Judging
I was a judge once again at the NH FTC State Championship competition held at NHTI in Concord, NH. There were 28 teams and something like 9 teams were advanced, 3 to worlds and the rest to various versions of Premier events.
Jon Jesse was judge advisor and, because one of the judges was missing, he partnered with me for the morning’s structured interview sessions. We had little trouble coming up with nominations because three of our teams were clearly top-level teams that deserved to be nominated for just about everything. The other two were pretty good – it was the state championship – so we moved into the next phase.
I was paired with Rick Spritz for the pit interviews. Jon was reviewing portfolios for Think award consideration and Sue Hay did match observation on her own – all other interactions with teams needed to be done in pairs. We were not able to get to all of the teams on our rather long list of 10 in the time allotted. Between being queued for matches or not being found at their pits for other reasons, we sometimes had a hard time of it. Also, with the pits in the same room as the competition fields, it was extremely noisy and I could not always hear the student team members’ answers. We did a few interviews at the practice field, which was better, but were concerned that we might be interfering with the teams’ efforts to test or fix things that they were at the practice field for.
Ranking the teams for awards proved to be difficult, since the pit interview teams naturally only saw some of the teams and had somewhat differing ideas about what constituted ‘innovation’ or ‘good design’. In the end, we came up with a modus vivendi and had enough choices ranked that Jon’s spreadsheet was satisfied and produced a set of winners for awards.
During the finals, a team made a questionable move and the refs made a questionable call – we were waiting something like 20 minutes while the refs consulted with each other, the rule book, and finally made a call to First headquarters to talk to the FTC World head ref. The net result was to say that the refs had made an incorrect call and the match should be replayed, something I suggested they could do much earlier by the refs simply declaring that that’s what they decided. The end result was Alliance 1 won, as almost always happens.
After the final awards and advancements were announced, I turned in my gold judge shirt and nametag lanyard and headed out. Looking for my car. And looked for my car for something like 50 minutes, finally finding it all by its lonesome in a far away parking lot. Google Maps helpfully offered to turn on the feature of marking my parking location, something it has occasionally done in the past and would have been super helpful if it had done it this time.
The start of the competition had an announced one hour delay because of the snow conditions. When I left at 07:00, the snow situation was not too bad. We had been plowed around midnight and not much had accumulated after that. Snow plows were out, but conditions were, in most places, not particularly slippery. By evening, the main roads were essentially dry.
But we felt the schedule was compressed enough that we ended up only producing a script for the top Inspire award winner, which was Avant Garde out of Nashua, with the pink and turquoise color scheme for their 3D-printed components.