-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Awards
In FIRST, there are a series of awards that teams can win for their robot and for their impact on the community.
FIRST has a lot of awards that teams can win. The awards are broken into the following category: THIS LIST IN NOT CORRECT FOR 2021!!! (As of July 15,2020)
- Autonomous Award sponsored by Ford
- Creativity Award
- Excellence in Engineering Award
- Industrial Design Award sponsored by General Motors
- Innovation in Control Award sponsored by Rockwell Automation
- Quality Award
- Engineering Inspiration Award
- Entrepreneurship Award
- Gracious Professionalism® Award
- Imagery Award in honor of Jack Kamen
- Judges’ Award
- Rookie All-Star Award
- Rookie Inspiration Award
- Safety Award sponsored by UL
- Team Spirit Award
- Chairman’s Award
- Digital Animation Award sponsored by AutomationDirect.com
- FIRST Dean’s List Award
- Safety Animation Award sponsored by UL
- Woodie Flowers Finalist Award
Awards are important because they have district points. These district points can help the team go up in rankings which will help the team go to the District Championship and Worlds Championship. All awards are worth 5 district points except Chairman’s, and Engineering Inspiration Award. Those awards are worth 8 district points.
Awards are also important because they can help your team move to the next level of competition. Chairman’s, and Engineering Inspiration Award, if won, grants your team a spot in the next next level of competition.
For an example: If the team wins the Engineering Inspiration Award in the first competition, the team now has a slot to compete for the Engineering Inspiration Award at District Championship.
Note: If you win the Engineering Inspiration Award or Chairman, that doesn’t mean your team has a spot to compete on the field in the next level of competition. The team only has a spot to compete for the award. Meaning you have to get to the next level of competition based off your district ranking if the team wants to be able to compete on the field
In the section "What Are Awards", it mentioned that there are three main categories for awards. When it comes to winning those awards, one category requires a different path and this is the Submitted Awards category. Awards in the Submitted Awards category are awards that require a submission to win. An example is Chairman's Award. In order to compete for Chairman's, a team needs to submit the required documents, and create a presentation that will be shown to judges in a special judging room
Awards in the Machine, Creativity, and Innovation category and in the Team Attributes category are awards teams can win without a submission. Teams win these awards by talking to judges during the competition. These are the awards that this page will focus on.
Knowing your team doesn't mean you should know every detail from when the team first started to now. It means you should know the basics such as what outreach events does the team participate in, about how people are on the team, what does the robot do, etc. If you are active on the team and do your work, you should be all set. However, It is good to go through the hand outs before the competition.
You will get asked a good amount of questions by different judges. The questions that judges ask will be different depending on the judge but there are similarities. To see some example questions that might get asked, you can find a document on the team's Google Drive. (Note: These are not exact questions that judges ask you. They are just questions that some members remember being asked and the wording is not exact)
You do not need to memorized an answer for each question. The document of questions is just to familiarize yourself with what questions might be asked.
Creating hand outs is a great way to display information to the judges. Our team always has the following handouts during competitions:
- Sponsor Packet: A packet that is created with the purpose to show off the team to potential sponsors
- Outreach Packet: A packet that outlines the outreach the team has done since our rookie year. This includes information the Smore Bot and Candy/Marshmallow shooting robot, and statics such as amount of outreach hours
- Competition Robot info handout: This handout is normally a one page, double sided handout quickly but effectively outlining the robot's main mechanisms and what it does during autonomous
- Competition Robot Packet: A packet that goes into greater detail about the robot's mechanisms, electronics, and the software
During the competition, there will be judges that will approach your team's pit and ask you a few questions. The judges will be wearing blue polo and will probably have a clip board. Judges do not judge your team on the first day of competition, which is set up day. They talk to your team during the following 2 days of competitions.
Talking to judges may sound stressful if you are new and never went to a competition, but it's actually easy. You can think of it like talking to a teacher about the team. The judges will approach your team in the pits, introduce themselves, and then they will ask the questions. When talking to judges, it's always a good idea to have the correct packet. If the judges are asking questions about the robot, you should have Competition Robot info handout or packet. If the judges are asking questions about the team's outreach, you should have the Outreach Packet. Having the packet is very helpful because you can use the packet as a guide on what to mention to them and also it provides a lot of visuals such as photos of the robot's cad or photos taken during outreach events.
Packets and Handouts
Sometimes the judges will ask if they can have a copy of the packet or handout. Usually our team has many copies of our packets and handouts so you should give it to the judges. Giving the judges a copy will help them because they can go over the packet when they are trying to pick a winner, and it helps give them any information that a member might have left out when talking to them.
Positivity!
When talking to the judges, you should remain positive even if they ask a question like "what is an issue your team came across when building the robot and how did you fix it?". Using that questions as an example, your answer can be something like the following: "We ran into issues with our drive train. We could not get it to drive. However, our programmer and a member from the hardware team worked together to figure out the issue. They checked to make sure the code that was on the robot was code that worked before the robot stopped driving. Then they went through the motor controller IDs to make sure they were correct. After doing that, they realized that the reason the robot would not drive was because the joystick was plugged into the wrong port and the robot was able to drive again" (that's a true story) By staying positive, it shows the judges that your team can work together and that members enjoy being there.
After the final match is finished, the award ceremony happens. The award ceremony is when judges hand out awards to teams. The judges will read off a little paragraph that explains what the team did to win the award while dropping hints on what team won. After they finish reading the little paragraph, they will announce the number and name of the team that won. The team will go onto the field to get their award and then go off the field to get a photo taken.