Submission Statistics
Here are some statistics for submissions the 2021 FIRST Robotics Competition season you might find interesting.
Of the currently registered 3,075 teams:
- 701 teams applied for the Chairman’s Award
- 801 teams applied for the FIRST Dean’s List Award
- 596 teams nominated mentors for the Woodie Flowers Award
- 1,748 teams submitted for INFINITE RECHARGESM at Home. Of those,
- 1,561 teams submitted for both judging and skills components
- 187 chose only the judging component
- 1,378 teams submitted for the Game Design Challenge
- 882 teams submitted for the FIRST Innovation Challenge presented by Qualcomm
- 502 teams applied for all three of the At Home Challenges
- and 732 teams submitted for none of the traditionally submitted awards or At Home Challenges.
This last figure is honestly surprising to us, as these teams are essentially not participating in the 2021 season in any official way. While we expected some registered teams to not officially participate because of the variety of difficulties that accompanied this season, we weren’t expecting this high a number. To learn more about what drove this, we sent a survey to teams in this position on Friday. Very early results show a wide variety of reasons why registered teams are not officially participating, but we continue to gather responses.
Unofficial Score Reporting
Both before the survey was sent out and after, we heard mainly from teams that intended to participate in the INFINITE RECHARGE at Home Skills Competition but missed their chance. Either they knew they missed the deadline, they did not submit for the judging component (which is a requirement), or did not realize they needed to opt into the skills competition by March 5th . We believe there are at least 50 of these teams, and likely more, as some teams may not yet realize they have missed the window to confirm participation and have not contacted us.
For many of these teams, their only planned participation this season was in the INFINITE RECHARGE at Home Skills Competition, and we know it’s incredibly disappointing for these teams to realize they missed their opportunity. So, we’re developing an alternate means for these teams to still share their work, accomplishments, and successes with all of us, in the 2021 season.
We have many details to work out, but our intent is to create a means for teams that missed the deadline to share their scores on the FIRST website and compare them with other teams in the same situation. These teams will not be interviewed by judges and will not be eligible for FIRST-official awards but will still be able to complete their skills competition challenges and load their results in a system. We believe this approach does not detract from teams who did meet the deadline, as only those teams will get an interview with judges and be eligible for awards, but it still provides a way for teams who missed the deadline to celebrate their efforts publicly.
We are working out the details of this system now and will be sharing as soon as we have more to share.
Good luck to all teams that are starting their interviews!
Frank