[FRC Blog] Software Downloads and Administrative Manual Release

[wilsonmw04]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Reading this blog from Frank makes me feel like my 2014 FRC end of the year feedback survey responses were really read in detail, taken seriously, and given a lot of individual thought, and not just aggregated into a pie chart. It's nice for an individual to feel as if he or she has influenced an organization's policies and procedures on a national level.

I agree with the changes made to the Chairman's Award process for 2015, and I hope to see good things come from these changes.

You are actually ok with the complete removal of feed back? I have never given or received any sort of evaluation without some sort of feedback mechanism. If the only feed back a team get is the winner's "project," I fear the a lot of innovation will be removed from the "solutions" that earned Chairman's. Without some sort of constructive criticism, all projects will begin to look alike and a RCA arms race will ensue. Team X mentored 25 FLL teams? We need to do 35 next year! Oh, Team Y (not the Y team) did X at the Uber California regional, let's do that same thing here!

How do I know this, Matt? That seems awfully cynical.

Because I do project based learning in my classroom on a regular basis. Every year I get the same thing from students: "Do you have any examples of a good project?" "What does a good project look like?" One year I caved in and I gave them a few good examples. At the end of the project the vast majority of them were copies of those "example" projects. It was really disheartening.

Without proper rubrics and feedback, teams will go with what they think works. This means more and more submissions will look more and more alike.