Award Submission Process
The 2023 Charged Up season was a very successful season for us. Not only in terms of robot performance, but also in terms of team performance in general. Team Rembrandts has been working for over 10 years to light the spark of FIRST in the Netherlands and Europe in general and hard work pays off: we won the 2023 Impact Award at the Ventura County regional!
However, in order to win an award like the Impact award it is important to think about the message that needs to be conveyed within your Awards Submissions. Even though a team may make a huge Impact, that doesn’t necessarily mean that team can easily win the award. This does not only apply to Impact, but also to the Woodie Flowers and the Deans’ List Award.
Struggles within our own Team
Something our Awards sub-department has been struggling with over the past few years is the insane amount of time pressure that lays behind these submissions. Just like buildseason, an Award Submission can create a lot of stress because of the specific deadline.
On top of that students might forget that there are also Submissions that need to be written in order to even be eligible for an award. Not everybody in a team is equally as interested in presenting and creating a story around a team, such as the Impact Submission. And this is probably something that not only we (TR) struggle with, but other teams might as well.
What was the situation like before?
For Team Rembrandts that often meant the following for the Impact Submission: trying to spread the huge amount of work onto a larger period of time. But due to the lack of students that were interested it felt like it wasn’t possible to finish the Impact Award Submission way before the deadline, as we would’ve liked it to be. So we often ended up postponing a lot of the work and eventually having to create entire essays a few weeks before the deadline.
It often created a lot of stress for our students and it wasn’t nearly as fun as we would want it to be for our students. It’s hard to acknowledge, but change starts with searching for the root cause of the problem.
Searching for the problem
We often said that the problem was that we didn’t have enough students to do the work. Because not all students liked writing submissions. And that because of the lack of students, often support-roles and mentors started helping out with writing the Impact Submission.
However, in the end, that wasn’t the problem at all.
After having an incredibly successful season last year. It was also very clear that things needed to change. It is not fair to let our students experience the pressure of last season, because of doing the work at the last moment.
The root cause of the problem
And that’s when the underlying problem really came to light: it isn’t necessarily that our students don’t like working on Awards. It’s the fact that they feel they can’t do anything else besides it, because all of the work is being done so close to the deadline. Postponing work means that it takes more effort the closer you get to the deadline and therefore it means that students aren’t able to partake in any other sub-departments because of the huge amount of work left to do for Awards. Students might want to participate in multiple sub-departments, because they feel like there’s more fun working on multiple projects instead of one.
Time for change
So we started doing it differently this year. There are students that want to work within many different sub-departments, including the Awards sub-department.
But as a team you need to be able to offer them that chance. You need to offer them the chance to participate in multiple sub-departments. So the solution wasn’t hard to find: work with the few students you have, because they love working on it! But start ON TIME!! If you spread out the work over your entire off/pre-season, there’s way less stress and pressure to perform. And on top of that students are able to partake in multiple departments, because the amount of work needing to be done per week is way less for Awards.
For us it meant the following:
After the 2023 Championship we took a bit of a break from Awards. We had been working really hard and it showed off, so we took some time off. Which is fine obviously.
By September 2023, when pre-season started, a general planning was made for up until build season. The main difference now: working in small chunks. We would be simultaneously working on the Essay as well as the Executive Notes: at a bit slow, but very steady pace.
The essay
To start with the essay we always come up with a theme. This theme is something that can bind everything together once you get to a more complex state of the essay.
After that we made a rough layout and we thus wrote down all the content to fill the Impact Essay. So after 3 weeks there was a great basis to start writing an actual Essay. Note that because we did small chunks of work each week. Students were able to simultaneously work on Skills Classes within other departments.
In the end we made multiple versions of the essay.
- Version 1: a rough layout. Bullet points, like the skeleton of your essay, written down in a document.
- Version 2: a rough text. Just very plainly writing down what all of our outreach initiatives meant.
- Version 3: an improved version 2. Starting to elaborate more and starting to write everything down prettier.
- Version 4: a very pretty written version, but way too long. This was the part where we felt like it was almost perfect. It was just about 5.000 characters too long
- And then: Version 5: The same essay, but written in less than 10.000 characters! And we are proud to have it finished before buildseason even starts!
The Executive Notes
Of course the essay is a major task within the Impact Award Submission. However, something equally as important are the Executive Notes. We always felt like the Notes were very hard, because it’s not easy to write down everything you want to answer to a question in 500 characters or less.
So for the general planning we decided to not start over with the Notes. Why would we spend all this valuable time, when the Notes of last year were something we were really proud of?
We ended up taking the 2023 Notes, going through them and deciding with the Awards team on what questions to modify or maybe even replace with a new answer. Incorporating our new Outreach Initiatives into the 2024 Notes.
We ended up adjusting most questions a little, but it saved a lot of time! A valuable lesson learned: there is no need to start over each year, when Executive Notes of previous years are a great basis!
The 2023 Executive Notes question nr. 2
The 2024 Executive Notes question nr. 2
So? Conclusion?
Last seasons we would go through all of the stages from the Essay as well as the entire Executive Notes within 3 or 4 weeks. Which was not fair for our students. Now, we have done it over the course of 3 months and students were able to attend other sub-departments at the same time.
The key isn’t to get more students for your Awards Submissions. The key is to offer them time to do it, take away stress and allow them to do multiple things at the same time if they want to. Allow them to do other stuff than Awards specifically during build season. Because in the end: our students liked working on the robot during buildseason better than writing an essay.
Written by: Emma - Awards Lead