FIRST Impact Award

The FIRST Impact Award (formerly the Chairman’s Award) is the most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the mission of FIRST. It was created to keep the central focus of FIRST Robotics Competition on the ultimate goal of transforming the culture in ways that will inspire greater levels of respect and honor for science and technology, as well as encouraging more of today’s youth to become science and technology leaders.

Award Guidelines

The FIRST Impact Award is presented to the team judged to best exemplify the true meaning of FIRST through measurable impact on participants, school, and community at large with emphasis on promoting science and technology through FIRST programs.

While the FIRST Impact Award is about “more than robots”, teams often leverage their robots to enhance their impact on the broader community. For this reason, it is expected teams in contention for the FIRST Impact Award will have built a robot appropriate to the game’s challenges for the season. This does not require the team to have ranked at a certain level during the event but does require teams to put in more than just the minimal effort necessary to field a drivable robot.

The criterion for the FIRST Impact Award has special emphasis on recent accomplishments within the last 3 years. The judges focus on teams’ activities over a sustained period, as distinguished from just the robot design and build period.

FIRST Robotics Competition is not about machines; it is about the experience of people working together toward a shared goal. Documenting and preserving your team’s FIRST experience becomes an important component of the over-all FIRST experience.

Award Submission

The FIRST Impact Award submission has 4 major components; executive summaries, essay, presentation, and award video.

Executive Summaries

Team are asked to answer the following questions in 500 characters or less

• Describe the impact of the FIRST program on team participants within the last 3 years. Think about percentages of those graduating high school, attending college, in STEM careers, leadership skills, and serving as mentors/sponsors in FIRST programs.
• Describe your community along with its unique opportunities and circumstances. Think about your geographic region, diversity of town/school, language barriers, socioeconomic barriers, and cultural expectations.
• Describe the team’s methods, with emphasis on the past 3 years, for spreading the FIRST mission in ways that are effective, scalable, sustainable, and creative.
• Describe your team’s goals and the progress you have made towards them to fulfill FIRST’s Vision. 
• What impact has your team seen from your efforts described in the above question? How does your team measure impact? 
• Please provide specific examples of how your team and team members act as role models for the FIRST community with emphasis on the past 3 years. How do you share these best practices with other teams?
• Describe your team’s initiatives to Assist, Mentor, and/or Start other FIRST teams with emphasis on activities within the past 3 years. 
• What other initiatives have you created, grown, sustained, or participated in (FIRST or otherwise) to help inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators? What outcomes have you seen from your efforts in the past 3 years? 
• Describe the partnerships and relationships that you’ve created with other organizations (teams, sponsors, educational institutions, government, philanthropic entities, etc.) and what you have accomplished together, with emphasis on the past 3 years. 
• Describe your team’s efforts in the past 3 years to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion within your team, FIRST, and your communities. 
• Explain how you ensure your team and the initiatives you have created will be sustainable. 
• Highlight one area in which your team needs to improve and describe the steps actively being taken to make those improvements. 
• Briefly describe other matters of interest to the FIRST Judges, including items that may not fit into the above topics. The judges are interested in learning about aspects of your team that may be unique, particularly noteworthy or had a large impact.

Essay

The essay portion of the FIRST Impact Award submission provides teams an opportunity to describe their activities and achievements in narrative form. While Judges encourage creativity of expression, the essay must clearly deliver information and facts describing what the team is about. Teams are encouraged to use some of this space to explain how their team is structured and the number of mentors and students on the team.

• The essay should avoid merely duplicating information provided in the executive summary questions. However, it is appropriate for the essay to further expand on those responses and provide more in-depth discussion of notable team achievements.
• The most effective essays are characterized by an overview of team activities during the last 3 years, followed by in-depth discussion of notable activities during the most recent 12-18 months. Judges use the essay to get a big picture view of the team and to learn about achievements that may be unique and noteworthy.

Presentation

At events, teams are assigned a 12 minute interview slot, where they give a presentation for up to 7 minutes, with the remaining time being used for Q&A. No more than 3 student (pre-college) team members are allowed to present information or answer questions from the Judges. One adult Team Mentor may attend the interview as a silent observer and later provide feedback to the team, but the mentor is not allowed to provide any assistance during the interview. Teams may also choose to provide additional materials to the judges to review

Video

Teams submitting for the FIRST Impact Award are invited to optionally provide a video link along with their submission.The only way to submit a video is through this portal as part of your submission, a USB will not be accepted at the event. Teams cannot edit the URL after it has been submitted but may continue to update the video file as long as the URL does not change. 

The team that is awarded this award will have their video shown during the award ceremony (if available). The content of the video should explain what the team has done to earn the FIRST Impact Award. The video content may be in the team’s native language, but if that language is not English, the team should add English subtitles. The video may be shown to the judges during the team’s presentation if the team chooses. In addition, the team must provide the equipment for viewing (i.e. laptop/speakers etc.) the video if they intend to show it during their interview.

Team Approach

The team edits and updates the executive summaries and essay yearly with new information. The team also creates a new presentation and video every year.