As a user of Inventor, I feel that FIRST neglects us a little bit. If you see the thread “shafted again” you can see my views. However, it is my general opinion that the AIA should be spread to a regional level, just as the animation was a few years ago.
Pros: More recognition
More participation?
Cons: Less time
Is anybody else with me on this? Perhaps if we get enough support for this, FIRST will change its position. Perhaps when they do regional conferences, if enough of them bring up AIA, FIRST will expand it.
Actually, I’d be willing to bet that odds are you’ll have a very small handfull of teams that submit for the award–less than for animation, which almost makes it pointless.
Then again, I have no idea how many teams submit at nationals to start with, so I could be completely wrong.
In principle I agree that a regional Inventor award would be great. However, Autodesk, not FIRST, does most of the heavy lifting for AIA. Currently they receive and judge about 60 submissions and make the awards. If there were regional awards and more teams submitted, they could be looking at judging 100s and handing out 30 regional awards.
So, would the increased recognition of Inventor (and Autodesk) be worth the cost to them? If not, perhaps FIRST might create a regional design award - opening the competition up to all the Pro/E and Solidworks users, as well. Food for thought…
I understand everybody’s point of view. But at the same time, I have done the inventor award submission for team 108 this past season. The ones that have the responsibility to turn in the submission on time has a lot of stress to work with as well as the animators do for their submission. I remember those nights that I went through without sleep to get this submission in on time (many of my friends would confirm that). Yes, it would be nice to have each regional have an inventor winner. Yes, it would be way better if we get every team to submit a drawings. I am sure that every team goes through a design process, they go to the drawing board even before they start building the robot, and every team doesnt use the same software or not used to it. I had to go through learning inventor in order to submit the submission. Just like someone pointed out before me, maybe FIRST can open this up to all teams as a “Design Award” where teams are allowed to submit drawings (CAD, Inventor, Pro E, Solidworks).
… What is engineering? Engineering comes into play when you are there to solve the problem. An Engineer goes to the drawing board first and then onto manufacturing the product. The high school students have had the encouragement from the mentors and engineers to go straight to the manufacturing parts of the robot while a lot of students didn’t go through the drawing process of engineering. A student like myself had the chance to go through design work and then onto manufacturing. Submitting a submission by a student can also help them learn how to use these industrial softwares which inspires them to get into engineering. FIRST is about us and learning. Lets imagine, innovate and create…
As no one from our team had much to do with Inventor until I started using it this past season, we didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t read the rules concerning awards like AIA. I had thought that it was a regional competition like the animation. As the animation competition when though a similar change, maybe we should consider the impact of the animation change had to judging, entries, winners and the like. I am no expert on how this went, but if the animation competition changed for the better though a similar change, maybe AIA would, too.
I think if FIRST and Autodesk are serious about promoting the Inventor award, they need to institute a regional-level award. I know that many teams (mine included) simply disregarded the Inventor award because it’s a lot of work, with a very slim chance of winning any recognition. If there were to be a regional Inventor award, however, we would focus our design process on Inventor from the beginning, so that we could have a quality entry to submit at regionals. I would be willing to bet that the number of Chairman’s Award and animation submissions have increased (relative to the number of teams competing overall) since those awards were brought to the regional level, and I believe Inventor could benefit from the same change.
On another note, I like the idea of having a “Design Award”, where teams could sumbit CAD drawings and models in the program of their choosing. This may be hampered, however, because of Autodesk’s major software donations. On the other hand, the SolidWorks corporation has been a FIRST sponsor for two years… maybe their involvement could aid the development of a Design Award.
