Has anybody recieved a notification regarding whether their team is a Semi-Finalist for the Innovation Challenge? Has anybody seen any information from FIRST regarding when teams will be notified about this?
There is a lot of additional content for teams to provide for the next round of judging, but that information is only relevant to teams that advance to the next round. On its face, that’s roughly a 13% chance for each team… in my team’s case, we fully intend to keep working on our project regardless of the outcome of the competiton, but the documents required for submission for the next round are an extremely low priority for advancing our concept unless we actually move on to the next round.
Life is busy. My students have a lot of other stuff to work on. I do too… we have a hard time justifying spending a lot of time on something that has a 13% chance of being relevant.
I really hope teams are notified about their status as a semi-finalist with a reasonable amount of time prior to the competition deadline. By my count we’re 9 days away from the submission deadline and by some standards that’s already not enough time.
The last day for judging was yesterday (4/11). I would expect to hear something early this week. I encouraged my team to start with an outline of the additional submission materials. Then, we can crunch through everything else this week if we are selected.
The FIRST Event Information website says that the results for the FIRST Innovation Challenge groups will be submitted between today (the 12th) and Friday (the 16th).
Hoping they are released sooner rather than later.
Due to an issue with the awards submission portal for Judges, FIRST has pushed back the awards deadline for Judges to the end of day this Wednesday.
That seems to mean that we will not find out if we’ve been selected as a semi-finalist until Thursday at the earliest. FIRST HQ is aware of how tight this makes the April 21 semifinalists submission, but so far has not pushed that deadline.
This was mentioned in the FRC Blog today, semi-finalists will be announced this Friday, April 16th. And the enhanced submission deadline of April 21st at 11:59 PM Eastern Time remains unchanged.
You will DEFINITELY want to check out the Q&A responses that were just put up today - there are some very notable changes to the prompts and the submission portal. If you had already looked at the portal prior today, you were probably VERY confused because the design and business model prompts were split into two sections, which was not in the manual. FIRST has changed the portal to reflect what was in the manual (500 words for each), said that you cannot in fact edit your executive summary, and they seem to have added two optional prompts for design and business model.
Please try to spread this information to any semifinalist teams you are involved with or close to - considering some teams apparently didn’t even get their “congrats, you made it, here’s more instructions” emails, I wouldn’t count on all of the teams getting an email with this update. This is really unfortunate (to say the least) that this is changing less than 72 hours before the submission deadline, on top of what was already a very fast turnaround for submissions.
One of the Q&A responses says that they will release these officially in a Team Update 18, but that doesn’t appear to be out yet as of when I’m posting this.
The rules manual mentions team logo and team description for the additional requirements for semi-finalists. My team’s understanding was this was just our general team logo and background description. Does anyone know if this interpretation is correct?
For the team logo, it’s definitely your general team logo per Q&A 192 FIRST FRC Q&A System
For the team description, we are interpreting that as a general description of your team in the “we’re team 123456 from Somewhere, PA” sense, but the only way to know for sure is to ask the Q&A…
May 7, 2021:The 20 Finalists from each program for the FIRST Global Innovation Awards are chosen on or around this date. Teams should anticipate receiving an e-mail from FIRST at this time. In May and June, Finalists continue to iterate and refine their work.
Just wondering if anyone has heard anything b/c we never got the Semi-Finalist email.
Sorry, we were being too obtuse.
We found out we were Semi-Finalists via the blog post, never got an email.
So was wondering if they did/were going to do a blog post or only email for the 20 Finalists; b/c we don’t seem to reliably get FIRST emails.
Just looking to also inquire if anyone has received information about finalists yet, as I believe emails were set to go out after finalists were decided yesterday/today
