Not quite mutually exclusive… You can have fun without winning an award, but if you get an award (especially if you didn’t try for it), you have even more fun!
Oh, definitely true. Perhaps fun and winning awards shouldn’t always have to go hand in hand, but both can certainly be a great way to end a competition!
While I personally agree with you sponsors like awards, students like awards. But, teams can often focus on something because they feel passionate about it and end up winning an award for it. I think this is a good thing.
As a joke, we all like awards cuz they are shiny and who doesn’t like shiny?
To concur with this (I think: I haven’t seen any 30 foot towers in the pits. Maybe 3 foot ones?) – One year the team opposite us in the pit had a couple of those blinky safety cones, the ones with the flashy red lights, sitting in the front corners of their pit. Which, when sitting at our programming laptop, would blink-blink-blink right above the laptop screen. Very distracting, and I’m not sure very safe either.
I agree with the above posters that the team spirit award is about more than who has the most people/makes the most noise in the stands. When 558 won the award at the CT regional in 2007, it was to recognize the extraordinary efforts that the urban team members had to undergo just to be a part of the team, like walking and biking to meetings in all kinds of weather, as well as their willingness to help other teams.
I believe at least one team at SVR used PVC pipes to “claim” all the 3-dimensional space they were allowed… but a 30-foot tower? Has anyone seriously done this?
I got a safety token for sweeping out our pit when the robot left. It’s nice to get small recognition like that for something that needed done anyway. Y’know, if they gave those out at work I might clean my desk more often!
I’m still wondering about that 30 foot tower with blinky lights. Maybe they were landing airplanes? I suppose in the “old days” it was possible there was one, but in the past couple of years isn’t there a rule of nothing over 10 feet?
MOE 365 had a 20 foot tower a few years before the 10 foot tower rule was put into place. I know a few other teams had towers over 10 feet at that time, too.
Here is a pic from 2004 of MOE’s 20 ft tower before it got downsized. It sure made it easy to find them in the pits!
Yeah because the bright green make you SO hard to find.
And you know, in 2007 RUSH was called many things, one of those was an aircraft carrier, something about a ramp the size of a truck bed. And based on the number of teams who didnt manage to get up it (9 degree incline) we coulda used some lights to guide them.
I saw this quote at the top of the page and found it interesting because… well, I was captain of Everything Else on my team (as opposed to Bot and Build).
When I was in high school, I remember the award itself, not what we could learn from it, being the motivation to win an award. Our team was pretty new at the time, so we hadn’t quite grasped the value of FRC and there was no one to point it out to us. It was only after we won our first few awards that we realized their real importance. It wasn’t about the award! Duh! (Hmm… “It’s not about the bot” sound familiar?)
My point is that an award acts as an initial incentive. It’s a great way to get students started on the right paths, even if they focus on the goal instead of the means. They figure it out eventually. It’s similar to how the competitions feel like a reward for all the hard work - but also teach Gracious Professionalism, among other things.
Our team, team 1675, was enthused to find that we won the award in chicago. We cheered for our teams, cheered for the judges, and just showed support for everyone. We also made a big commotion when handing out awards in the pits.
EDIT: But we weren’t expecting it at all. We only realized we won it when they mentions our enthusiasm for everything.
What you all are describing, seems different then my experience with the spirit award.
Last year my team was definitely one of the most spirited groups at our regional. We were eliminated early on, and decided that if we couldn’t cheer for ourselves, we would cheer for EVERYONE else.
My team even started what is believed to be, the longest conga line in FIRST history.
But the spirit award was given to a team that showed spirit outside of competition by doing presentations for some local schools.
So the spirit award is not always given out to teams because of what they do during competition. At least not at our regional anyway…
Really it depends on the judges. The award criteria is worded broadly enough that it could be anything from overcoming all odds and competing to a team that is really close.
At no point does it say these things have to take place at the event. Just some food for thought.
I don’t think it would be allowed.
What don’t you think what would be allowed?
Thats pretty much what I was trying to point out…