Has anyone ever been to an off-season competition with judges as judging practice? How did that work wherever you attended? What are your thoughts on attending one with practice judges?
My question would be who pays for the awards at the offseason? Part of the registration fee possibly if there is one for the event?
Would you expect them to judge the real awards and criteria or let event hosts change the rules?
For example I’ve seen custom trophies for winning an off-season, but not for creativity or non-perfornance based ones so would you expect custom trophies too or get real ones made up by the same vendors.
Space Coast Showdown in Florida did a couple judged team awards along with a Volunteer of the Year award this year. They sent judge pairs to pits and did interviews pretty similar to that of competitions, with groups being either robot or team attribute based. The awards themselves weren’t copied 1-1 from their competition counterparts, but there were one or two robot design-related ones and a team attribute engineering inspiration-style one too. I very much liked that our students got some extra judge whispering practice from it, and is especially helpful for our rookies learning what events are like. The 3D printed trophies were pretty awesome too!
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Likely the organizers of the event or pull from the registration fee. We are in talks of inviting some of our favorite judges to an off-season event to give the teams some judging practice with only a few judged awards.
Perhaps having them judge for non-performance based awards, like something similar to Excellence in Engineering or EI. We were discussing this idea for an off season event to give teams the opportunity to have judging practice in the off-season. We’ve won EI multiple times along with other judging awards and hold judging practice in high regard on our team. We wanted to share that sentiment with other teams that may not have the opportunity to practice with a real judge outside of in-season competitions or people from their team(s).
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Judged awards at offseasons are great. They’re low stress opportunities for both students as well as NEW judges to be trained. No need to make fancy awards, and you should feel free to take liberties on which awards you want to judge for as well as naming and criteria.
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Second all of this.
Florida has historically had judged awards at most of the offseason events. The event typically pays for the trophies and I believe all 3 events this year also gave out winners banners.
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Last week our team took a creative approach to judging practice since our offseason competition did not include judging or awards. We partnered with our sponsors to recruit volunteers from their engineering staff to do a Q and A session with the students. We started the evening with a demo and then split the students and engineers into groups based on their expertise - I.e. project management, engineering design, manufacturing, controls, and culture. Some of the volunteers were FIRST alumni which helped. While this didn’t prepare our students to answer exactly the types of questions they might see at competition, that wasn’t the point. We are focused on developing our students technical communication skills. Judging questions at competitions are very open ended, usually it’s up to the students to present their teams strengths in an eloquent manner to be considered for awards.
If you want to see pictures from our session you can find them at our instagram, @maikenmagic.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy7DYI7R7qU/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
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At our pre-season event, we usually give out a couple of awards, including a gracious professionalism award, a robot design award, and a volunteer of the year award. These are generally judged by our mentors and other students around the competition, and the awards are 3D printed.
We have also given out occasional non-judged awards, such as in 2022 we had a competition where the human player from each team would compete in a tournament to see who could shoot the most cargo into the hub.
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I would think most off seasons have some sort of judged award. The ones around us do. They mean whatever the organizers say they mean. They are not “official” First awards. For as I know. Big First does not sponsor any of season event.
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Most California off-season events have judged awards. My team won Innovation Award at SoCal Showdown a few weeks ago.
As for “who pays for the awards”, why do they necessarily need to be paid for? The awards (trophies) are fabricated by volunteers. For example, myself and another local mentor are fabricating all the trophies for Beach Blitz this week.
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Someone making them still has materials cost from their pocket (which is appreciated but cost them $ and time to work on it). I like custom stuff and think that’s awesome, just mainly didn’t want to see off seasons going up in cost just to afford official blue banners or replica trophies from the vendors.
If they are bought or made then is it in the hosts to pay for materials or split it up amongst the entrants? Others have already answered that point and I think it’s the least important part of the process.
You don’t really think about it with FRCFIRST Robotics Competition regular season but part of the registration fee for each team gets used to pay for the medals, banners, etc. Nothing is really free, and if those awards were all hand made and donated by hosts I don’t think FRCFIRST Robotics Competition registration costs would decrease anyways, at least not an appreciable one
I’d say the cost of materials for trophies is most definitely in “the noise” for any given robotics team or group of volunteers looking to run an event. As in, REMs from a team’s scrap bin. Just about every team I know would be happy to throw some of their excess materials towards trophy fab for an event. Sure the raw materials weren’t “free” to begin with, someone, or some sponsor at one point purchased. I’d say most mentors I know throw some of their own personal money or donated materials at their team for the betterment of the team, as would hosts of an off-season event to make it a better experience for the participants.
I fabricate trophies for drone races, personally, in exchange for free admission to the event (others volunteer their time at the event in exchange for free admission). I feel like all of this is in the spirit of event enhancement
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