Judging and Awards

By Lin, Jayesh, Omar, Tycho, and Max

Task: Increase chances to advance in judging

In our competitions we really can't rely on our robot performing as well as it does in practice and our sparring matches with Imperial. If we're going to increase our chances of advancing from Regionals to Super-Regionals 90% of the time it's going to be from judging. We've always had rocky presentations in my opinion, but this year we're getting our energy up and trying to get everyone more interactive. We've heard that the organizers are having trouble getting enough judges, so it's likely the judges will be a little inexperienced. We're making a colored tab and blurb for each award to place at the front of our journal. We'll have a little paragraph on why we think we should be considered for each award, followed by a handful of key posts we believe back up our claim. Each award has a color, each post gets a number, and we place colored tabs (think these post-it flags) with a number written on the printed page.

Reflections

Judges don't have much time to inspect pages before a presentation, so it's the job of the first person who goes in to give the journal, a presentation copy (or 2 depending on the table space), and a short description of what's going on. This includes reference pages such as the awards and a copy of our scouting flier. Judges mostly listen and take notes during a presentation, so we don't want to overload them with pages to look at initially, but have enough information available to look through at the main judges meeting. The easier it is for a judge to get a sense of our team, the higher likelihood they will mention us in award considerations. This is a hard balance to strike, but the tabs served us well last year and I should have gotten them together again a while ago. Jayesh and Omar went through our tag page, picking the key ones to bring up. Tycho and Max continued working on their technical posts.