I’m don’t think he meant that Jr. FLL teams couldn’t make the video literally because the students are to young sign the TOS. The point is: how exactly do you expect a group of 6-9 year olds to make a video? Their parents signed them up to build robots with Legos, not get interviewed on film.
Last I checked Jr. FLL wasn’t “Lego Robots Club”. If anything, the Lego part is, while a requirement, secondary. It’s about Researching and finding a solution to a problem and then presenting the solution; the Lego part helps illistrate the solution as part of the presentation. I don’t see how presenting on camera is that far off of what Jr. FLL already does.
I wouldn’t expect the videos to be the next blockbuster, but to say that making a video isn’t in the scope of Jr. FLL is IMHO shortsighted.
That said, having spent 4 years as an FRC student, I know all about time management and the like… I also know it’s possible and doable to make time management work. To those that did get videos done: Well done, keep it up. To those that didn’t, hopefully your team got something else productive done, and if not, try again and try harder. Any progress is progress, the more the merrier.
I’m going to do my best to avoid this thread like the plague after this post, but if people are seriously going to try to start a debate over whether or not children between the ages of six and nine should be doing this video project when they’re developing motor skills, reading and writing abilities, spelling, and all of that on top of JrFLL, I just can’t put into words how empty-headed that sounds. The priority of JrFLL is to start teaching kids about what FIRST is all about, not record their every interaction in formative years to tie it into FIRST.
This thread isn’t about whether JFLL kids should be making homework videos. Ryan was just breaking down the submissions by program. Keep in mind that the Homework was issued during the FRC closing ceremonies, so it’s not like the other programs had any exposure to it until the release of the guidlelines later in the year. However, my main point is, everybody chill out.
I think at the beginning of this thread, before its clear and not-at-all-subtle* downward spiral, had some useful discussion on how the Homework could be better distributed/handled in the FIRST Community. Maybe we can bring it back to that? Hm?
*I do commend your efforts on trying to be neutral/nice/PC, Ryan. Sometimes it’s hard to, amidst the catfighting that happens in threads.
Good thoughts.
Why we didn’t create a video submission:
- It was not on our list of things we needed to get done this summer/fall due to higher priorities such as:
- Outreach opportunities
- Sponsorship incentive
- Training and workshops to prepare for the 2014 season
- Organizing our own off-season event (Nov. 9)
2.** Our current video making skills are very poor.** Creating videos is NOT simply turn on the camera on your iPhone and hit the record icon. There’s a TON more that goes into the process in order to do it well.
- Our Summer/Fall meetings are sporadically attended by students, due to other extracurricular activities, school emphasis, and working jobs while they can before Build Season begins.
**Could we have used making a video for homework as a way to train and prepare for our upcoming CA Video project? **
Absolutely, but then I direct you back up to points 1 and 3. Plus, the students decided to create a Safety Animation submission this year instead: honing their visual media skills that way, instead of video.
Ways to improve this specific Dean’s Homework project:
Instead of videos, have teams submit written stories, then have a group at HQ choose which stories they felt would make good videos and pair those teams with a video-team equipped to help teams make professional videos.
Loosen the criteria. The exact 2 minute video criteria is daunting.
Post a nice big “Dean’s Homework” on the main page of the website, explaining what it is and how teams can easily submit one.
Dean’s Homework has always been something that I hear and think, “That’s a great idea! Let’s add it to our priority list.”
But this is the reality:
April-May: Students busy with end of the year activities
May-July: Students busy with summer activities like jobs, sports and being with their families. When we do team activities it’s usually outreach one-day activities, or rebuilding our robot for off-season events.
August-November: Students busy with workshops, training, soliciting funding, balancing school, jobs, other extracurricular activities, and planning our own off-season event.
I love FIRST. This is my 11th year in the program. I’m the P.R. mentor for my team, and I love things like Chairman’s Award and making videos. I think FIRST is the most important thing that these high school kids will do during their educational experience.
But there is a limit to what we can do on our team. Limited time, limited resources, limited students, limited mentors. And creating a video like this honestly would not have helped improve our team enough for the time and resources that it would take.
