Changes to Chairman's

[Jacob Bendicksen]

Hey all,
It looks like there's been some changes to the Executive Summary. Everything is still 500 characters, but the prompts have changed.

Briefly describe the impact of the FIRST program on team participants with special emphasis on the 2013/2014 year and the preceding two to five years
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the impact of the FIRST program on your community with special emphasis on the 2013/2014 year and the preceding two to five years
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Team's innovative or creative method to spread the FIRST message
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe examples of how your team members act as role models and inspire other FIRST team members to emulate
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the team's initiatives to help start or form other FRC teams
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the team's initiatives to help start or form other FIRST teams (including Jr.FLL, FLL, & FTC)
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the team's initiatives on assisting other FIRST teams (including Jr.FLL, FLL, FTC, & FRC) with progressing through the FIRST program
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe how your team works with other FIRST teams to serve as mentors to younger or less experienced FIRST teams (includes Jr.FLL, FLL, FTC, & FRC teams)
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe your Corporate/University Sponsors
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the strength of your partnership with your sponsors with special emphasis on the 2013/2014 year and the preceding two to five years
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe how your team would explain what FIRST is to someone who has never heard of it
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Briefly describe other matters of interest to the FIRST judges, if any
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

[joelg236]

Is every prompt different? If not I'd like to see the specific differences.

[Tottanka]

Where are those questions coming from?
The manual doesn't have The Awards section yet.

[cgmv123]

Submission in STIMS must be open. I'm not my team's submitter, so I can't check for sure.

[E. Wood]

I will be a bit disappointed if FIRST made this large of a change without some up front notice in an Email Blast or on the FRC Blog. Some teams, including ours, write these documents in October and November so that we have time to finish other tasks during the build season. The responses to the prompts are carefully crafted and can take weeks to finalize in my experience and would require weeks of rework to correct if the prompts have changed.

[PayneTrain]

It looks like these are the biggest changes.

Prompts that seem to have been added or split off of older prompts:

Describe the team's initiatives to help start or form other FRC teams
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the team's initiatives to help start or form other FIRST teams (including Jr.FLL, FLL, & FTC)
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the team's initiatives on assisting other FIRST teams (including Jr.FLL, FLL, FTC, & FRC) with progressing through the FIRST program
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe how your team works with other FIRST teams to serve as mentors to younger or less experienced FIRST teams (includes Jr.FLL, FLL, FTC, & FRC teams)
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe how your team would explain what FIRST is to someone who has never heard of it
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

On top of that, the "window" for the award seems to have expanded from the previous 3 years to the previous 5 years. I assume others will pick up on more changes than this.

[Jacob Bendicksen]

Yeah, they're from STIMS. I'm kinda disappointed, too (I had written drafts for everything, but now I can't actually submit those). I'm surprised at how much they focus on other FIRST programs now, but the 'describing FIRST' one should have been there a long time ago.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by E. Wood

I will be a bit disappointed if FIRST made this large of a change without some up front notice in an Email Blast or on the FRC Blog. Some teams, including ours, write these documents in October and November so that we have time to finish other tasks during the build season. The responses to the prompts are carefully crafted and can take weeks to finalize in my experience and would require weeks of rework to correct if the prompts have changed.

11 also does this.

Not a big deal, but some notice would have been nice.

[Karthik]

Here are the 2013 Executive Summary fields:

Briefly describe the impact of the FIRST program on team participants with special emphasis on the 2012/2013 year and the preceding two years
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Examples of role model characteristics for other teams to emulate
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the impact of the FIRST program on your team and community with special emphasis on the 2012/2013 year and the preceding two years
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Team’s innovative methods to spread the FIRST message
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Describe the strength of your partnership with special emphasis on the 2012/2013 year and the preceding two years
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Team’s communication methods and results
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Other matters of interest to the FIRST judges, if any
(500 characters allowed, including spaces and punctuation)

Overall I think the new list is a big improvement for submitting teams, and will make life easier for the judges. (This is even more important this season, since the volume of submissions judges will be seeing at the local is increasing due to the multiple event submission rule.) Some thoughts:

- Going from 3500 to 6000 characters will be a huge relief for the top teams, who never seem to have enough room to get all their points in.
- Shifting the focus from the past 3 years to the past 6 is also beneficial for the teams competing at the highest level, as it allows them to demonstrate a sustained historical level of effort.
- Would have liked to have seen a specific section on media and social media impact. This can be fit into a bunch of areas, but now with the elimination of the "Teams communication methods and results" question, it's going to have to be forced into other areas.
- There's definitely a push to see full details of how the team has helped grow the FIRST family of programs. Calling this out is important, as it makes it easier for judges to find the quantifiable statistics on growth, however I hope it doesn't mean that they're only focusing on FIRST growth. Many FRC teams (including Hall of Fame teams) have done a lot of work promoting STEM education via other programs. It would be disappointing if this new emphasis on FIRST programs, begins to preclude teams who also support other STEM programs.

[Tottanka]

Is it ok to rely on those questions as the official 204 questions, or not yet?
What do you guys think?

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Karthik

- There's definitely a push to see full details of how the team has helped grow the FIRST family of programs. Calling this out is important, as it makes it easier for judges to find the quantifiable statistics on growth, however I hope it doesn't mean that they're only focusing on FIRST growth. Many FRC teams (including Hall of Fame teams) have done a lot of work promoting STEM education via other programs. It would be disappointing if this new emphasis on FIRST programs, begins to preclude teams who also support other STEM programs.

I was thinking about this as well. Hypothetically, my loophole would be to talk about how FIRST involvement influenced my team to start other STEM programs, such as VRC or VEXIQ, BEST, etc. The "Message of FIRST" prompt would also be a place to talk about how spreading the ideals learned from FIRST can be done through various programs. If the judges are explicitly told by FIRST to find lesser value in entries that mention other programs, I would be disappointed, but I don't think that will happen.

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

I was thinking about this as well. Hypothetically, my loophole would be to talk about how FIRST involvement influenced my team to start other STEM programs, such as VRC or VEXIQ, BEST, etc. The "Message of FIRST" prompt would also be a place to talk about how spreading the ideals learned from FIRST can be done through various programs.

Yup, there's also plenty of other spots other than those specific Executive Summary questions where this can be addressed.

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

If the judges are explicitly told by FIRST to find lesser value in entries that mention other programs, I would be disappointed, but I don't think that will happen.

Agreed, I highly doubt that these sorts of efforts would be discouraged. Especially since they've been rewarded at the highest levels of FIRST in the very recent past.

[Dantvman27]

I am also displeased with the re-word of the award criteria. It seems to me the award has gone from what team best spreads a love and appreciation for science, technology, learning, etc. to "what team best spreads FIRST to the most schools, and keeps it that way." I understand what they are going for, but it looks like they have narrowed it saying "The only way to accomplish our goal is with FIRST teams. All other endeavors aren't as good." Might not be their intent, but it's how it reads. I've been thinking a lot about this over the past few days, because I didn't want to write just a gut reactionary response to the change, but I can't think of it any other way. Just my two cents, looking to see what others think