2019 Awards Update

We have been hard at work making improvements and have some news about the FIRST Robotics Competition Awards that we are excited to share! Here are some highlights:

Gracious Professionalism Award:

Many of you are aware that at events, each team would receive a form where they could nominate another team for the Gracious Professionalism (GP) Award. We found that these forms were not the best way to obtain the information we wanted. So, for the 2019 season, we will not be using the GP forms and instead will be focusing on more training for the Judges to help them decide the winners for this award without the form. Be sure to share your team GP stories with visiting judges.

Team Spotlight:

One thing we had given teams the option to do was submit some information about the team that Judges could then review before the event. This was on the Lead Coach/Mentor 1 and 2’s Dashboard and was called the Team Spotlight. It wasn’t a mandatory form, and we found that only some teams would fill out these sections. Since we were not getting information from all teams, it was not as useful as we had hoped. We also felt that these questions are usually answered from the pit interviews, so we have decided to remove this form from the Dashboard. You will notice the link is still on the Dashboard, but the portal is closed and is not accepting any additions. We wanted to let teams know that they shouldn’t worry about filling this out.

Chairman’s Award

While working on updating the awards, we noticed that the Chairman’s Award was missing some information (things like the character counts for the executive summary, etc.) and was not laid out on the website in the easiest manner. We went through and reorganized it to present the information in a more efficient manner and made sure to add any additional information that would be helpful to teams submitting. You will also notice some wording updates to stress the importance of FIRST. Be sure you check out the updates on the website here.

Autonomous Award Sponsored by Ford:

Remember this blog? We announced earlier this year that we had a new award that was to be presented at Championships only. Due to everyone’s excitement and the success of the award, and with Ford's continuing sponsorship, we have decided to expand this award to be available at all regional and district events. Make sure you check out the awards description as it has been slightly updated since we originally released it. You'll also notice that like the Rookie All Star and Rookie Inspiration Awards, this may not be presented at every event. We are looking forward to seeing some incredible Autonomous Actions for the 2019 season!

Entrepreneurship Award:

We have completely revamped the Entrepreneurship Award. Read all the details about the new guidelines and requirements for the award here. You will notice it no longer require teams to submit through an online portal. Instead, to be considered for this award, we are asking teams to prepare a summary business plan to bring to events and give to the judges when they come to the pits. Because Judges will be receiving these at the event, there is a page limit, but teams should also be able to speak to the ideas inside the document. We are hoping that this new method will allow teams to submit in a format that is more useful to them and could be used to recruit potential sponsors. With the removal of the portal, teams are also given more time to finish their business plan and we are hoping this will increase the number of submissions we receive. We cannot wait to see team’s business plans and we hope you are as excited about these changes as we are!

We are super excited for all of these improvements and are confident that these changes will help make for a more consistent team experience.