For those teams that did create a video: AWESOME JOB! I am in awe of your efforts. Next year, my team will hear Dean’s Homework and say, “Let’s do this!” Hopefully we succeed. Hopefully it fits in with what we need to do. Hopefully it can be placed higher on our priority list.
Libby,
Thanks for bringing the conversation back to the original question.
We dedicated a few resources to complete the assignment because we felt it had a net benefit. Specifically, the video gave us a jump start on our Chairman’s Award process going into our sophomore season. It became the “first draft” of our message.
Getting awards organized early may also give us a better shot at winning a few. Winning our way to Championship is definitely a strong incentive. Documenting our history and having additional promotional materials to recruit sponsors are other benefits.
The November 1st target was a little early in my opinion. A mid December deadline would still have forced us to finish before kick-off, which I felt was the true goal. The early completion date could have discouraged boarder participation of other FIRST teams.
I know my rational above was focused on the benefits to my team. However, the actual goal of Dean’s Homework was to provide “Make It Loud” content for the benefit of FIRST as an organization. Maybe Dean should provide examples as to how other homework assignments have used to benefit FIRST. I am assuming these videos will be used to convince future sponsors or agencies to join our mission. But it is just an assumption…
David
I can’t speak 100% for why the video wasn’t accomplished on 1071. I know we had discussions about it back in the spring, and we said we we’re going to do it. However I know myself (PR leader at the time) and my PR mentor, along with many others in the PR sub-team got wrapped up in planning for our off-season event, and it got pushed to the way side. Summer is always hard for the team to accomplish things so that didn’t happen. As for this fall, with over 50% of our 2013 membership now at college, the team was busy training new membership and it couldn’t be accomplished.
With that said, most of the reasons 1071 didn’t get it done was reasons specfic to our situation. However there are some things I recomend FIRST could change to hopefully increase participation.
- Increase the maxium length of the video to 5 minutes.
- Extend the Deadline to at least kick-off of the next year.
- Provide an example video or two.
- As it has been already said, a little more promotion on FIRST’s part would help as well.
With that said, even with these and other changes suggested, sometimes teams just won’t be able to make it happen. Thats okay, every team needs to focus on what it considers a priority based on it’s own needs and situation in the moment.
We were one of the teams that did do it, and I think I know why. We were able to cut it down to a 2 person team to make the video – one of our guys has a great story, so he told it, and our video person made the video. However, we have a relatively big team, so we were able to spare the manpower to get this done (while also running three offseason events).
As for ways to make more teams do it, I like the idea that someone suggested earlier of having it be a prerequisite for a Chairman’s submission. It’ll get far more teams to submit, while also making the quality better (Chairman’s teams often have awesome stories to tell).
An interesting idea, but I don’t think a carrot or stick approach is the answer to this homework problem.
I think extending the deadline until a week before Christmas could be beneficial. Teams likely to do this are in high gear right now, they can use some footage to tie into their RCA video, and a lot of events teams do happened around this original deadline or after it.
Tying in a video requirement to the RCA submission on top of the RCA video (which isn’t even judged) isn’t the solution, but I think if FIRST came out, asked for more submissions, and gave teams some more time, they could double or nearly triple the submissions.
I hope FIRST/Dean will offer up the homework at kickoff this year. It’s important to realize the circumstances surrounding the homework/make it loud call to action took place under very unique and personal circumstances in the first place, so the unique timing of the announcement may be just that.
How is getting the homework at the start of the build season going to help? All the teams are going to be busy at that time. He gave the homework out that the end of the season and gave 6 months (give or take) to do it when teams are supposed to be less busy and look at the results. imagine what would happen if he gave it out at the beginning of the season.
At least everyone would know about it. Maybe teams with dedicated media students will make amazing videos that will impress people. Teams that struggle to get by during build season are most likely in the group that didn’t make a video already anyway. This was, in my short tenure, the first time that homework wasn’t a part of kickoff. This is also the first time we haven’t done it to some degree.
Because almost everyone in FRC watches Kickoff?
In this instance, you can make this an easy opportunity to develop b-roll for build and competitions, or use the time for just about anything else under the sun. Maybe a team holds a kickoff event for rookies or has a special night with the community to show off their robot and program. Maybe a team has a really cool outreach event in between events. Teams can do anything on any given day of the year, why impose limits over a deliverable that can be independent of the submit construction?
