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

[Skute327]

I personally don't agree with the voting system at all, and I wrote the following to the autodesk feedback section

I Highly dislike the voting system, it is very unfair. it turns the award into a popularity contest. a larger team has a huge advantage, and most teams have not even heard of this site , and don't have accounts here, it is difficult to create an account, I am student team leader and it took me 2 days to find out my "team password" so I could create an account to vote for my own team. many people don't understand the idea of the award, and aren't sure who to vote for, if voting system is kept, it should 1 be more publicized, 2 be easy to sign up for, and 3 be one vote per team.


after reading again, and posting here i realize it was a little harsh and not very GP, the way i worded it, but i do feel this way.

I don't think having voting by peers is professional by any means. With voting, the most colors or special effects wins. Most don't take into account the difficulty of projects among other things.

I completely agree with this, and I couldn't have worded it better!

[pmax]

Folks,

First off, congratulations to _all_ the teams for their hard work and a great season. It is encouraging to see the quality of both the designs and teamwork improve year to year.

We appreciate the comments and want you to know we are listening. This was a pilot year in a peer voting method, and of course we want to improve upon it in the coming years. Keep the comments coming, especially while they are fresh in your mind, and know that they can have an impact on how we structure the award in the future.

Kind regards,
Pete

[Ben Martin]

What if, on Autodesk FIRSTbase, the main contact of each team designated one student to score the Autodesk Inventor award? This student could score each of the top five entries like Autodesk scores them. The downside here, though, is that you still have the chance that the student picks the entry with the most outstanding graphics.

In addition, we could include the opinion of Autodesk as well. Autodesk could take their score and add it to the average scores of all the teams. The team with the highest combined score would be declared the winner.

In this way, Autodesk gets 50% of the input on the winner, and FIRST Robotics students get the other 50%.

Anyway, it's just an idea.

[R Stephenson]

... i didn't like how it was 100% voting, because it ended up being a popularity contest. and not about the work but i think there still should be a vote, keeping the students involved.

Autodesk gets 50% of the input on the winner, and FIRST Robotics students get the other 50%.

This is exactly what i was thinking but with more Autodesk involvement also like the idea of one vote per team it gets rid of big teams having an advantage, the registering process has to be much easier it took a while to register which probably turned people away from voting.

I would like to see regional awards for CAD that would give the little guys a chance.

I like the idea, don't really know how to do it, but maybe something on a smaller scale, like having a best in country .. and maybe because of the number of teams in the US have a best in the region such as "best in New England"

[Daniel Brim]

I don't like student voting.

I don't like an all-Autodesk vote, either.

Perhaps it is time for Autodesk to kick voting up a notch. I want the feedback (and votes) from people who use the respective software (Inventor and 3DSmax) for their job/career. I want to know how people who are closer to a real design process (read: engineers) to decide which design process/CAD integration is the best.

In short, I think that the awards should be decided by Engineers (Inventor award) and Animators who use the software in question to judge the entries. Thoughts?

[Robert Thacker-]

I think that's a good idea that Daniel Brim suggested. The problem is that the top guys in the nation who use the program professionally may not care about FIRST and may not wnat to find the time to take place in judging. It's a harsh reality that Autodesk may have to face. I have no idea about animation, but I know Inventor is usually judged by very well-qualified people. Although knowing what kind of people who judge the awards would be cool. As in what THEY use the program for and perhaps some examples of their CAD work. (I'm curious if I could possibly top their work too - lol)

[Skute327]

I'm in favor of the split-scoring system. Autodesk first selects 5/10 finalists for each award. The Autodesk judges each get an input, and the voters/peer scorers get a certain input. The weighting of each input is evaluated by Autodesk.
The criteria should be technical in nature, but beautiful graphics, marketing, and detail should play a role as well. In reality, you don't only have to create your design, you have to market it. Your design may be perfect, but if a/your company doesn't want to make it, it's worthless.

the idea of the award is not to try to sell anything. inventor is a program to help design a product not sell it. Agreed, detail and ''pritty colors" are important for the business/ marketing end but in my opinion aren't nessissary to the drawing. i believe the most accurate representation of the team's robot should "win"

[petek]

Originally Posted by Skute327

the idea of the award is not to try to sell anything. inventor is a program to help design a product not sell it. Agreed, detail and ''pritty colors" are important for the business/ marketing end but in my opinion aren't nessissary to the drawing. i believe the most accurate representation of the team's robot should "win"

I don't mean to pick on you, but in my experience there are often times when designs are used to sell a project to a customer. In these cases the presentation is very important, and how well the model conveys the final appearance may be as important as how well it explains basic functions. I see the Inventor Award as a way students can learn these skills and marketing techniques.

