At the Duluth Regional award ceremonies, we didn’t do high fives or handshakes in order to avoid transmitting diseases. They also had two representatives receive most awards at this weekend’s ceremonies. Both of those changes are great and should receive serious consideration to become the new standard for all FRC events.
Even if we didn’t have a new flu virus to worry about, it would makes sense to avoid that level of unnecessary physical contact between so many people at an FRC competition. FRC events bring together people from a variety of geographic areas, and by Saturday evening, this inevitably includes a decent number of sleep deprived people with low white cell counts.
Having two team representatives receive awards, championship style, was a great feature of this year’s Northern Lights Regional. Our team was pleasantly surprised to receive an award, and my impression was that our students seemed perfectly happy to cheer from the stands when the award was announced.
In Israel we always have only two representatives come onto the field. Only when the Chairman’s Award is given, the whole team comes down. Awards Ceremonies here are very fast.
Congratulations on the award you received!
I’d put the winning alliance on there too–even with the massive traffic jam, they’re hanging a banner. Perhaps the finalists too (but I could be persuaded).
Finalist/Winner awards get quite boring for spectators. It’s rather unexciting since everyone of course knows who won the awards as they are slowly named one-at-a-time. Maybe name them all at once and invite the drive teams?
Is that moment really about the spectators? I would argue no. It’s about recognizing all students of the team for their tremendous efforts. They deserve the reward of getting to be all recognized publicly for their achievements.
As a student, there was nothing more energizing than jumping from your seat and (safely) rushing down the steps to walk the high-five line.
I’d rather see this also be just two representatives. A lot more then just the drive teams goes into a winning robot, and I feel that 2 chosen representatives could better represent this.
In fairness, Duluth has a long trek to the field from the stands.
It’s really down a steep set of stadium seats, out into the hallway, back into the arena, down two sets of stairs, and then across the front of the field.
It’s not 20 minutes - it’s over an hour.
In Duluth, it takes >5 minutes for teams to get down, go through the line, and get back up to clear the path for the next team.
That’s across 13 or 14 awards.