FIRSTStar(TM) Rating

[Joe Johnson]

In thinking about how many teams won multiple regionals this year (and last year actually), I would like to have a one stop shopping list of the various regional & national award winners.

Does anyone have a spread sheet or a database with every award given at every regional FIRST has held?

How about just a list of Championships?

I am thinking about pulling together a sort of "Hall of Fame" document (perhaps as a white paper or perhaps a section on this website).

Maybe a better name would be a "FIRSTStar(TM) Rating" something like MorningStar does for mutual funds.

The idea would not be to rate teams or robots in any one year but to let folks get the picture of a teams historic performance.

I am thinking that one way of looking at the data would be to click on a team number and see the awards that that team has won over the years.

Another way would be to allow you to pick a criteria and compare teams based on that criteria (e.g. list the top 20 teams in terms of winning the Leadership in Controls Awards or list the top 20 teams in terms of winning regionals, etc.).

Once we have a database, it may be possible to have build your index type querries (e.g. list the top 20 teams that have been Rookie All-Stars and have been Chairman's Award winners or Finalist).

I think that this would be a worthy thing to keep up because FIRST is growing so fast that many really inspirational teams are popping up all around the country and we really have very little way of learning who they are and in what way they are great.

What do you think?

Joe J.

P.S. (I am addicted to these silly P.S.'s ) This came up at this time because my management was interested in knowing how many regionals our team has won over the year -- in fact, I didn't know and had to think hard about out to get the sums to come out right (7).

The next natural question is "Who else has won a lot of regionals and how many have they won?" I have no answer to this question. Shooting from the hip, I think Kingman (60) has won 6 (maybe more), Beatty/Hammond (71) has won 6 that I can count, I think Cheesy Poofs (254) have one 6 as well. Beyond that my brain gets even more foggy. There may be more teams that have won 6. How many have won 5 or 4 or 3 or 2 or even 1? We (or at least I) don't know! This is where the FIRSTStar Rating service would be a very useful service to have around.

[Wetzel]

What do I think?
I think I am going to eat lunch now.
Oh, about FIRSTStar? I think it would be a very cool and useful tool. Yay databases.^_^

[JVN]

I think this is a good idea. But there are so many great teams out there who haven't won, either because of bad luck, or whatever. I think there are lots of teams out there with stories that need to be told. Is there anyway that attached to this there could be a brief bio about a team? That way the teams who aren't lucky enough to win 7 (wow...) regionals can still get their name out there.

I mean, why limit these team histories to just winners?
(of course, you could also make this searchable by awards/wins/whatever)

Could a white paper do it justice? What about a type of database?

I dunno, just throwing ideas out there...

~JVN
Strategy Head
Team 229 - Clarkson University
"Close but no cigar"

3rd Place Alliance - Buckeye Regional
4th Place Alliance - Canadian Regional

[Don Taylor]

I agree that this is a great Idea. I'll start with the stats from our Team, Team 343 M-n-M. Our first year was 2000 where we played in only 1 regional at KSC, and were first runner up losing in the 3rd match of the Finals to Baxter Bomb Squad and Heat wave.

In 2001 we played in 2 regionals KSC and Langley and won both of them.

In 2002 we played in 2 regionals KSC and St. Louis and won both of them.

We didn't do particularly well in the competition at the nationals in 2000 or 2001, however we did win Rookie of the Year in 2000 and the Inaugural Kliener Perkins Caufield and Byars Entrepreneurship aware at the Nationals in 2001.

Don Taylor
M-n-M

PS If other teams will post their stats here I would be willing to put all of the data in a spreadsheet, the only question then is where do we store the spreadsheet at, I guess we can figure that out later.

[rees2001]

WOW,
I thought we were doing pretty well for a 3rd year team. You guys have been rockin'. Here's our list. If you get one of these from each team you'll be working till next season. Maybe have a place we can go in & input our own data. I don't think anybody would lie.
2000 NJ rookie of the year
2000 NJ finalist
2001 spbli #1 seed
2001 spbli imagery award
2001 Galileo Division Champs
2002 NYC Delphi award

[soap108]

Originally posted by JVN
I think this is a good idea.
...
(of course, you could also make this searchable by awards/wins/whatever)
...
What about a type of database?
...
~JVN

I'm sure we can make this available at some point.

SOAP Team,
Team 108 - SigmaC@T
www.soap108.com

[team222badbrad]

This website may help in looking up information.

http://www.waybackmachine.org/

Go to that website and type in www.usfirst.org

This website will take you back to the year of 1996 and it shows you what the website used to look like (laugh) and it might just tell you who won and who got what awards.

[Brandon Martus]

Originally posted by soap108
I'm sure we can make this available at some point.

ditto...

wouldnt be that hard to do a little database to keep track of every team & their awards for every year, etc.. and then have custom queries.

