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

[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.