Ignoring the 3-Year Window and the Robot Trap

Two structural errors quietly cap many submissions’ scores. Both are easy to detect and fix.

Mistake 1 — Living in the past. The Impact Award puts special emphasis on recent accomplishments, and the Documentation Form is explicit: ‘Please only turn in documentation for activities within the past 3 years.’ Most executive-summary prompts also say ‘with emphasis on the past 3 years.’ Yet teams pad submissions with their founding story and a decade-old award.

Symptom: multiple paragraphs whose dates are 4+ years old; documentation evidence from outside the window.

Diagnosis: tag every claim with its year. If more than a quarter of your weight sits outside the 3-year window, you have a recency problem.

Fix: history earns at most one or two framing sentences to establish trajectory, then pivot hard to ‘in the past 3 years…’. Notice that nearly every 5985 summary literally opens with the window: ‘In 3 years, PB has…’, ‘In 3 years PB reached…’. Legacy belongs only as context for momentum, never as the main evidence.

Mistake 2 — The robot trap. Teams confuse the Impact Award with engineering awards and spend paragraphs on their swerve drive or this season’s game strategy.

Symptom: technical robot detail in the essay; the interview drifts to ‘how does your climber work?’

Diagnosis: the Impact Award recognizes a team’s sustained activity and embodiment of the FIRST mission, distinguished from the robot design and build period. Your robot is evidence you compete; it is not your impact.

Fix: mention the robot only as a tool that enables outreach — for example, 5985 ‘Made FRC robots for theatre, reaching 1,100+ people.’ If a robot sentence doesn’t connect to inspiring people, cut it.

Combined troubleshooting pass:

1. Build a quick table: every paragraph → its year → its primary subject (program vs robot).
2. Flag rows older than 3 years and rows whose subject is the robot.
3. For each flag, either reframe it (robot-as-outreach-tool, history-as-trajectory) or delete it.
4. Recheck balance: the bulk of weight should be recent and people-centered.

Edge case — sustainability vs recency. The sustainability summary asks how you ensure your team and initiatives ‘will be sustainable,’ which is inherently about the long-run model, not just the last 3 years. There, longevity is the point — 5985 cites a Teaching Program that ‘provides 89% of team income.’ Don’t confuse the recency emphasis for activities with the sustainability question, which rewards durable structure.

Key takeaways

• Emphasize the last 3 years; tag every claim with its year and let legacy serve only as one or two trajectory-setting sentences.
• Avoid the robot trap — the award measures sustained activity, not the build season; mention the robot only as a tool that inspires people.
• The sustainability question is the deliberate exception: there, durable long-run structure and funding are exactly what judges want to hear.

This lesson was adapted from learnfrc.com.