Lesson 1: How Team Interviews Work

Before you can hold a good conversation with a team, you need to know how interviews are set up at an event and what you are listening for once one begins. This lesson covers the shape of an interview and the rubric you will score it with. The next lesson covers the conversation itself.

Download a copy to follow along throughout this lesson: Team Interview Rubric – Letter Size or A4 Size.

Preparing for an Interview

If the team submitted a Season Summary, read it before you get to their pit. The summary tells you what the team did; the interview is where you ask how and why. Pick one highlight and plan to ask the team to take you underneath it.

Teams that did not submit a Season Summary take part in the same interview and are scored on the same rubric. With those teams, you can open with one of the sample questions printed on the rubric.

For what teams are told about the summaries, see Season, Code, and Credit Summaries for Judging.

Using Your Available Time Well

Every team at an event must have the opportunity to be interviewed, and interviews do not run on a fixed schedule the way matches do. Your Judge Advisor will let you know which teams you are responsible for interviewing, and approximately how long you have to interview each team at the event. Keep interviews to about the same length, so that the last team you reach gets the same conversation as the first.

Approach the team, introduce yourself, and ask whether now is a good time. If it is not, ask when would be better and come back then. A team that is due on the field in four minutes cannot show you their season.

• Leave a note if no one is there, so the team knows to expect you. A coach nearby can often tell you when they will be back.
• Pause and resume rather than rushing. If a team is called to queue partway through, tell them when you will return and pick up where you left off.
• Keep track of who you still need to talk to. By the end of the day, you and your judging partner should be able to account for every team assigned to you.

If a team would rather not be interviewed, thank them and let your Judge Advisor know. That decision comes from the team itself, not from an empty pit and not from a coach.

How the Rubric is Organized

The Team Interview Rubric has two sections and six criteria. Each criterion is one row, and each row is scored on what you heard during the conversation, for a total of 12 points.

Each row is scored Heard, with Specifics (2), Heard (1), or Not Yet Heard (0). You score every row. Two other things are printed on the rubric and are meant to be used during the interview:

• Sample Questions appear at the top of each section. The next lesson covers how to use them.
• Listen-fors appear under each criterion. They are examples of the kinds of evidence that count for that row. You do not need to hear all of them — hearing any one of them counts.

The rubric sheet is also where you can take notes, including an Additional Notes space on the second page. Feel free to write during the interview: a phrase a student used, the number they gave you, the part of the robot they pointed at. Those notes are what you will have to work from later.

Scoring a Criterion

Each row gives you three descriptions, and your task is to decide which one matches what you heard. Here is one row in full, from the Explain Your Learning section.

Criterion: Students trace how they got there

Listen for: attempts described in order; something that did not work, and what they did next; a moment that changed their thinking — a test, a failure, a conversation.

Reading across the row, the difference between the levels is how much of the team's path the conversation actually captured. 

• At Not Yet Heard, you heard about the robot as it is now, and nothing about how it got that way — even after you asked.
  • Ex. “It picks up two blocks at a time and it works pretty well.”
• At Heard, the team tells you that things changed over the season, in general terms.
  • Ex. “Our first intake didn't work very well, so we built a different one.”
• At Heard, with Specifics, the same answer arrives with detail: what the earlier version was, what went wrong with it, what they did about it.
  • Ex. “Our first intake used flex wheels, and blocks kept slipping out when we came in at an angle. We switched to rollers with rubber bands. This is the third one — the second one jammed whenever we picked up two at once.”

A team that scored Heard on all six rows totals 6 of 12. What separates Heard from Heard, with Specifics on any row, is whether concrete detail arrived, not how well the team spoke.

Scoring the Interview

Two habits from notebook scoring carry over: hold one standard from your first team to your last, and judge each row against its own description rather than your overall impression. Two things are specific to interviews:

• The evidence is only what came up — and you can go get more. A notebook is finished when you open it. An interview is not finished until you end it, so a row with nothing in it is a prompt to ask rather than a score. Not Yet Heard should mean the team could not address it, not that the conversation never got there.
• The two judges at an interview agree on the rubric scores together. Fill in the rubric after the team has finished rather than while students are still talking, then compare what each of you heard and settle on a rating for each row. Where you saw a row differently, that is worth a short conversation rather than an average. Your Judge Advisor can help if you cannot reach agreement.

From Scores to Awards

Interview scores stay within the judging team. Teams do not receive them, and they are not shared with coaches, Event Partners, or other volunteers. There is no award for a great interview by itself.

The score sorts interviews so that a conversation can start, and that conversation draws on more than the rubric's six rows. Much of what awards recognize has no row to score and is visible in an interview anyway — how a team talked about its design, how teammates treated each other, what they got excited about. Notice those things and be ready to describe them.

Two teams can score 10 of 12 having told you completely different stories. "They handed that question to the teammate who built the arm, and she showed us her test chart" is something the judges who were not standing there can weigh; a 10 is not. Bring what you observed rather than how you felt about a team. The Judge Advisor guides that discussion after all teams have been interviewed.

Everything in this lesson is also kept in the Library as Judging Team Interviews. Keep it handy at an event, or come back to it any time during the season for a refresher.