This is what I meant in my post earlier in the thread – if the deadline was extended to next CMP, they could be using the entire year & build season to compile the media they’re going to use, and make a quality product by the time the next homework is given out.
Something that’s this big of a project needs more time than just April-November (and in the cases of teams who didn’t see Dean’s speech, August-November – or whenever it was that the guidelines were released.)
FIRST has heard about the discussion going on here – well, the relevant and useful parts of it. (Not so much the arguing about JrFLL.) Hopefully something will come of that. I’d love to see the submission box left open so that people can continue to produce content.
As Akash pointed out, nearly everybody watches kickoff. This is compared to the less than 20% of teams at or watching Championships, or the even smaller amount of teams that may stumble upon an assignment given at any other time of the year. Quite basically, Kickoff is the only time that FIRST can reasonably expect to reach the majority of participants in a way that is more meaningful and exciting than an email during the off-season.
Clearly the method they used last year didn’t work, at least in terms of getting a ton of submissions, so something has to change-- probably from both sides of the equation. Yes, maybe teams should be more willing to jump into “non-essential” activities like Dean’s Homework, but there are several things (which have been previously expressed more eloquently than I am able to previously in this thread) that FIRST can do to creating that sort of internal culture change.
Here’s the thing - in the past, the homework has been much easier in comparison.
“Write your representative, invite them to your regionals.”
“You’re not just a robotics team, you’re a FIRST team!” (help make FIRST a household name)
This video project requires a lot more time and effort. The barriers to being able to do this are pretty high given the time constraint that was placed on teams. Without the Nov 1 due-date, I think more teams would be able to work on it, either as practice with their media-passionate students pre-kickoff, or as a sidebar to their Chairman’s video production as they’re collecting media on their team over the course of the season.
I don’t think the issue is that people don’t want to do Dean’s Homework - it’s that this homework was a lot harder than the timeline given can accomodate.
Not only that, these weren’t objectives with a set due date, they were more of a new way Dean wanted teams to promote themselves on a rolling basis, but not a one time deliverable to FIRST. This was a very different assignment for teams for a lot of reasons, and that’s probably the result of a much different (lower) turnout.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to limit the “method” to only how they assigned it-- I meant to encompass the entire assignment-- from how it was assigned to what the assignment was. I should have been more clear about that.
I’m not entirely in agreement that the timeline was unrealistic-- I think that it’s possible for significantly more that the amount of teams submitted to have completed the project.
I think in particular though, the main problem was that “zero-to-sixty” feeling from this assignment-- as was mentioned, previous assignments have been significantly easier. Going from “track your alumni and nominate students for Dean’s List” (2012), stuff that most teams should be doing anyways, to “find a story, learn to edit video, find mentors to help to edit video, make a presentable video (to say nothing of making an awesome video)” is a rather massive leap. Perhaps if FIRST wants to scale up to “larger” homework assignments (such as a video), it would be a good idea to gradually scale up the difficulty of assignments-- teachers (at least for high school students) typically don’t expect you to complete a final project before you’ve done any homework-- likewise, some sort of build up of the willingness of teams to take on increasingly challenging homework assignments would probably go a long way towards more teams fulfilling the requirements.
I have to chuckle at some of the expectations that a few people posting in this thread have for FRC teams, their leaders and their members.
It is important, I think, to remember that being part of an FRC team is just one part of the life of an engaged, enthusiastic human being. FRC team members, mentors and teachers do more than just FRC.
We hike, bike, sing, dance, play sports, travel, read… and should be proud of that. Our lives don’t have to revolve around FIRST. (Well, not for the entire year at least. 
)
I would tell my students that I expected a small part of their extra-curricular attention for part of the year, and a very large part of their efforts for a few months of the year. Outside of the December-March “Robot Season” I expected them to bring the same professionalism, committment and dedication to their other activities that I expected from them for FRC activities, and that meant giving them the time to do those activities properly… and I used the time to enjoy my other, non-FRC activities, too.
So I think it is perfectly acceptable to respond to the question of “Why didn’t more team’s do Dean’s homework?” with the simple response that they had something better to do. Diversity is good. There is no need to apologize for it.
Life > FRC
Jason