2023 JUL 14 | Written by Collin Fultz, FIRST Robotics Competition Senior Program Director
If you’re anything like me, you spend a good portion of the off-season looking at the FRC-Events webpage. In case you aren’t, we wanted to share some exciting upgrades we made to the site.
One of the most common requests we hear from teams after events is to see the script the MC uses for awards during ceremonies. Two years ago, we implemented a new system called the Award Entry System (AES). AES links award information a Judge Advisor provides directly to the Field Management System (FMS) and MC at an event. This helps reduce an error of potentially typing in a wrong team receiving an award. An added benefit of AES is that now we have the ability for teams to see the script the Judge Advisor provides the MC for the award ceremony! (Some events were not able to use AES in 2022 and 2023, so there may not be 100% compliance. We’re working on those issues and hope to have full compliance in future seasons.)
Script for the FIRST ® Impact Award Winning Team 135 at the FIRST Indiana State Championship
The cherry on top? We also have the historic AES information, so the 2022 award scripts are now available on those event pages as well!
While you’re on the event pages, you may also see that Team Avatars now appear on the list of teams at the event, the Qualification Rankings page for 2023 events, District Rankings pages for all seasons, season and district team list pages, and the playoff page for 2023 events. You can now see your team’s Avatar almost anywhere your team is listed on the FRC-Events webpages!
And finally, the playoff page has been updated for the Double Elimination bracket format and now includes a bracket display. This bracket is not viewable on tablets or phones. In addition to the bracket, the playoff page for the 2023 season also lists each Alliance in the tournament and its Alliance members.
The Playoff Bracket for the 2023 FIRST Championship Einstein Tournament
While I do believe we revieved a hard copy of the script at at least 1 event this year, its definitely not been every time. In fact. Outside of this year, I dont ever recall getting a script when the team received an award (at least not in Ontario )
For the first time in the entire history of ever for me, someone at CMP (the announcer maybe?) came around and gave it to us. I was speechless for a second because it definitely has not been common practice and most of the time we either transcribed it ourselves from video or we had to hunt someone down for it.
Also, we’ve earned a lot of stripes over the years.
The (now former) FIRST Senior Mentor in my area I grew up with made it a common practice to hand the script out with the trophies to teams as they went down the high five line. Now in a show running position myself at many events, I do the same. I think I still have one or two scripts.up on a bulletin board or in a drawer somewhere.
I’m glad AES is now (apparently) reliable enough to have some public facing components. Navigating it has been an improvement, but challenging.
I’ve never been instructed as an emcee at an event to provide a script to a team. I keep them with me in-case a team asks for it and I typically try to stop by the Impact winners pit to give them theirs and congratulate them once again.
That being said, trying to keep that slip of paper in relatively good shape as you celebrate your award win, pack up your pit, and load-out is a bigger challenge than it should be.
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