Creativity Award to Champs

[pabeekm]

This reminds me of a post someone made awhile back about making a scouting award. It prompted this comment:

Originally Posted by Chris is me

The Scouting Award exists. It's called "Championship Winner".

Along a similar vein, I think creative approaches to the game challenge should be appreciated as just that: approaches to the game challenge. I’m a little worried about what will happen if people perceive creative ideas as just something you would do for a highly valuable award.

I don't want to see people deciding that teams' creative designs are made for the sake of being flashy and not for competitiveness (trust me, that kind of judgement happens enough already). That attitude easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because a lot of unorthodox strategies don’t seed well and rely on alliance captains seeing their competitive potential.

This idea could actually make it harder for creative bots to succeed in competition. Yay, pessimism!

I'm sorry OP, it's a very nice thought. Maybe a better way to promote creativity is to expose more people to the ways effective creative teams operate. 1114's strategy presentations are a great start, for example (http://www.simbotics.org/resources/strategy).

[SndMndBdy]

I had a similar thought a couple of years ago about sending creative robots to championships, and sent a note to FIRST with the idea. I mentioned different awards but was referring to roughly the same concept as the original poster. They responded with a blog post in which they basically said it wasn't feasible because of a limit to the number of teams at championships:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=130152

[marshall]

Originally Posted by pabeekm

This reminds me of a post someone made awhile back about making a scouting award. It prompted this comment:


Along a similar vein, I think creative approaches to the game challenge should be appreciated as just that: approaches to the game challenge. I’m a little worried about what will happen if people perceive creative ideas as just something you would do for a highly valuable award.

I don't want to see people deciding that teams' creative designs are made for the sake of being flashy and not for competitiveness (trust me, that kind of judgement happens enough already). That attitude easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because a lot of unorthodox strategies don’t seed well and rely on alliance captains seeing their competitive potential.

This idea could actually make it harder for creative bots to succeed in competition. Yay, pessimism!

I'm sorry OP, it's a very nice thought. Maybe a better way to promote creativity is to expose more people to the ways effective creative teams operate. 1114's strategy presentations are a great start, for example (http://www.simbotics.org/resources/strategy).

Always with the good answers...

[Bob Steele]

I hope you understand that there is an unwritten hierarchy of awards at events and creativity, although an important award, is not at the top of the robot awards. When judges look at the possible candidates for awards, often creative designs are also solid in many other respects. Good teams are often up for many awards.

Examples are 1519 that you mentioned and 1023
Team 1519 won Innovation in Control, Entrepreneurship, and the Excellence in Engineering award along with a District Chairman's Award at their various events prior to CMP.

Team 1023 won Gracious Professionalism, the Quality Award and Chairman's Award at their events...

This does not mean that they were not especially creative... or that they couldn't have won that award too...but awards are spread out.

I would just be wary of the creativity award. At smaller events it may not be given for anything more than a unique design feature.... it does not even have to work very well.... Many great teams have won this award at both regional and district events.... but often teams with creative designs that work win the other robot awards like Quality or Engineering Excellence or Industrial Design.

I am not saying that creativity awards are not given for really great ideas and great engineering but rather that often teams with great creative ideas that work have entire robots that work extremely well and therefore are put in for the other robot awards by the judges.