Awards

List of all awards

In addition to the Winning and Finalist Alliances receiving recognition for their field performance; the following list includes awards presented at official Championship and Qualifying Tournaments based on judging criterion including engineering notebook, team interview, observation, and/or field performance:

• Inspire Award: This award is generally given to teams who achieve greatness in all parts of FIRST including programming, robot design, the engineering notebook, judging presentations, gracious professionalism, and outreach. This team embodies what it is to be a FIRST robotics team and is a team that others can look up to as a role model. The Inspire Award is the highest ranked award as it embodies all other awards inside of it and allows a direct bid to the next level of competition.

• Think Award: The winning team of this award clearly displays their engineering and design process in their engineering notebook. This award honors the team who had an engineering section of their engineering notebook that clearly displayed the mathematics, science, and design process that went into the building of their robot.

• Connect Award: This award is granted to the team that most connects to their engineering community outside of FIRST by sharing who they are, what FIRST is, and how others can become involved. On top of that, this team’s engineering notebook shows that they have a clear fundraising, business, and outreach plan that they will follow throughout the season.

• Rockwell Collins Innovate Award: This award is given to the team with the most innovative and creative robot design. This robot must work in a consistent manner but does not need to perform well in every round to be eligible for this award.

• Design Award: This award focuses on the design aspect of the robot. The team winning this award must show a thoughtful design on their robot that is both functional and aesthetic. The robot must distinguish itself from other competitors by showing off its unique design. This design can be shown both on the competition field and in the engineering notebook through sketches, blueprints, photos, and computer-aided design (CAD). CAD helps teams plan and create robots before actually building the robot in person.
• Motivate Award: Sparking others to embrace the culture of FIRST! This Team embraces the culture of FIRST and clearly shows what it means to be a Team. This judged award celebrates the Team that represents the essence of the FIRST Tech Challenge competition through Team building, Team spirit and displayed enthusiasm. This is a Team who makes a collective effort to make FIRST known throughout their school and community, and sparks others to embrace the culture of FIRST.
• Control Award: Mastering Robot intelligence. The Control Award celebrates a Team that uses sensors and software to increase the Robot’s functionality on the field. This award is given to the Team that demonstrates innovative thinking in the control system to solve game challenges such as autonomous operation, improving mechanical systems with intelligent control, or using sensors to achieve better results on the field. The control component should work consistently on the field. The Team’s Engineering Notebook must contain details about the implementation of the software, sensors, and mechanical control.