( # of chairmans awards winners who won 3 regionals, etc)

wait a sec .. what am i getting myself into [j/k]

[Mark Pierce]

I'd sure like to see this also.

I've combined all of this year's seeding and award results into one spreadsheet, and will try and format it enough to post as a white paper later this week. It seems to me this might be useful for teams heading on to National or just curious. It's a lot of cutting and pasting for everyone interested to have to do.

[mpking]

Hey Joe. Tj² came up on this problem last year, and my solution was to start writing everything down in one long document.

I publish it on our homepage, and if this project gets off the ground, I will glady add the data to it.

http://www.tj2.org/accomplishments.htm


I don't really see this database as a useful tool for the teams themselves at competitions, but I think it would be highly useful for teams to keep track of themselves, and to allow teams to compare themselve to others.

For instance, Tj² has never won a regional.

Ever.

We have finished 2nd in NJ 3 times, and have finished in the top 10 one time. We have had the number one seed at flordia before, and the inaugreal winner of the Woody Flowers award went to our team leader, Mrs Calef. We have won or placed second at numerous out of FIRST events (Rumble at the Rock, BattleCry), and have won the several of the Judged awards.

I'm not going to list every award and accomplishment we've gotten, that's the purpose of that webpage, and besides, it'd be very long.

On average, we average out very high. Please ignore 2001, we can't explain it. :-)

Mike
Webmaster of Team 88

[Mike Carron]

I hate to correct my fellow Metal-In-Motion teammate, but we have a few more awards to throw into the mix. Here is the complete list for our three years of existence so far....

2000 KSC Finalist
2000 KSC Motorola Quality
2000 National Rookie All-Star

2001 KSC Champion
2001 KSC Judges Award
2001 Langley Champion
2001 Langley Industrial Design
2001 Langley Incredible Play
2001 National KPCB Award

2002 KSC Champion
2002 KSC KPCB Award
2002 St. Louis Champion
2002 St. Louis Chairman's Award (our favorite!)
2002 National .......

[Joel J]

Originally posted by mpking
Hey Joe. Tj² came up on this problem last year, and my solution was to start writing everything down in one long document.

I publish it on our homepage, and if this project gets off the ground, I will glady add the data to it.

http://www.tj2.org/accomplishments.htm


I don't really see this database as a useful tool for the teams themselves at competitions, but I think it would be highly useful for teams to keep track of themselves, and to allow teams to compare themselve to others.

For instance, Tj² has never won a regional.

Ever.

We have finished 2nd in NJ 3 times, and have finished in the top 10 one time. We have had the number one seed at flordia before, and the inaugreal winner of the Woody Flowers award went to our team leader, Mrs Calef. We have won or placed second at numerous out of FIRST events (Rumble at the Rock, BattleCry), and have won the several of the Judged awards.

I'm not going to list every award and accomplishment we've gotten, that's the purpose of that webpage, and besides, it'd be very long.

On average, we average out very high. Please ignore 2001, we can't explain it. :-)

Mike
Webmaster of Team 88

Yea, about that page .. didn't you guys go to the NE regional?

[JVN]

Hey,
I went to the WaybackMachine.com website (way cool, thanks a lot Brad!) and downloaded a bunch of the FIRST material. I have the list of teams for every year (1992-2001) the winners, and award winners from every regional (1995-2001) compiled into one .zip file. It's pretty overwhelming, a lot of history there. Now who wants to sort it into a database? haha.

It is posted here-->http://www.clarkson.edu/~vielkije/First%20Archives.zip

That is my Clarkson FTP space, so it should be safe surfing for those who worry...

If anyone has any of the regional results from way back in the day (pre-'95). Or if anyone has the results from 1995 New England (for some reason I couldnt get those) send em, and I will update the file.

~JVN
Strategy Head
Team 229 - Clarkson University

PS - Is this something that should be in whitepapers?

this is a really great idea...... ive been meaning to dig into my teams history and this gives me an excuse..... we have over 20 trophys from the past 8 years and i think it might be time to track them all down........ we have had a lot of success this year and we finally talked to principal into removing random chorus football trophys from 10-20 years ago to give us our own trophy case..... to a lot of teams this might not seam that exciting, but our team doesnt get a lot of recognition in our school (i know theres teams out there that know what that feels like too)

[Joe Johnson]

There may be a way to get the data straight from FIRST.

If we did, we need to think about what type of system we would like to set up.

Any more ideas for useful rating systems?

For example maybe a Chairman's Award Rating which would include some combination of Winning THE Chairman's Award, Regional Chairman's Awards, and being a Chairman's Award finalist.

Any other thoughts?

Joe J.