[FRC Blog] Chairman’s Award Submissions Definitions

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

There are a lot of schools and students who don't have every opportunity to be on a robotics teams, any type of competitive STEM team. It's my belief that we should all be trying to support the grow of all STEM education. I love FRC but there are tones of schools where an FRC team just doesn't make sense, maybe FTC does, or VEX, BEST, Botball, Trinity Firefighting, OCCRA, MATE, or any of the other dozens of programs that want to inspire students to learn more about STEM.

I'd be interested to know how the HOF teams felt about this since the way the blog reads these definitions were published by them.

During the creation of these definitions there was no discussion about including other types of programs in this new common set of terminology. We were working within the pre-exisiting framework and written criteria and just ran with it. There was absolutely no intent or direction to exclude other types of robotics programs. However, creating these type of specific definitions would have been much harder if we weren't applying them to specific programs.

I think my feelings are well known on this topic; inspiring students to get excited by STEM is the goal, it really doesn't matter what program they use to achieve this goal. I would hope the judges continue to award teams who are inspiring by promoting this vision via any avenue, as they did for 1114 in 2012.