Researching Awards

By Lin

Task: Research and understand the various awards

We rarely prepare enough for awards, usually hoping the practice before that we've done enough to be in the running. Last year we won the PTC Creo award at one competition, but that was a one time deal. This year we can prepare our journal in such a way to make it easier for judges to find what they're looking for when deciding.

Reflections

Out of the 9 awards, 7 are given at every tournament. These main 7 are Inspire, Think, Connect, Innovate, PTC Design, Motivate, and Control. Following are summaries/key points of the main 7 awards.
Inspire

• Good Engineering section, Team section, Business and strategy section
• good reliable robot in general
• professional

Think

• Detailed notebook with drawings
• Notebook must recount lessons/journey/experiences of team
• Entries giving lessons on underlying math and science concepts

Connect

• Notebook business and strategic section. Contains fundraising, sustainability timelines, outreach, and community service goals
• actively engaging in the engineering commnuity

Innovate

• design process and design solution
• elegant and unique design
• efficient design

PTC Design

• detailed design drawings
• functional and aesthetic design

Motivate

• Be an ambassador for FIRST
• recruit others who might not be active in STEM
• EVERY team member must participate
• Each member must present
• Creatively market the team

Control

• Must fill out application sheet
• Engineering section
• uses intelligent coding
• @ Iron Reign members: Pose and color blob would give an advantage

Most of these awards hinge on us being able to effectively present our achievements to judges, with a well organized engineering notebook. Our tagging system will make it easy to categorize posts based on what award they fall under, I just need to add sorting pages for these 7 new tags. Then we can print out extra engineering notebooks dedicated to each award. When added, we will go through previous posts and tag based on the relevant award category. All the more reason to get this done quickly, the posts are piling up.