The CADathon will start at 2020-09-30T23:00:00Z, with the deadline for signups being 2020-09-30T06:59:00Z.
We will be giving the judges a week to judge all submissions.
Winners will receive various awards.
For those unaware, a CADathon is like a hackathon but with CAD. People/teams are given a short period of time to CAD a specific thing (in this case a robot) ending with a panel of judges selecting a winner. If you would like more information on CADathons, check out the 8th Bi-Annual F4 CADathon.
Teams will be made of up to 3 participants. Each team needs to submit only one signup form, but all team members must join the discord. The discord will be the place to ask questions directly to the organizers.
When done, teams must submit their CAD files and a PDF detailing the design documentation.
CAD files will be checked to make sure they adhere to the game rules.
The only prerequisites to join are that you are willing to spend time doing it and that you have access to some CAD software. You can be any age (this is not limited to students) and we encourage everyone from newbies to the most advanced CADers to put their skills to the test. If you are new to CAD and would like to be on a larger team to help yourself learn, please contact us as these will be handled on a case to case basis. If you are interested please sign up here but please sign up as soon as you decide to participate.
Prizes
1st Place
$100 gift card or WRRF-branded item of equivalent value of team’s choice
2nd Place
$50 gift card or WRRF-branded item of equivalent value of team’s choice
3rd Place
$25 gift card or WRRF-branded item of equivalent value of team’s choice
Most Functional
$20 gift card or WRRF-branded item of equivalent value of team’s choice
Most Aesthetic
$20 gift card or WRRF-branded item of equivalent value of team’s choice
Most Practical
$20 gift card or WRRF-branded item of equivalent value of team’s choice
Are they any limits of who can be on a team other than QTY of people?
Who are the judges of the event?
What are the judges qualifications?
What are the criteria being judged?
Do judges have access to all common CAD softwares, or will they be importing?
Are there assumed manufacturing resource limitations, and if so, what are they? (if not, can we safely assume that our 6-axis parts will be judged fairly and evenly with other submissions?)
Are all-student teams judged on the same level as mentor/student teams? Are they judged on the same level as all-mentor teams?
Is it possible to win multiple awards (ie. Second Place + Most Practical)?
Is this for the broader FIRST community, or is it specifically focused on the typical Bay Area crowd that WRRF normally interacts with?
Overall I like the idea of a CADathon from WRRF, but with anything from anyone I am interested in the details to see whether I should get my students involved.
Any more info on this would be greatly appreciated.
To be frank, my concern is that from my personal experiences, WRRF has had a track record of having workshop instructors who I now wouldn’t say were the most qualified to instruct in that subject (I’m including myself - I was allowed to teach Solidworks workshops as a student and I can’t say I knew enough to teach good CAD practices effectively at the time). Alongside this I’ve seen other “CADathon”-like events run and judged by people lacking in experience to the point where it notably affected the judging process, so knowing who the judges are and ensuring they’re qualified for such a judging role is important to me.
I’m also concerned that there are no limits on manufacturing abilities, and can see a slippery slope of judges either being too impressed / accepting of complicated parts or too skeptical that a given team can produce a given part. In the past when I’ve run CADathon-esque competitions, I’ve found that having a resource limitation helps ensure more fair judging on the practicality of a design.
It worries me that teams comprised entirely of students could get blown out of the water by teams of mentors from teams they may have never been exposed to before. I think you would find more enthusiastic newcomers with less experience and more student teams if you judged teams with all students separately.
I don’t mean to be nitpicky and don’t want to sound rude - It’s just important to me that these kind of things are done well because I’ve seen how positively they can impact the community when done well (see F4’s CADathons). I wanna see this one succeed, I’ve just been hurt before .
The judges are all CAD/mechanical mentors or alumni for FRC teams, and they all have the CADathon Judge role on the discord.
Part of the judging criteria is feasibility, which is tailored to FRC and FTC - if the design in question would be reasonable to build by an FRC or FTC team, then the score for feasibility would be higher.
This is a really good point, and we will look at the criteria and documentation requirements to ensure they are fairly balanced for everyone, no matter the experience.
I’d like to thank you for all these good questions, actually - I really want this CADathon to go well, and your questions and concerns are appreciated, especially since this is our first CADathon.
The CADathon will be opened on September 30, and will run until October 6. Judging will take place from October 6 to October 13. Final results will be announced on October 13.
