Hi Everyone,
There has been an update to the Guide to Judging, live as of this morning.
Normally, this would be scheduled for December; however, we decided to release it early because some of the changes impact how students may organize notebooks and submit for the Innovate Award. This update also potentially impacts eligibility for the Excellence Award at smaller events that qualify teams to the World Championship.
Our goal with the update to the Innovate Award submission process was to give teams another way to organize their Innovate Award submissions via a specific section in their Engineering notebook, which will assist teams who, due to their notebook format, are not able to add/subtract pages. This will also allow teams to keep a record of their past submissions, which might be both fun and enlightening for the team to reflect back on later in the season.
Our goal with the update to Excellence Award criteria for small events qualifying to the World Championship is to open up eligibility for regions with under 16 teams in their Event Region Championship, where there may be enough teams to hold a tournament, but the 40% ranking requirements for performance criteria narrows eligibility to a very small number of candidates, in some cases creating a scenario where no team is eligible. The waiving of the 40% performance ranking requirements requires approval from the region’s Regional Support Manager and is not automatically triggered by the size of the event.
For more information, please see the official KB articles / PDF version of the Guide to Judging.
Guide to Judging Change Log:
November 2024
Overall
- Various grammatical and typographical fixes.
- Various edits and additions for clarity.
- Current season Q&As as of 11/4/24 integrated into document.
- Clarified that the Event Partner cannot serve as a Judge during their own event.
Section 4: Awards
- Formalized exemptions to Excellence Award in specific instances at events qualifying teams directly to a VEX World Championship event.
- Innovate Award - additional option for submission form placement: included in clearly marked section of the Engineering Notebook.
- Clarified that Sportsmanship and Energy Awards can be determined by volunteer nominations even if the event does not include Judging.
- Clarified award precedence to align with most current version of the Qualifying Criteria.
Section 5: Judging the Engineering Notebooks:
- Clarified definition of “Fully Developed” consistently across Guide to Judging sections.
7 Likes
To clarify, this Guide to Judging update is in place of the December update, and therefore there will be no Guide to Judging update in December?
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If we have a bunch of impactful Q&As or receive actionable feedback, then a December Update may still be something that happens in addition to this one. I do not want to completely rule it out, but there is a good chance it will be smaller update, if we have changes to make. If we have no changes to make, then we will skip the December update entirely.
2 Likes
You’ll want to make another small update.
- In a clearly labeled section in their Engineering Notebook. In this instance, teams should take care to date all entries and arrange them chronically, fully filling out the information required on the Innovate Award Submission Form. Judges are to only consider the entry in this section that aligns with the event name / date.
1 Like
I like this idea!
Four recommendations I would make (for teams, judges, and/or the RECF) are:
- For judges, I highly recommend having judge teams write something on the rubric to indicate that a team made a submission for the Innovate Award, such as an “I” (with bars so it’s easier to distinguish from an accidental line) or “Inn.” in the upper right corner. (They could also write something like “Innovate Submission”, though that might take longer.) This might also remind the judges to pay special attention to that feature during the interview.
- It would also be good to create a list of teams that made Innovate Award submissions, and ideally even brief summaries of what their innovative feature was (to save time, the sunmaries could also be written after interviews are finished, or written by the Judge Advisor during notebook evaluations while they aren’t busy with something else).
- This goes without saying, but make sure all the judges know about the rule change, especially those who might have gotten used to the previous method.
- For teams, it might be good to place something right after the title page that indicates the Innovate Award form will be in a certain section, to make it even more clear where this information will be located.
On another note, when you submit a digital notebook, make sure the link works on devices besides your own, including that it didn’t get converted to a URL with something like “safelinks.outlook.com” in it, and that it is hosted on a site that isn’t blocked by any school wifi or other networks, and is set so anyone who uses the link can view it. There may be some issues that judges will be able to overcome, but not all of them.
Would it be possible to update the Vex Digital Engineering Notebook Templates ( https://kb.roboticseducation.org/hc/en-us/articles/8369508470935-VEX-Digital-Notebook-Templates ) with the new Innovate Award Submission form? That might increase the likelihood for teams to submit it.
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Often, tournaments accepting Digital Notebooks will have a deadline for the submission a week or 2 before the actual competition. Some teams may have multiple tournaments relatively close together in time such that these deadlines overlap. How should Innovate Award Submission forms be handled in these cases? Obviously, teams may be updating their notebooks between the deadline and the tournament (both for purposes of the Innovate Award and as part of their natural documentation process). Does the Innovate form for the specific tournament need to be “properly submitted” on the deadline date or on the tournament date?
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Please submit any questions to the official Judging Q&A. This helps to keep information centralized so all teams have access to it.
3 Likes