Awards and Inspire
Connect your team's work to the award criteria and prepare a balanced Inspire portfolio.
Build one for all the awards your team is pursuing. Show what you did, why you did it, and what came of it. Page references help find the details.
Inspire
Inspire recognises a team that does well across design, team development, and the engineering process. To be considered, your team needs a portfolio and must be a strong contender for at least one award in each of these groups:
- Machine, Creativity, and Innovation: Design, Innovate, or Control.
- Team Attributes: Connect, Reach, or Sustain.
- Think: how you worked through engineering problems and what you learned.
Judges also look for a positive, inclusive team where everyone contributes and can explain the team's work. Give your robot, people, and enough space for the reader to understand each.
What to include
Use this table to decide what to include. The examples are suggestions for showing the work behind each award.
| Award | What to explain | What you could show |
|---|---|---|
| Think | How you solved an engineering problem | Your process, a lesson you applied, alternatives you compared, or a calculation that helped you choose a design |
| Connect | How members planned and developed their skills | Learning goals, training, advice from a professional, and the work students completed afterward |
| Reach | How you helped grow | Outreach goals, the plan, your team's role, and people who joined FIRST as a result |
| Sustain | How the team plans to keep going and tracks its progress | A , recruitment and handover plans, progress reviews, and problems you prepared for |
| Innovate | How you developed a creative design that works reliably | Early ideas, , tests, and changes that helped it perform its job |
| Control | How feedback helps your robot perform better | The problem, and other control components, what the code does with their readings, and test results |
| Design | How the whole robot works together | A labelled robot overview, design choices, efficient use of space, and access for repairs |
Think asks for at least one of the four engineering topics in its row. You do not need four separate stories. One well-explained design problem may cover several.
Required and encouraged criteria
Read the required criteria for each award first, then the encouraged criteria. Use them to spot gaps in your portfolio. For example, a Connect page should explain the learning plan; a list of alone leaves the reader wondering what members learned.
For Control, show how a sensor reading changes the robot's actions. For Design, explain how the fit into the whole robot, even if one gets most of the page.
Award map
A working table helps the team see what still needs writing. Keep it in your planning notes:
| Work | Awards it helps explain | Portfolio page | What to add |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lift redesign | Think, Design | Mechanism page | Test conditions and a comparison with the earlier lift |
| Feedback-controlled lift | Control | page | What happens if the home sensor fails |
| Mentor-led training | Connect, Sustain | Team page | A part a student designed independently |
| Support for a new FLL team | Reach | Outreach page | How the team helped and whether the new team is participating |
Replace these examples with your own work and assign someone to fill each gap. Award labels can help with navigation, but the page still needs to tell the story.
One story, different questions
A page can contribute to more than one award explanation. Each connection needs its own detail. Two book examples make that distinction useful:
| Portfolio example | First question it helps answer | A related question requiring another detail |
|---|---|---|
| Blu Cru's design process, DECODE page 10 | How did requirements, prototypes, and analysis guide a design decision? | What did a professional teach, and how did students apply it? The page connects its mentor discussion to examples of design work. |
| Seattle Solvers' learning plan, DECODE page 3 | How do members develop skills through practice and independent work? | How does that progression prepare future leaders? The later learning stages make responsibility part of the explanation. |
The first example can help you explain engineering process and applied learning. The second can help you explain skill development and continuity. Those are useful connections for planning; the award descriptions above still determine what your own team must demonstrate.
Try this with one of your pages. Write the question it answers for each award you associate with it, then underline the sentence, picture, or result that provides the answer. If the same badge points to an unanswered question, add the missing explanation or revise the mapping.
Balance the document
Read your proposed portfolio as a whole. Can someone find a technical choice, the work behind it, member development, outreach results, and a credible plan for the team's future? Follow each overview reference to its supporting page.
Balance comes from explaining the team's actual work clearly. It does not require equal page allocations or a separate page for every award. Keep a strong engineering study together, and give a learning or outreach project enough room to explain the students' contribution and result.
Team participation
Have members check the pages about their work. Everyone should be able to explain a contribution and something they learned, including members who handle outreach, finances, documentation, or manufacturing.
Ask someone outside each subteam to read its pages. If they cannot explain the decision afterward, add the missing context or explain an unfamiliar term.