FIRST Israel Awards

[FIRST Israel]

As the Regional Director for FIRST Israel, I want to first thank everyone for their concern for the Israeli students, and to clarify the awards situation. The Regional Website Award will be given at our Regional. The students will compete for the Autodesk animation award at the Championship level. If we can find animation judges here in Israel, in the next week (as our Regional is two weeks away), we may have a Regional Autodesk award. It was never the intention to withhold hard-earned awards from our students; there was simply a misunderstanding, which led to miscommunication (lesson!!!). Not all awards will be given at our event simply because there are only 12 teams competing, and because some of the awards are not relevant to us this year. Please be assured that the decisions over which awards to hand out were carefully made between myself (a 5 year FIRST veteran & Lavery mentoree ) and FIRST HQ.

Again, it is wonderful to see so much support for the Israeli students from the FIRST community. If there are further questions over this issue, please feel free to contact me at first_Israel@yahoo.com.

Good luck to all the teams! Hope everyone gets some sleep Tuesday night! (after the parties of course )

[Rich Kressly]

Great news, great response, and an awesome example of what happens when people work together to solve problems. Thanks to all who expressed their concern, to Dave for addressing the issue professionally, and especially to FIRST Israel for providing this awesome opportunity for students!

[Leav]

Originally Posted by Rich Kressly

Great news, great response, and an awesome example of what happens when people work together to solve problems. Thanks to all who expressed their concern, to Dave for addressing the issue professionally, and especially to FIRST Israel for providing this awesome opportunity for students!

I would like to second Rich's comments, and add a thanks to him, for starting the "CD Awards for Israeli FIRST students" . that meant allot Rich!

As this is the first year there has been a FIRST competition in Israel, it is only natural for some inevitable misunderstandings and mistakes to occur, but overall FIRST Israel has take amazing care of all of our teams, they have done everything in their power to minimize our dealings with bureaucracy, and maximize our learning experience!

-Leav