Since there won’t be a World Championship for 2020, I have a few ideas about ways for some of the usual awards could be given out:
The teams with the #1 Skills scores in their grade levels could be declared the World Skills Champions for 2020. (The main drawback to this would be that some teams ended their regular seasons earlier, but were planning to get a higher Skills score at Worlds - or they had to end their seasons early because of COVID-19.)
If possible, judged awards could be determined by having eligible teams submit notebooks for a group of judges to review them, and be given video interviews, and then Design, Excellence, and other judged awards could be determined based on those. (Excellence and Amaze could also consider their performance throughout the year, and videos that exist of their robots in action, while Build could also consider photos and videos of their robots, and Think could consider their performances in Autonomous.)
If there are concerns about the process being incomplete compared to most events, the awards could be considered as something more unofficial, and Excellence wouldn’t qualify for next year’s Worlds.
I’m guessing the whole process of choosing the awards might not be feasible since some teams had to end their seasons sooner than others, and especially if some potential Excellence winners wouldn’t have the time to be interviewed under the circumstances, but I wanted to put the idea out there in case it would work.
I know that the RECF online challenges have already been announced, but I would like to know how the online challenge winners will be addressed in the absence of worlds since they usually have a ceremony for them and present them with their trophies. @tweber would you happen to know the answer to this?
The other alternative is that teams just won’t get their chance to get awards, and World Champion, Excellecne, and similar awards from Worlds 2019 will just qualify for Worlds 2021 to fill those spots, since there was not Worlds 2020 to pull qualifying awards from.
Things like Skills can be pulled from current standings, though it may be somewhat unfair to aforementioned teams whose seasons were ended early before they got a chance to improve their scores.
I’m sure the RECF will get to these finer points in the months to come, and until they do all we can do is speculate.
Judged awards may be doable through video submission, but then it would still just equate to a glorified online video challenge, without other factors such as personal conduct or event performance coming into play. Notebooks could be submitted via pictures of each page or snail-mail, but that’s pretty unfeasible.
I think that Awards just won’t happen whatsoever this year. However, I am interested to learn what the RECF decides to do with the 2020 World-qualifying awards
I’m expecting that the awards from 2019 that automatically qualified for 2020 Worlds will qualify for 2021 Worlds instead (and perhaps also the #1 Skills scores from this year, although that seems more unlikely).
If there are awards given out to replace the awards at 2020 Worlds, I think I agree with not having them qualify for 2021 Worlds, since they wouldn’t go through the same process as the normal awards. (They would provide a little bit of insurance for the teams that win them, though.)