We are a rookie team and are interested in trying for the rookie award. We are having trouble finding information on what exactly we need to do in order to win. Can anyone send us a link where we can find some more specifics about this topic.
Thanks so much for your time and help
Thanks for the help.
Administrative Manual, Section 6 gives an explanation. There is no specific criteria, the award is supposed to be for the rookie team that “gets it”
Assuming you’re referring to one of those two awards, you can try poking around CD for previous winners. The key to winning either of the awards is simply showing that, although you’re a rookie team, you’re a well put together rookie team.
BlueJackets - do you have a veteran team helping you out? They could be a great source for this. If not, please PM me and I will see if I can get you in contact with a team in your area.
My team won the Rookie All Star award at MAR Champs and the Rookie Inspiration award at Champs back in 2012 when I was captain of the awards team. Feel free to message me with questions.
One thing I would recommend is talking to the judges a lot at competitions and have packets to hand out to them.
Here is our packet from that year.
We won Rookie Inspiration in 2005, but I was 8 back then, so I can’t give advice from the position of someone who’s won it. However, from what I’ve seen, Rookie All-Star and Rookie Inspiration are vaguely like the rookie versions of Chairman’s and EI. Essentially, your team should be out in the community spreading the word about FIRST. You can do demos, some FLL stuff, get involved with your school district - there are as many ways to win the awards as teams that have won them. One common theme that I’ve seen, as ENeyman mentioned above, is that you definitely should have spokespeople in your pit to talk to judges, and handouts to give to the judges so they remember you.
A note of caution, however: judges can often tell if your team is doing these things just to win an award, or if you’re doing them because they’re the right thing to do for the benefit of FIRST and STEM. You should get out into the community because you want to get out into the community - not because it’ll earn you a ticket to St. Louis.
Our team won NYC Rookie all star last year and went to St. Louis. And I agree with Jacob, if you try to go for rookie all star just so you can get to St. Louis you won’t get anywhere (heck our team didn’t know rookie all star sent you to champions until a couple of hours before they handed the awards out.
A few points of advice:
FIRST loves propoganda/advertisement. Getting involved in your community and spreading the ideas/name of FIRST is a big thumbsup for this award. Even if you don’t actually get to do anything, if you show the judges you want to take initiative and go out into the community for the sake of STEM that’s good too. Least year or team had basically done nothing but come up with a plan to get involved in the community (run a robotics summer camp, get involved with the local PAL, etc.). We made the plans, made the partnerships necessary to realize those plans and viola, we won.
Best of luck!!
Also look at the chairman’s award criteria. You are not expected to do all those things, but if you can speak to some of those it will be helpful.
Since they don’t have much to go by, your (especially student) conversations with judges are crucial. Judges will come by the pit asking to talk with someone. Have some of your more articulate students well prepared to talk about your program. Teach them how to “sell” your team.
Is some of this your Chairman’s submission? How did you compile/choose content, etc? Would the judges browse through it then & there, or just take it for later? Did you bind it in any way?
Thanks for the info!
Our team won it in 2009. In our case, we had done some grade 8 days where they learned some basic electronics stuff, I believe we had founded some FLL teams our robot was alright, and we treated everyone else very well.
As another poster said, think of Rookie All-Star as Rookie Chairmans, and do the same things that tend to win chairmans: Get the word of STEM in general and FIRST in particular out to your community. Starting new teams, involving policymakers (from local to state to federal), getting on TV, running workshops are all good things to do to get a solid Rookie All-star or chairmans attempt on track.
I’ve always thought of Rookie Inspiration as the runners-up to Rookie All-Star. They had a good package, but not as good as the all-star team.