The past two competitions my team has gone to we have not been interviewed for the design award. Now I can’t complain the first Competition we won the design award, but as it is part of the rubric I’m concerned on how we did win without an interview and then how we did not win at he next competition we attended (same place). Our Notebook is very in depth and we would like to win the award at states but if they don’t interview us can we even win?
I would recommend you contact the Event Partner for the event - there may have been a shortage of judges for the event.
Also, as the season goes on, more teams submit notebooks for reviews, so where you may have earned Design at an early event, you might have been bumped by a team competing for the first time at the venue.
That’s too bad, but it can be really hard to get enough volunteers to get everything done. I’m assuming that the event partner would have liked to do so, but it was just a staffing issue. I’d be really surprised if the top teams at states did not get interviewed. As you don’t have much experience as it wasn’t done before, be sure you look over the rubric and the judge’s guide carefully. This will give you an idea of what it will be like.
Good luck!
I can’t speak for local events (who don’t typically judge design and excellence separately from other awards), but for Worlds, there are teams of judges assigned just to design. (Other judges interview every team for Amaze, Think, etc., and every team gets an interview for those). The design award judges will only interview the best teams as determined by the notebook review. In other words, after all the notebooks are scored using rubrics, the top notebooks go to the design award judges for review and interviews. Since every finalist notebook will pretty much have a “perfect” score (within a point or two on the rubric, that is), the interview become the most important aspect to select the design award winner.
YA it’s super important! one that the whole team understands what they’re building and two what teammate individually contributes to a team so if we have won a design award without an interview our notebook must be decent, but an interview proves what we’ve accomplished has been documented in just worried we’ll be overlooked at states. over thinking it lol
it’s becoming fairly common to just interview the teams with the top notebooks, so not having an interview in and of itself is not strange, but is really weird that you won without an interview.
Is it possible that the rest of your team did an interview without you?
No, we were all really scared that we didn’t get interviewed so when it happened a second time I wasn’t as concerned. yet I’m unaware if they interviewed the winning team at our last comp… I should have asked but I can assure you our notebook is large … over 200 pages and I have read the rubric and kept to it so i would hope its somewhere near the other teams(yet I know that just because I think our notebook is good and its long doesn’t mean it is)
We do not typically interview specifically for the Design Award. Some of our events will have scheduled interviews with all of the teams, but those are not necessarily for the Design Award. Some of our events do not have scheduled interview times. The Design Award is based on the teams documentation of their design process, which is manifested in the Engineering Notebook. We typically have one or two judges whose primary responsibility is to read and evaluate the Engineering Notebooks. They do an initial sort to weed out the obvious non-contenders then rank the remaining notebooks to get a top 5 or so. They are then encouraged to go and informally talk to those top 5-6 teams to see how the students respond to questions about their notebook. Remember also, the Excellence award winner might have the best Design Notebook, but by winning Excellence, they are not eligible for Design.
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The process is outlined here: https://www.roboticseducation.org/documents/2017/10/vrc-design-award-judging-process.pdf
As mentioned earlier - scheduled meetings with the judges is not required. However, judges will use their available time to determine a team’s understanding of their design process. How this is done varies from venue to venue.
There are many excellent notebooks out there to use as reference.