I came up with an idea, looking to others to help refine it and see if it makes sense.
Currently, teams get trophies and plaques (2016) for awards that FIRST provides. What if we did things a little differently than the typical sports model here? We do lots of other things differently and I think this idea follows the pattern.
FIRST would publish trophy guidelines, for example:
Size restriction – trophies must be no larger than some HxWxL. (This assures trophies will fit on the awards tables and teams can plan in advance for pit Trophy displays that will accommodate the hardware.
FIRST Logo - trophies must have FIRST logo of at least size x, and in accordance with FIRST branding requirements.
Trophy must have X by Y inch area for affixing a brass plate (provided by FIRST), containing the award name/year etc.
The producer of the trophy must include their team # and name on the bottom of the trophy.
Maybe others relating to weight, materials, fragility/robustness, etc.
Teams would be invited to build award hardware (as many as they want) that meets the guidelines and bring these to events and turn them in to pit admin.
A set of students volunteer (maybe limited to those from teams that chose not to submit trophies?) to ‘judge’ the trophies and identify which trophies will be used for which awards— e.g. the most awesome trophie for Chairman’s, the 2nd-4th most awesome for Winners (in captain, 1st pick, 2nd pick order) and so on. Maybe the students are chosen by drawing if there are too many who wish to do it. Event staff may have to shuffle things around so that a team isn’t awarded a trophy they made (or maybe that’s ok?)
Unused trophies are returned to teams that donated them early on Saturday morning (last competition day). They might choose to affix their own brass plate and do a peer award.
Benefits:
FIRST doesn’t need to provide trophies (cost, transport, etc.)
Teams with multiple awards over the years don’t get identical looking trophies.
Helps to ‘Make it Loud’ by prompting uninitiated to ask “Why are all your trophies so different looking?”
Teams who don’t manage to build a great robot this year might be able to build a great trophy and wouldn’t it be cool to have built the Chairman’s trophy?
Yes, I thought of that… there might be a transition period where FIRST provides backup trophies. Once patterns emerge, a smaller supply will be needed. Alternatively, teams could pre-commit to providing a number of trophies they are willing to provide.
Alternatively, FIRST requires that we bring a Robot to the competition, they could also require that each team bring one or more trophies.
I like the idea, however I think you would end up with a vast difference in award quality. The different trophies will probably not look as professional as having a single style of trophy.
Example:
However, I think the responsibility of the trophies could be pushed to the event planning committees. Having different trophies for different events could be cool along with removing the cost/responsibility from HQ.
We compete in plenty of areas already. I don’t need to enter a competition of who can make a better trophy. In our display case, I don’t want the variety of all these different things I have to explain, and I also wouldn’t want to be the sucker who gets the “worst” made trophy.
I’m perfectly content with keeping them all the same.
I like the general concept (let’s save FIRST some money), but I think Matt hit the nail on the head with his post:
I think it’s cool that the off-season events have trophies that reflect the character of the event host, but I think it’s good that the trophies for official events have the consistent style and quality.
I agree with keeping the official event trophies consistent, but don’t disagree with making it a student design.
Battle for the Bluegrass Trophy for 2015
I can see a method of this working if we keep it at a competition where CAD or manual designs of awards are submitted, and then the best is selected by voting or a judge panel early on in the season. After that, then the trophies will be manufactured professionally or by a group of volunteers from nearby teams for events. This way, there wouldn’t have to be so many trophies made that would just end up getting given back to teams.
The space to store and move the amount of trophies to be brought and picked could be saved. That’s space taken up in trailers, cars, or pits. If there does happen to be a case where a large enough number of teams bring trophies, then the returned ones could make for a lot of peer awards. This may be too much, however it may not be a problem if teams are limited to one submission.
I can see this working well as a pre-season competition, much like the Safety Animation. Wrap it up before kickoff so FIRST has time to choose a winner and make the trophies. This way teams can work on it as a CAD learning/practice exercise.
It would be manageable to have teams submit CAD trophy designs before competition season, say in February like Chairman’s and Woodie Flowers submissions, but a trend in this thread seems to be saving FIRST money. Am I not correct in saying that manufacturing many different models of trophies and medals would cost more than manufacturing the one standard award style?
I’d have to agree, unless the funding for trophies per event was done independent of FIRST, as I stated with the possibility of having teams volunteer their time/donate materials for a single design for their local event.
But yes, a universal mass produced design for all of FRC is more economic, and isn’t efficiency a big part of engineering?
The original proposal had the benefit that FIRST didn’t pay for the trophies (willing teams build them) and neither FIRST nor event planners had to do very much, other collect the trophies, get a group of willing team reps together to pick which ones to use, and get the unused ones back to the teams. Event staff would also have to affix FIRST provided brass plates to the chosen trophies.
Costs and manufacturing were ‘crowd sourced’ out to the teams so no one organization has to deal with anything substantial in volume. Anything that leads to a custom design to be mass produced will be worse than the status quo in terms of costs/logistics.
I would clarify the proposal so that district championships and CMP(s) would still have traditional FIRST provided awards. Or maybe this proposal would make sense only at district events and not regionals. Maybe a handful of district events or an entire single district would be a good place to ‘pilot’ something like this.
There is already enough off-season events to have specialized, unique trophies.
The trophies being the same style and uniform at all regular FRC regionals, district competitions, and the Championship is fine as is.
If teams want more than 1 per award, they have the option to purchase them already.
Let me put it this way: You’re asking teams to volunteer to do something that a) might not be used, b) takes time, probably a lot of time, and c) has little or no benefit to the teams that do it. You’re asking event staff to essentially do an extra round of judging to figure what’s “good enough”, AND then to figure out which of the “good enough” ones go to which award, AND do some assembly.
And then you run into the problem of teams NOT volunteering… which means you’ve got to make and ship the trophies anyways, just in case.
You’re going to have to come up with a much better incentive for the teams to volunteer in the first place–for the vast majority of teams, it just isn’t worth the attempt. (If you’re thinking of requiring submission–the rookie teams and a fair number of veteran teams aren’t going to be able to, no matter what you do.) And then I believe I hear the Judge Advisers and Volunteer Coordinators calling you–they want you to do the judging/assigning/assembling, something about they’re shorthanded again. “Willing team reps” means, in most cases, “mandatory volunteering”, which if you can probably guess really means that you get UNwilling team reps.
This proposal makes sense for precisely two places: Offseason events (which do their own awards anyway) and team-awarded peer awards (which individual teams decide to do, build, and do).
That being said, I wouldn’t mind seeing a competition for trophy design, and having trophies MADE locally, if that could be arranged. Just not made by teams–leave that to the pros.
HQ provided trophies sound good to me. Teams pay their registration fees directly to FIRST, and from what I understand, events don’t get a lot of that money. So, frankly, I’d rather have my registration money fund my trophy than the event committee that’s already trying to make ends meet.