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Unread 30-03-2015, 00:30
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mrnoble mrnoble is offline
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Re: Chairman's Award -- is the bar too high now?

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.

Last edited by mrnoble : 30-03-2015 at 00:35. Reason: Just adding a bit
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