A recent case in point: my department provides engineering services for the company's scientific groups and we recently completed the development of a high speed reagent dispenser for the biologists. We worked with the biologists to determine the best device to fill their needs, which included surveying and testing commercial instruments as well as proposing our own proprietary device. That meant that we had to "sell" our device as a design concept vs. actual instruments they could bring in the lab and test.

We were working with an external engineering company who provided basic designs and layouts in AutoCAD 2D format. The biologists found it difficult to grasp the functional concepts that way, so I created Inventor models from the ACAD files, including an animation of the product transport system and a concept model of the overall instrument package. As soon as the biology department leader saw those he went from a tentative and wary "customer" to an enthusiastic supporter of the project. Being able to visualize the instrument in his lab was a very important factor in getting his approval.

By the way, that external engineering company has since begun using Inventor and the project was very successful - providing our biologists with the best solution for their needs and giving the company a competitive advantage in what's know as "high throughput screening".

[Evenstar_342]

I definetly agree that how something looks or is packaged can help make a sucessful engineering product. I think that the controversy (at least in my team), is that the Inventor award is supposed to be for technical excellence. If Autodesk wants to include that a portion of each entry's score is based upon how well they've packaged their design (which I think is a great idea, as the world gets more globalised and more competative, we all should learn some marketing skills), that's fine. I think what we're having a problem with is that we're not sure whether we should be marketing our design, or even what criteria we're truly being judged on during peer voting, since everyone has a different set of criteria.

[Daniel_H]

Judging Criteria

Judges will review all entries. Five finalists will be selected to advance to peer voting.

In scoring your entry, judges will address specific criteria:

Robot Design 50 points
Technical Expertise 30 points
Presentation of final design 20 points

TOTAL POINTS: 100 points

This was taken from FIRSTbase website, I believe that's the way Inventor Award should be judged by other people too, not only for the judging of the top 5.
The only way to judge properly these 3 areas is looking carefully at the Inventor file and reading all the website that the team developed, but to do that you have to know the software very well.

[JasJ002]

There is no way to make a voting system that is non biased. Even if you were to make one person per team give a score for every other team, what would stop a team from simply getting every sister team to give them hundreds and everybody else zero's. I'm not saying that cheating would be rampant but it is peoples natural instinct to favor themselves or those close to them.

Although you are all looking for a perfect system, there is none. As long as we know how the award will be judged, teams will always be able to adapt their award to fit the criteria.

Also you do want an aesthetically pleasing design. I know for a fact that the Air Force uses programs like Inventor to prepare their Alpha prototyping. This is how you sell a product, because you cannot simply make a 2 million dollar aircraft to show off.

Overall it shouldn't matter how the award is decided, it will never be 100% fair, but this is still by far an award with one of the most spelled out definitions every year, you know exactly what to look for in a submission.

[Robert Thacker-]

Originally Posted by JasJ002

There is no way to make a voting system that is non biased. Even if you were to make one person per team give a score for every other team, what would stop a team from simply getting every sister team to give them hundreds and everybody else zero's. I'm not saying that cheating would be rampant but it is peoples natural instinct to favor themselves or those close to them.

Although you are all looking for a perfect system, there is none. As long as we know how the award will be judged, teams will always be able to adapt their award to fit the criteria.

Also you do want an aesthetically pleasing design. I know for a fact that the Air Force uses programs like Inventor to prepare their Alpha prototyping. This is how you sell a product, because you cannot simply make a 2 million dollar aircraft to show off.

Overall it shouldn't matter how the award is decided, it will never be 100% fair, but this is still by far an award with one of the most spelled out definitions every year, you know exactly what to look for in a submission.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Padre_Vez]

At first I thought the voting would be a poularity contest. So I thought our team would not come in first. However maybe your right and just alot of people like our team.

Anyway thanks to all the teams that voted for us at nationals, and if anyone has any questions I would love to help.

[Lil' Lavery]

I'm in favor of the split-scoring system. Autodesk first selects 5/10 finalists for each award. The Autodesk judges each get an input, and the voters/peer scorers get a certain input. The weighting of each input is evaluated by Autodesk.
The criteria should be technical in nature, but beautiful graphics, marketing, and detail should play a role as well. In reality, you don't only have to create your design, you have to market it. Your design may be perfect, but if a/your company doesn't want to make it, it's worthless.

[Evenstar_342]

I know that this is digging up an old issue (and probably a lot of angst ), but Autodesk FIRSTbase recently sent out an e-mail survey asking for your imput on this season's awards voting and other services offered by FIRSTbase. I responded to the survery with a lot of the same viewpoints that I've espoused in this thread, and I'm just curious to see how many people have done the same and whether you think if there is a big enough response to do away with the voting or change some aspect of the competition whether something will change?