I’m in favor of the split-scoring system. Autodesk first selects 5/10 finalists for each award. The Autodesk judges each get an input, and the voters/peer scorers get a certain input. The weighting of each input is evaluated by Autodesk.
The criteria should be technical in nature, but beautiful graphics, marketing, and detail should play a role as well. In reality, you don’t only have to create your design, you have to market it. Your design may be perfect, but if a/your company doesn’t want to make it, it’s worthless.
the idea of the award is not to try to sell anything. inventor is a program to help design a product not sell it. Agreed, detail and ''pritty colors" are important for the business/ marketing end but in my opinion aren’t nessissary to the drawing. i believe the most accurate representation of the team’s robot should “win”
I don’t mean to pick on you, but in my experience there are often times when designs are used to sell a project to a customer. In these cases the presentation is very important, and how well the model conveys the final appearance may be as important as how well it explains basic functions. I see the Inventor Award as a way students can learn these skills and marketing techniques.
A recent case in point: my department provides engineering services for the company’s scientific groups and we recently completed the development of a high speed reagent dispenser for the biologists. We worked with the biologists to determine the best device to fill their needs, which included surveying and testing commercial instruments as well as proposing our own proprietary device. That meant that we had to “sell” our device as a design concept vs. actual instruments they could bring in the lab and test.
We were working with an external engineering company who provided basic designs and layouts in AutoCAD 2D format. The biologists found it difficult to grasp the functional concepts that way, so I created Inventor models from the ACAD files, including an animation of the product transport system and a concept model of the overall instrument package. As soon as the biology department leader saw those he went from a tentative and wary “customer” to an enthusiastic supporter of the project. Being able to visualize the instrument in his lab was a very important factor in getting his approval.
By the way, that external engineering company has since begun using Inventor and the project was very successful - providing our biologists with the best solution for their needs and giving the company a competitive advantage in what’s know as “high throughput screening”.
I definetly agree that how something looks or is packaged can help make a sucessful engineering product. I think that the controversy (at least in my team), is that the Inventor award is supposed to be for technical excellence. If Autodesk wants to include that a portion of each entry’s score is based upon how well they’ve packaged their design (which I think is a great idea, as the world gets more globalised and more competative, we all should learn some marketing skills), that’s fine. I think what we’re having a problem with is that we’re not sure whether we should be marketing our design, or even what criteria we’re truly being judged on during peer voting, since everyone has a different set of criteria.
Judges will review all entries. Five finalists will be selected to advance to peer voting.
In scoring your entry, judges will address specific criteria:
Robot Design 50 points
Technical Expertise 30 points
Presentation of final design 20 points
TOTAL POINTS: 100 points
This was taken from FIRSTbase website, I believe that’s the way Inventor Award should be judged by other people too, not only for the judging of the top 5.
The only way to judge properly these 3 areas is looking carefully at the Inventor file and reading all the website that the team developed, but to do that you have to know the software very well.
There is no way to make a voting system that is non biased. Even if you were to make one person per team give a score for every other team, what would stop a team from simply getting every sister team to give them hundreds and everybody else zero’s. I’m not saying that cheating would be rampant but it is peoples natural instinct to favor themselves or those close to them.
Although you are all looking for a perfect system, there is none. As long as we know how the award will be judged, teams will always be able to adapt their award to fit the criteria.
Also you do want an aesthetically pleasing design. I know for a fact that the Air Force uses programs like Inventor to prepare their Alpha prototyping. This is how you sell a product, because you cannot simply make a 2 million dollar aircraft to show off.
Overall it shouldn’t matter how the award is decided, it will never be 100% fair, but this is still by far an award with one of the most spelled out definitions every year, you know exactly what to look for in a submission.
I’m a little tired of the voting system changing every year. Our team has submitted into the AVA for three years now, and each year we’ve had to submit or judge the awards differently. Last year, Autodesk turned to online voting, which ended up as a disaster in the regionals we attended, with teams being called to vote at the event and many not voting at all. This year, we had to submit the animation via firstbase, which ended in another batch of problems. Our school server blocks all upload sites, and when we tried uploading from different locations, the upload would frequently fail.
Personally, I believe the best way to decide would be a combination of last year and '05. Teams would only be able to submit to one regional, the teams would vote on these animations during the competition, the winners of the regionals, along with a handful of other team animations would then move on to the finals, which will be judged solely by Autodesk.
The reason why I feel this way is because I think that online voting just doesn’t work. Most people and teams don’t know that Firstbase exists and when they try to register, they have to go through a long and arduous process to join and vote.
One thing I have a problem with is Autodesk not updatting their website. Their “FIRSTbase” still says that there are only finalists and it doesn’t say who won. Even in the team page, it still says “Submit your entry today.”
If a company pushes a new aspect of the award, they should step behind what new changes they decide to do.
I like the idea of adults being able to vote (because then I would be able to), but then teams could just contact all of their alumni and get them to do it.
Whoever started this thread should first write “decided” correctly!!!
Great job for another Autodesk award win Team 107 three times in a row!.
Anyway, this year was my first time on an FRC team and it was very interesting. I joined the Subteam of design on Team 342 because I am interested in Autodesk. I heard the process of last year was better so why change it. If this was alright as it was last year then let the Autodesk judges pick the winner.
I know that this is digging up an old issue (and probably a lot of angst :yikes: ), but Autodesk FIRSTbase recently sent out an e-mail survey asking for your imput on this season’s awards voting and other services offered by FIRSTbase. I responded to the survery with a lot of the same viewpoints that I’ve espoused in this thread, and I’m just curious to see how many people have done the same and whether you think if there is a big enough response to do away with the voting or change some aspect of the competition whether something will change?
My opinion is that Autodesk/FIRST should see if they can aquire volunteers from companies like Pixar or Dreamworks to judge the award on the championship level, i also think that they should use a pre-decided set of metrics released to teams at kickoff and that the award should be judged on technical stuff not which one has the prettiest colors…
We are sponsored by DreamWorks and several of their animators mentor our team.
I’d be pretty happy if they were recruited to judge the AVA awards
Having a rubric would really help. But as with all movies, the real deciding factor will always lie with the storyboard and theme. If you go back and review the winning AVA’s you’ll see that they all flowed beautifully, and had great themes.
You *can *have technical excellence and a bad animation.
