How do you feel about how the Autodesk award winners were decided?

[Evenstar_342]

First of all, the Design Subteam of Team 342 would like to congratulate Team 103 for winning the Autodesk Inventor Award.

I'll take the risk of speaking on behalf of the subteam. After much discussion through out the build season and after the top 5 were announced by students and mentor, we are very disappointed that Autodesk has chosen to have the award decided by student voting. With all due respect to our fellow FIRST students, we feel that even other design students (and overselves) could not possibly try and determine what, technically, is the best entry. We understand that to the best of our knowledge, the Autodesk Inventor award is to honor the best technical entry. Therefore, we are unsure how we, as students without the team's files or methodology, could decide which entry is technically, the superior (although we are biased, of course, and would like to thank all that voted for our entry).

We would like to see two things. Firstly, we feel that returning to the original judging by Autodesk judges, which was fair and impartial, is the best option. Unless Autodesk is trying to encourage teams to market their "product", which is a valid challenge and if so, this reason needs to be publicized; the voting process encourages students to create the best looking product and not necessarily the best technical product. We feel that deemphasizing the technical aspects of the award is sending a poor message to future designers. If Autodesk could clarify what they meant by changing the voting process (other than "we want to get the FIRST community more involved" which they did, in my opinion, poorly; almost no one knew about the contest or how to vote that I spoke to), it would be greatly appreciated.

Secondly, we would like to see the vote totals released for the overall contest (not per team, just how many people total voted). Therefore, we could see if our efforts helped get the word out about the change or whether we, as design teams, have a lot more work to do.

I don't mean to be beating up on Autodesk, these are just the general thoughts that are floating around our subteam as we review the past season. If anyone here is from Autodesk, we'd greatly appreciate any insight, especially if we've missed any sort of announcement about the award change. We also would love to see more teams submitting or at least looking at teams' Inventor work and if this inspires a student to delve more into Autodesk, than obviously that is a great development!Good luck to everyone next year!