Criteria for the SRS prize

In reading the general description of the SRS award, I identify the following criteria that we have been given to start with:

- The SRS award will be earned by a group which successfully completes a project which serves the purpose of both education and service.

- This award must be given to a sanctioned student club or non-for-profit organization.

- The group project this club is being recognized for must focus on increasing awareness and public education for space exploration.

- SRS will be open to all sanctioned organizations. This means that all majors are considered.

- The award will be presented at latest, at SGC 2008 in Scotland

It seems to me at first glance that we need to define what is a student club/non-profit for purposes of this award.

I would suggest we define it as being a club or organization that is student run at the level of the organization which the project is being run.

Example: Though an organization like AIAA is professionally run at a National Level, if a local student run chapter successfully starts and finishes a project bringing astronauts to the classrooms of local high schools, the chapter would be eligible, but the professional run National organization would not.

I think we can easily leave it open ended to high school, etc... But we cant go so open ended as to nullify the point of the competition. Student run is the key point to the prize.

If a place doesnt have well established schools, they dont have the students necessary to create a student club. If we open it too much past that we get into the realm of having to include other clubs that are basically composed of older age-levels.

As for less traditional areas, in the end I think it will come down to how widely we advertise this, and how an organization can be nominated / investigated.

Alot of the less traditional areas of space exploration will hear about this competition through existing international organizations (ex: SEDS will get it out to India and several Asian countries, SGTALK will get this advertised across most of Europe). The more we go beyond existing organizations in our advertising, the more less traditional areas that will hear about this.

One problem I can see in the end will be how do we authenticate clubs claims? There will need to be some way of confirming that such and such club had this event with such and such number of attendees.

I was just "passing through" the forums and thought I'd make a comment/suggestion.
It seems that this award is strictly for groups, not for individuals, which makes sense because group projects are more likely to have a big impact and because the SGC is about students working together. But is there also a way for the SGAC to recognize an individual student or young professional who has in a big way increased public awareness of space? If not, you might suggest for the future that such an award be created.
What do you think? Feel free to disagree with me.

Hello All,

From what I've read so far it seems that you have a definition for the group you'd like to award:
"...a club or organization that is student run at the level of the organization which the project is being run." (Stated by CosmicPioneer). Now the word "organization" may seem a bit formal but "club" is certainly open to interpretation. As Pieter said, (and I agree) you have to formalize the definitions somewhat so that you can judge them fairly but you must leave some room for flexibility. I'm of the mind that as long as it's a student run body it's good enough for me.

On to the criteria of the award: You all seem to think that clarification of the goal is needed. Specifying in how this student group must educate and convey the importance of space exploration may not be necessary so long as they meet the criteria of actually doing it. Here is where I'll refer to CosmicPioneers comments on authentication. Instead of specifying exactly in what way (scientific project, PR work, etc...) the objective must be met, perhaps the focus should be shifted to what information will be required to prove that a student group has made a difference. The judging criteria here could be as simple as: number of people educated, means of eduation, depth of message, time for preparation, number of student involved, etc...

Finally, I'm just going to comment on the comment made by Frank C about the minimum requirements. I like the idea of restrictions by setting a goal that is measureable by all. Setting a minimum is certainly a good idea but I doubt that we, or anyone else, could come up with all the possible media sources and thus set a minimum. Simply having the student groups send us these numbers would make a measureable stadard for more fair judging.

I'm just trying to make sense and summarize what you guys have been talking about so that I can understand where we're headed. Let me know if I've gotten the big picture.

Heather

Hi! :)

I've just started a SEDS chapter here in the Philippines (Aaron, feel free to message me on AIM at aodhnait fara) so I would like to offer my input regarding the judging by how many people have been reached.

Student groups may not always get the numbers right. In some events, it is not possible to see how many students have been reached. For example, when I put up posters around school, I have seen people walk past it without paying attention and I have also seen people drawn towards it. The same goes for, say, playing a video on space exploration in a central area of a university for all to see or a website. Organizations, in all practicality, cannot keep count of that.

A way around this might be to restrict the award to activities that can be measurable; but then again, this limits it, in my opinion, unfairly.

My suggestion would be to have the group submit profiles of the activities, including evidence of its occurrence (photos, videos and the like). The criteria could include (all or some): number of events, range of students reached (elementary to university and beyond) and quality of events (taking into account, of course, the resources available to the group).

Thanks for listening :)

CosmicPioneer!
It look you have good sugestion about prizes award criteria, and I want to alart you that if you give award by the example you gave that students bring an astronauts in the A-Level classroom, it is possible that most of Afriacan countries would lost the opportunity since we have very few people who are practical astronauts in this countries and LDC's in genera.
Imma Ollo

"Having very general requirements may not be feasible when 1000 entries are submitted."

I think that we may want to pay more attention to the coverage of this prize. If we have the funds to put out a commercial, shoot up some billboards on highways, get the award posted on SGC, AIAA, SEDS sites, or find some other ways to promote this award, then we may be looking at upwards of 1000 entries. But if we're just assuming that students will apply, we may have issues. Particularly if we intend to fly the winners to Scotland upon acceptance & give the runners-up a flight with Zero-G we should advertise the heck out of this award. (Just throwing options out for prizes btw)

If we restrict the award to science based outreach or engineering based outreach, we may lose a percentage of our potential application pool. So keeping it general in that aspect, may be a good idea.

However, we do need to set some measurable parameters. For example, the number of hits to a website is a good idea, but doesn't require one-on-one outreach.

What do you all think of the following:
Requirements of outreach (each allotted a certain percentage for us to judge)
1. Face to face (ie. presentations, public speaking, astronaut appearances at schools)
2. Media, advertisements, visual stimuli (ie. posters, radio announcements)
3. ...?

Now, the question becomes how to measure all of these. Face to face could require a video that the participants send us of their presentations or whatever they do. Judging media needs to include our knowledge of how effective the (posters) actually were.

I like the idea of having a video journal as a required submission item.

I think we need to leave the judging criteria loose at first, and comparing submissions directly to assign point values. For example:

>>In the competition solicitation:
>> "projects will be judged on:
>> (1) effect in the community
>> (2) effect on fellow student
>> (3) media coverage
>> (4) impact on space exploration
>> (5) project presentation
>> (6) Scope of the project

Say each of the 6 categories is judged with equal weight (all worth 100 points). Each project would have to be judged in comparison with the others to determine how many (max possible 100) points to award for each category.

I think we should tackle first our 6 (or however many we need) general categories. We could even have sub-categories. Once we nail down the generalities, we can start collecting specific criteria we want to judge about each.

What does everyone think of having multiple classifications, high school and University? It seems that University students have distinct advantage over high school students, but University students could promote space in an entire different "market" than high school students could. I think it would also encourage younger students to compete knowing that they are not competing against college seniors!