Summarizing!

Team 3313 had a meeting last week! We're finally updating about it now.

The main (well, only) project we worked on was the Chairman's Executive Summary. We completed a first draft! We realize FIRST has not actually released the full Awards Section of the Rulebook. However, if you log into STIMS (the student login thing for FRC), the executive summary questions and essay questions are on there. So we are basing our work off of that for now. If the rules change, we will adjust accordingly. 

For those not aware, last week we took our team timeline of events (EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE ONE OF THESE) and divided them up into Essay, Speech, and the 12 Executive Summary Questions. This prevents repeats across the three platforms (except the essential stuff). 

Today, we took the super long lists under each Executive Summary Question and narrowed them down to 2 or 3 things. Finally, we assigned each question to a person to type up. That way, each person was in charge of one 500 character section. We will edit them in the future but simply typing up SOMETHING is the first (and possibly most difficult) step. 

Working on the Chairman's Award as a large group has been a great experience so far. It's informational for rookies and makes the whole team invested in the product (the same should be applied to the robot). Plus, we don't have a lot of robot activities to do right now so this is keeping everyone busy. 

It's super, duper funny to think of where we are at in the Chairman's process this year, compared to last year. At this time last year, we had barely done anything. We completed our first Executive Summary Draft with about 1 week left in Build Season. It's just awesome to see how far we've come in such a short time. 

We're getting philosophical here but our team really enjoys the Chairman's Award. It's the main thing that separates FIRST from just about every other competition (of any kind). FIRST is about building robots and exposing young people to Engineering and Science but even more than that, it's about changing the culture, community by community, to make science fun, interesting, and desirable. Chairman's rewards and pushes teams to keep doing more. 

Anyway, in our meeting this week, we're going to start making an outline and formatting the essay.