If you’re looking for more, there are some incredibly bright minds here on CD who I would bet would be interested in judging if you asked. I believe transparency with this sort of thing is important because it shows that you are prepared and put together, and having a list of names can add credibility to your program.
Anything left vague and ambiguous can sometimes (incorrectly) imply that things aren’t figured out or that there’s a known lack of quality. The more information given up front, the more confidence people will have about your program. As always, don’t be afraid to ask for help! I know WRRF in the past has preferred to handle everything themselves, but the FIRST community always wants to help.
Your ongoing concerns and questions about our CADathon are valid, and as @gellnick said, much appreciated. Thanks for helping us refine our contest specs as we navigate this for the first time. I’ll let @gellnick continue providing more information about the CADathon itself.
However, I did want to call out something you said earlier a little. This:
seems not only irrelevant - this thread is specifically about the CADathon - but also rude to and dismissive of the many student leads, alumni, and mentors who have taught workshops, who have not only worked hard to earn the experience (and thus - qualifications) they have, but also spend a lot of time preparing and/or rehearsing their workshops to make sure they can present that experience in a cohesive manner, especially since this is a public forum, and especially since you haven’t been at any of our workshops for several years and thus have a limited idea of our recent developments and track record.
We know that presenters are doing those things because we ask folks to send in outlines ahead of time; we communicate with them if it seems like there’s anything off about their descriptions; and we sit on each of the sessions that happen at our events to see how presenters are doing in action.
I will admit that despite all that, here and there we do still get folks who could have been more prepared, but that is true of pretty much any event that puts out open calls for proposals and not specific to us.
We do our due diligence on our end, but presenters also have some amount of responsibility to reflect on and consider whether they are really ready to speak to everything they want to present as well.
The workshops I believe you are referring to were primarily beginner-oriented. Sometimes introductory workshops don’t need to cover every single tenet of good practice - and consequently, nor do their instructors need to necessarily be the most qualified to talk about every single tenet of good practice - they just need to get people started and excited to learn more (and you were able to do that well enough). So I don’t think that having instructors in that position is a detriment overall. Much as FIRST’s programs themselves don’t aim to have students graduating with the entire set of skills and theoretical grounding that they need to head straight into industry - they just aim to give students a solid foundation and inspire them to get on the track to getting farther.
I allowed you to teach because I thought well of your knowledge and skills - even if you yourself didn’t - and still do, so for you to now use that goodwill to justify your criticism here is rather dismaying. Of course, it’s easy for us to look back now and think about how little we knew comparatively years ago - I would certainly hope that with the additional experience at school and work that you’ve gained since then that you now know lots more than you did back then - but regardless of what you may feel about that younger version of you now, projecting that into a blanket criticism of all our other instructors and track record seems inappropriate.
I apologize for derailing this thread a bit, but since you decided to get in a swipe about all our instructors for some reason, I just wanted to speak up for them and set the record straight here.
I’m a bit late in replying with results, but here are the winners!
Overall Winners
First Prize of a $100 gift card to any robotics-related vendor or service, or the equivalent value in WRRF-branded merchandise, goes to Team 103, the Scary Peary People, with 92 points. Congratulations to Peter and Ty!
Second Prize of a $50 gift card to any robotics-related vendor or service, or the equivalent value in WRRF-branded merchandise, goes to Team 7707, SkyHigh, with 78 points. Congratulations to Caleb!
Third Prize of a $25 gift card to any robotics-related vendor or service, or the equvalent value in WRRF-branded merchandise, goes to Team 576, Wild White Pizza, with 66 points. Congratulations to Riki!
Category Winners
The Function Prize of a $20 gift card to any robotics-related vendor or service, or the equivalent value in WRRF-branded merchandise, goes to Team 108, Faulty Flush, with 22 points in the Function category. Congratulations to Jatin!
The Aesthetics Prize of a $20 gift card to any robotics-related vendor or service, or the equivalent value in WRRF-branded merchandise, goes to Team 100, Kektimus Prime, with 17 points in the Aesthetics category. Congratulations to Shrey!
The Most Practical Prize of a $20 gift card to any robotics-related vendor or service, or the equivalent value in WRRF-branded merchandise, goes to Team 106, TaterBots, with 14 points in the Feasibility category. Congratulations to Jacob, Natan, and Nick!
I'd like to thank all the participants and judges for their hard work, and for making this CADathon a success. It was a lot of fun hosting this CADathon and seeing all the unique designs.
Thank you!
- The WRRF Spark Planning Committee