First of all, for somebody who has streamline handy (I do not), how many teams entered the Inventor award this year? How does this compare to last year? If the AIA has a substantial rate of growth, this could be a case to make to FIRST about a regional award.
Also, have you sent for your score yet? If so, what did you get and where did you place? How did this compare to last year?
This year we received 75 points and 11th place. Not bad for a 1 person team. This was significantly down from our 2004 score of 98 points. However, it is entirely possible that all scores went down and therefore there was a steeper curve. I’m now curious to see where we placed in 2004 (but it’s too late to find out, I guess).
I think that one should work like the inverse. FIRST should not wait for more people to do Inventor in order to make an award for it, they should make an award which will cause more people to do Inventor. Do you think they waited until someone built a quality robot for them to make a Quality award? I think the presence of awards should influence robot designs and team progress, not robot designs and team progress influence the presence of awards.
Sorry for the slight diversion, now back on topic…
I just opened streamline and counted 55 entries (excluding empty folders).
I sent in & received our score today. I have no problem sharing our score, but I want to check with our mentor be for posting it (I don’t think he will care, but I’d rather check). This is our first award submission, but we have done CAD in previous years. For the 4 years I’ve been on the team we have done some CAD each year, more & better the more recent. The part of CAD that I was most pleased with this year was drawing most parts before they were made, we have a history of building with the “design on the fly” style.
We had more CAD people this year than we did last year. Most of the work last year was done by one student, this year we had 3 students and 1 mainly CAD mentor. One of the biggest challenge is keeping track of who’s doing what and which files are the most recent. On a side note what methods of management have people found effective, I’m curious to see what others do to handle the madness?
On the side note of further Inventor Award recognition, with 30 regionals this year and 55 entries, regional awards could be hard with each regional maybe having only one or zero entries. Until more awards are submitted I think it would be a good idea to recognize a winner and a runner up or two at Championship.