In this email:
Remote Judging Platform including “Primary Adult”
Virtual Sharing and “Pit Visits”
Team Submissions
Judging Session Scheduling
Ask An Expert – Inspection – Nov 18th
Team Member Registration
FTC Scoring System
Registration for Later Events
Qualifier Status

Remote Judging Platform

Well, we’ve finally made our decision and we’re planning to use Zoom for the judging portion of our Remote Events. We are planning to set up each team in their own Zoom session (provided by us) hosted by one of your coaches and the judges will come into your session for judging. (See below topic on judging) We are planning to have “practice” sessions set up for teams/coaches that aren’t familiar with the platform. More on training later. Each Zoom session will be required to have a minimum of 2 adults per YPP guidelines and at least one of them needs to be Lead Coach 1 or 2. This Lead Coach will be assigned to be the host of the Zoom session. When submitting your team’s information for the Remote Event, this person will be submitted in the “Primary Adult” position. We will email all necessary Zoom information to the Primary adult and the additional adult identified by the team and they may share the information with their team members. Please do not share this information outside your team as you don’t want outside individuals in your team room during judging.

The award ceremony will be on a GoToWebinar Platform at the end of the day.

Virtual Sharing and “Pit Visits”

We are planning to post a chart of teams competing at an event with an optional space for them to post a link to content they would like to share with the public. This could be a link to a shared slide file or a video. It could be a video of their robot reveal or a presentation about the team. It could also be a link to a playlist of their qualifying matches for that event. This is optional but we’ve had many teams that are interested in having a place to share these types of things.

In our day’s schedule, the teams will have a morning judging session and a 2nd visit from judges (Pit Interviews) after lunch. In the afternoon after the judging, we will be emailing out information to teams that Opt In to hosting “Pit Visits”. This means we will share your Zoom credentials with other teams so that you can visit each other in your pit rooms.

We’re going to try these two optional activities for all of our December events and see how they go and how much participation we get. We’ll then decide whether or not to continue them into the rest of the season.

Team Submissions

Teams will get a link to a JotForm to submit all information needed for their event. This will include basic team and contact information including an address where any trophies should be mailed and the chance to upload a team picture that may be used during the award ceremony.

Then there will be a place to upload your Engineering Portfolio. This will be an upload in .pdf form rather than a link to your content. The Engineering Portfolio is required for any judged awards. There are also optional uploads for the Control Award Submission form (and a link to a required video), a Judging Team Feedback Form and a link to your Engineering Notebook should the judges want to look at it.  (If you’re interested in receiving feedback, here’s a link to the form.)

The last section asks teams if they want to Opt In for Pit Visits and if they have something they would like to share virtually with the public with a chance to provide the link to the content and a short description of it.

It’s important that teams provide this information in a timely manner as we will need time to verify receipt and make it available to the intended users. We are requesting all Jotform materials will need to be submitted no later than Wed evening (8pm) the week before your judging session. Note, this will be during the week of your qualifying matches.

Judging Session Scheduling

Teams will have two sessions with judges on the day of the event. They will have a morning scheduled session that’s similar to the morning judge sessions at a traditional event. They will have 5 minutes to present to the judges followed by roughly 5 min of Q&A. After lunch, each team will have another Pit Interview session. For these interviews teams will asked to be in their team’s Zoom session room during a window when the judges will be coming around. Specific times for these windows will be out later but we anticipate it will be somewhere in the 1:30-4:00 window and we’ll let you know more as it’s more defined.

Ask An Expert: Inspections – Nov 18th at 7:00p

We will be hosting our next Ask An Expert session with a presentation and general Q&A for Inspection. Bob France, a lead NorCal FTA and Lead Inspector will be going over all the requirements for self-inspecting your robot to be sure you’re compliant and competition ready. Just in time for the December events!!  Register here to attend on Wed, Nov 18th at 7:00pm.

Team Member Registration – Important!

A reminder that all team members will need to register online this year and electronically sign the consent and release form. Note, the Consent and Release form was updated on Sept 9th with notes about Covid-19 so any team members or coaches who had signed prior to that date will need to go back in and sign the updated version. For help and instructions on completing this process, there’s a section in the Resource Library to help including instructions for using a mobile device. Look here for instructions.

All team members should be registered online even if your not planning to compete. You’ll need to have all youth registered including the Consent forms for youth and adults. You will not be submitting a printed (or .pdf) roster for competitions however. We will be checking these on the FIRST system. Teams will not be allowed to log into the FTC Scoring System until this is complete. Please help us in this HUGE effort of verifying all teams by taking care of this now! Once this is done for the season, you won’t need to touch it again unless you make changes to your teams.

FTC Scoring System

FIRST has provided several videos to help teams prepare for their remote qualifying matches using the FTC Scoring System. Here’s a link to the Game and Season page. Look under “Remote Team Resources” for links to the videos and FTC Scoring Manual. The link to Remote Scoresheets are at the bottom in the “Season Results” section.The FTC Scoring system should be released soon.

Once we confirm a team has completed their teams’ registrations, we will register teams into their events in the FTC Scoring System. Then either Lead Coach 1 or Lead Coach 2 can access the scoring system either through a link (ftc-scoring.firstinspires.org) or (we think) through a link in their FIRST Dashboard.

Teams will have from 7:00am on the first day of their event through 2:00pm on their judging day to submit their qualifying match scores. These will either be live with an internet connection or entered later with from a paper scoresheet (if no internet at the field). It’s important for teams to carefully review the score from a match before hitting the submit button because once it’s committed, it’s final. We also recommend that teams plan to complete their matches early. You will want to allow time to fix any problems or difficulties prior to the end of the window. Absolutely no late scores will be accepted. If you wait until the last minute and run out of time, any unplayed matches will have a zero score.

At the end of the event, all scores from that event will be made public on the FIRST website.

Registration for Later Events

Check the norcalftc.org website at the bottom on the tab labeled “NorCal FTC Event Registration”. This is where you’ll find the schedule for when the windows to register for all our events. The actual registration link you use during the applicable window is from your team’s status page from the Team List.

Qualifier Status

If you look on our website at the “Qualifier Status” link at the bottom, you’ll see how many teams are registered for each event. If you click on the link for the name of each event, it will show you the list of teams that have registered for that event.

There’s a lot to unpack in this message. Please let us know if you have questions. Teams registered for events will be emailed from their tournament director with specific dates and instructions for submitting their team’s materials prior to their event.

Good luck and stay safe!