Coaches,
BACKGROUND:
The FIRST LEGO League organizers are always trying to figure out ways to make the overall season/tournament experience better and more meaningful for teams. They often field-test changes in a few regions to see how they work, and then tweak them before making a general change for all teams. Here are some of the concepts that they've tested out over the last several years:
- Core Values Poster
- Rubric Updates and Streamlining
- Robot Design Executive Summary
- Engineering Notebooks
- Expansion of allowable software for robot programming
There even was a scoring adjustment one season based on whether teams used an older robot controller or the brand-new improved version. After observation and feedback from volunteers, that was discontinued, because it wasn't needed.
Based on this history, we can't be certain about specific requirements until we see next year's Challenge guide.
DISCUSSION:
The Core Values Poster and the Robot Design Executive Summary have been around for a few years, although we haven't required them in Virginia-DC FLL. Based on my experience judging in other states, I see them as tools to help teams organize their thoughts and prepare for judging. Whether or not the team talks about their poster during judging (FWIW, I don't want a team to spend a lot of time reading back everything on their poster,) teams that have put in time to work on a poster often seem to be better organized and prepared to talk about their season, because they've already thought about it in the context of Core Values, or Robot design and programming.
This year's Challenge Guide has only one requirement for a Core Values Poster--don't make it larger than 3 feet by 4 feet. And it definitely allows for something of a different size to accommodate the team's needs for travel and storage. There are no requirements for a Project Poster. The Robot Design Executive Summary isn't a poster at all, but a structure for a discussion/presentation.
So, teams should feel free to make a "poster" out of whatever materials are best suited for them. The only thing that I would warn against is making something that could require a lot of effort to set up, because that can distract a team, and reduce the time available for discussions during the judging session.
Steve