Congratulate our Awardees
FTC Jamaica Awards
Teams devote a substantial amount of time to designing, building, and programming their robots, as well as learning what it takes to be a team player.
Competitions are often the culmination of a season’s worth of hard work for many teams. However, FIRST Tech Challenge is more than just a robot competition; teams can also earn judged awards. Choosing prize winners is a difficult task, and the obligation is taken very seriously by the judges. The judged awards are a positive approach to acknowledge teams who exemplify essential qualities such as Gracious Professionalism™, cooperation, creativity, innovation, and the importance of the engineering design process.
We honour our students by giving them various awards. Check out the plethora of awards below.
The Inspire Award
The Inspire Award is presented to the Team that the Judges felt truly embodied the ‘challenge’ of the FIRST Tech Challenge program. The Team that receives this award is a strong ambassador for FIRST programs and works to promote FIRST and make it loud in their community. The Team that receives this Award has performed well in all Judging categories and was chosen by the Judges as a model FIRST Tech Challenge team both on and off the playing field. This team shares their experiences, enthusiasm and knowledge with other teams, sponsors, their community, and the Judges. Working as a unit, this team will have shown success in performing the task of designing and building a robot. The Judges used observations made during interviews and in the pit area, the team’s engineering notebook, and performance on the playing field in determining the winner.
Think Award
The Think Award is given to the team that the Judges feel best reflects the journey of the engineering design process. The engineering notebook is the key reference for Judges to help them identify the most deserving team. This team’s engineering notebook focused on the design and build stages of the team’s robot and exemplified their journey as a team and engineers.
Connect Award
The Think Award is given to the team that the Judges feel best reflects the journey of the engineering design process. The engineering notebook is the key reference for Judges to help them identify the most deserving team. This team’s engineering notebook focused on the design and build stages of the team’s robot and exemplified their journey as a team and engineers.
Collins Aerospace Innovate Award
The Collins Aerospace Innovate Award celebrates a team that has the ingenuity and inventiveness to make their designs come to life. This award is given to the team that the Judges feel has the most innovative and creative robot design solution to the FIRST Tech Challenge game. Elements of this award include elegant design, robustness and ‘out of the box’ thinking with regard to design. This award may address the design of the whole robot or some sub-assembly component of the robot. The creative component needs to work consistently, but a robot does not have to work all of the time during matches to be considered for this award. The team’s engineering notebook showed the design of the component(s) and the team’s robot, and clearly explains how the team arrived at their solution.
Design Award
The Design Award expands on this year’s challenge, inspiring teams to incorporate industrial design into their robots. These elements can be shown in the simplicity of the design as it applies to the tasks, the look and feel of the robot in how the design allows us to think of robots in new ways. The design aspect must serve a function – but they should also differentiate the robot in a unique fashion.
Motivate Award
Next we have the Motivate Award. The team that receives the Motivate Award has the culture of FIRST and clearly shows what it means to be a team. This 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.
Judges Award
The Judges Award is given at the discretion of the Judges to a Team they have encountered whose unique efforts, performance or dynamics merit recognition, yet the Team does not fit into any of the existing Award categories. Here is what the Judges have to say about the winner of this Award.