Chairman's Award -- is the bar too high now?

[mrnoble]

This year, we applied for chairman's for the first time since our rookie season in 2004, because we had been focused on community service for a number of years and we wanted to share that with the FIRST community. While I don't regret encouraging the team to apply, I currently feel neutral about the experience and the award. I am leaning toward not having the team go through the process again. Here are my reasons.

1) The type of work that we are doing doesn't seem to fit the model. Our team is using their skills in STEM and fundraising to meet needs in our community, and it makes a difference, and I'm really proud that they are doing this. But I am unclear on whether it is what the kind of stuff that the award is intended to honor. Not saying that what I see Chairman's winners doing is bad (clearly not); it's just not quite our style, I guess.

2) I thought that going through the application process would help the students better understand and appreciate what they are already doing, but I don't think it actually did that for them. They like doing the service work anyway, and keeping a tally seemed more to be a distraction than a focusing tool.

3) kind of related to #1, I'm not sure that there isn't an element of self-promotion for FIRST that goes into what is judged to be good Chairman's work. FLL is great of course, but it's pretty clear that no one is going to win the award if their team doesn't start or mentor FLL. This is a bad comparison, but it's just a little like the Coke company giving a humanitarian award to a person for saving a remote village from dying of thirst by providing them with Coke products.

4) the effort to make the video, write the paper and executive summary, and prepare the presentation was a distraction for some of my best students, who have told me that they regret having agreed to work on it. They would rather have had their hands in the robot and the service work, and I don't blame them.

5) Probably the biggest deal: I am guessing on all of this. Is the bar set too high? How would we know? Without direct feedback, all I can go on is what other teams share, and on stuff from the past. Kids are now feeling disappointed and frustrated; not because they didn't win, but because they don't know if what they worked so hard on telling the community about was just shouting into the wind.

Anyway, those are my current thoughts on the matter. Thanks to whoever revived this topic.

[MysterE]

After four years of submitting for Chairmans Award, we won it at the Bayou Regional. Did we do all of the outreach we did to win? No. Did we use the criteria of what a Chairmans Award team is supposed to be? Heck yes.

I think what most people don't realize is that a regional level, a Chairmans Award is definitely reachable. It's simply about finding a niche and filling it. Our team's success is based on firsts. We started the first offseason in the Bayou Regional, the first FTC Qualifier in the state, the first official Kickoff in the state. . . And so on. If you were to have asked me last year if winning a Chairmans is possible for every team. . . I'm not sure. But looking back, I can see our learning curve. You have to find your own magic. You have to determine what makes YOUR team worthy to be called a Chairmans team.

Now... Looking to the World level. We know that winning this year is a pipe dream. If it weren't then we'd already be done and we have so much farther to go. Still, It's not beyond our reach, just currently out of our grasp. It's not about what any other team has done either. It's the magic that we bring. What magic does your team bring? What makes your outreach distinct? What is it about your team that makes people stop and take notice? If you haven't figured that out yet; that would be the first step. Let's face it. Everyone does demos. Everyone talks to politicians. Everyone does a lot of things. . . But what do YOU do? Where is YOUR heart?

It's not impossible. It's hard. And the tears of the struggle will be made all that more sweet from the striving.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by MysterE

I think what most people don't realize is that a regional level, a Chairmans Award is definitely reachable.

This part of your post caught my attention.
I think in some respects, winning at a regional level can be more difficult than at the Championship level.


And I could go on for hours as to why.
The only thing I will say is that for us personally, winning any categorical award at the Hawaii regional is much much harder than it was when we started participating there at the inaugural 2008 event.

Congratulations to all that have won it this season and good luck at the Championships.

[JesseK]

My views have changed since this thread was started. I don't think the bar for outreach, education and scope of STEM is too high at all. In fact, there is much more to be done. FRC teams may remain the same size forever, but the programs that FRC teams start can grow and become their own self-sustaining entities. It takes incredible leadership, vision, diversity of thought and work ethic to get to that kind of level, however.

The bar is high with respect to the students writing and concisely presenting everything that has been done in a compressed format. That, combined with inconsistent or misinterpreted feedback makes it feel the bar is 'too high' I suppose. Yet I've learned that the success of outreach efforts and program growth never hinges on a single one thing a small set of individuals do in a judging room. Regardless of CA, ideas and programs which are full of merit at their core will continue to move forward.

Man, I can't believe I was the guy who typed some of the tangential vitriol. I am sorry Rich :-/ It was a weird high-pressure low-results time in my life. Just goes to show that 5 years ago, I didn't know Jack (and I probably still don't).

[YAK'ker]

I agree that each team needs to find their magic, but it helps if your wizard is well-versed at making a professional video.

I'd like to know if there are any teams out there who have won the CA in recent years that haven't had a great video. Yes, I realize there's a requirement that one be posted on youtube, but it also says this can be a converted powerpoint show (which is what ours was.)

I know Skunkworks won it at our Philomath district meet last weekend, but they didn't show their video (which was a surprise) but I bet it was pretty awesome.

For us, it's a lesson for teams/mentors: don't assign someone to make the video who isn't invested in the team. Because we had a student in our robotics class who didn't get engaged in any aspect of build, our instructor (we have 3 mentors, one is our robotics class instructor) assigned it the CA video-making to him. It was a complete joke and (fortunately?) violated youtube copyright policies (so we were able to take it down and redo it before competition.)

As faculty member, I do cringe when I see some of the videos that I know present grossly exaggerated claims of "rescuing high risk kids." Some teams really do that, I'm sure, but I find it difficult to believe some of the stats. I had to chuckle when I saw the comments above about rescuing 3rd-world students to be on the team, because some of the videos have gotten pretty close to ridiculous. I hear students coming out of the interviews saying "I pulled that statement right out of my ....."

We do the CA because we are a NASA sponsored team; however, I feel it is a worthwhile project that we will continue to do every year that we are able, simply because it helps us focus on our achievements and make a great sponsor video.

[mathking]

We won at Queen City in 2012 with a video whose sound track was completely messed up, so they ended up playing it silently.

We will always work to try to win the Chairman's Award, but I always tell the kids that when someone else wins its OK. It just means the message of FIRST is being spread even more broadly. We try to win because to win requires engaging everyone on the team not only to get involved in outreach, but to remember why the team exists in the first place. This year one of my team leaders for next year told me that when we were discussing all of the things we do that he hadn't realized we did half of the things we do. We have a big team, and tend to have a lot of irons in the fire. The kids know the big stuff we do every year, but there are lots of projects we get asked to help with that just a few kids do. The process of getting the submission ready is also our way to make sure each group of students is immersed in our core mission.