman's." Lo and behold, the year we approached it from that direction was our first RCA. To be honest, it's not entirely rooted out, but at least the lead mentors have seen that that sort of attitude is a problem-- I doubt it will persist much longer, at least on my team.

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I hate how Chairman's awards have become so based upon quantitative evidence, that often gets pretty far stretched. I can say that our program has reached over 10,000 students, with some validity to that claim. However, if you went and surveyed those 10,000 people and asked them personally if our program has had an impact on them, chances are 9,000 or more would say no.

To be honest, I haven't really seen that sort of exaggeration as a problem, at least at the regional level in my state. That doesn't mean it isn't there in some areas-- it may just be that the Minnesota FIRST community is too young to have a significant problem with it-- last year was probably the first year that more than five Minnesota FIRST teams competed for RCA at each regional (I don't know the exact statistics, but the number has been dreadfully low for a long time).

In my experience at least, the judges have been very good about asking where numbers come from that we like to throw at them (especially really large ones). Part of the reason I think we hear the large numbers when the judges are describing the team is for shock value-- "Holy crap, they have 50 FLL teams?! (an exaggeration, to be sure, but I think the point is there)." It's less a "personal" award (like the Dean's List or WFF/WF award), and more an award for the entire team-- right? Plus there tend to be engineers on the panel, and we all know how much engineers love numbers!

Originally Posted by sanddrag

The Chairman's award needs less emphasis on the numbers of students we reach, teams we start, or relationships we build, and more emphasis on the qualityof such programs, and the stories behind them.

I agree with this, with the caveat that I think most successful RCA/CCA winners do both. It's the ones that submit and don't win it-- those are the ones who approach it from a single direction. I haven't been at an event yet where it wasn't a team that deserved the Chairman's Award that won it, and I don't see that changing with this system.