Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Wow, there's a lot of good tips in here. Thanks for the advice so far everyone!

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

The most important things i have seen here is the building of a second bot for practice and and planing with a strategy to win. not that you should step on other teams to win or anything like that, still be gracious and professional, but if the drive and desire is int there it wont happen. Again building 2 bots is critical. drive team practice is absolutely critical. We were able to have lots of drive practice this year and it really paid off.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

This is a great thread, and I'm going to save it as a resource to look back on next season. Lots of great tips, and as I look back, lots of lessons learned that I can identify with.

We ran late with our build and had to bag an incomplete robot. We also had to drastically simplify the design that we had originally planned due to lack of time. At our first regional, we spent the entire first day finishing it, and we missed all of our scheduled practice matches. Then we had qualification matches the following day with NO driver practice. The results were predictable. We ranked very low, and we experienced the exact opposite of the quoted post -- from the stands, we kept asking "what is he doing? why is he ___? why doesn't he ___?" and we didn't realize that the reason for the erratic driving was because a mechanism had failed.

Luckily we had a second regional and then got chosen from the wait list to go to CMP, two experiences which helped get our rears into gear. We fixed a lot of our problems -- and actually had driver practice! -- in time for the second regional, and that helped us double our average match score. That boosted everyone's confidence, but we still noticed multiple failures of our tote-holding mechanism. Learning we were going to championships was one more motivator to fix that problem for good and have even more drive practice.

At champs, it was like we were a whole other robot. Because we were! We had evolved from a landfill robot that couldn't do cans to a feeder station robot that could. Once our driver got to know the robot he could do much more skilled things with it. At one of our matches on Curie our tote-holder failed again, meaning we couldn't stack, but he quickly made the best of it and started scoring totes by pushing them onto the platform one at a time. We almost didn't notice ;)

So, to reiterate other points -- driver practice is huge.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

1) have an identical (or mostly identical) practice bot. My team has made a second robot since 2013, and the last 3 years have been our most successful ever.
2) good mentors, across the board. Have a diverse group of dedicated mentors for all technical skills, and multiple good mentors for outreach/business. Their many unique ideas will help your students gain a wider perspective on FIRST as a whole. This year, my team lost two of our leading mentors from the last few years, but we were able to fill the gap with multiple new, dedicated mentors. Their new, refreshing ideas and skills helped propel us to our best season ever. Our old mentors have left an amazing legacy, and our new mentors have done an excellent job pushing our success even further.
3) sponsors, sponsors, sponsors!!! Don't just look for money, find sponsors who will provide you with mentors and special machining capabilities you couldn't have otherwise. One of our leading sponsors, Industrial Kinetics, does all our welding. Also, just because you have one sponsor contributing $10k+ doesn't mean you can't find more sponsors willing to pitch in that much.
4) start other FIRST teams. FLL/FTC students come in with a better-than-average understanding of STEM and FIRST values.
5) communicate and collaborate with local teams. My team is blessed to be surrounded by excellent teams (special shoutout to 1625, 2451, 4655 and 111). We all bring our practice robots together to practice and get new ideas.
6) karthik's "don't make something beyond your means" paradigm is very true, but you MUST remember to push yourself. My team could have stopped at our collector, elevator, and can holder, but we pushed ourselves to make a pair of can pullers that could fit in the tiny amount of space remaining in our robot. It worked, and they were vital in making us competitive at the world level.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I second this!! My team scheduled out to finish our robot 2 weeks before bag and tag. We also had access to a full size practice field because our team and 4778 were hosting a Week Zero event. With all of this extra practice we were able to work out all the bugs early and not scramble to fix our robot at regionals.

In addition to having mentors it is also very important to have sponsors and community support. When your team makes it to worlds and you don't have the funds, your community will come together to help you raise the money. At least this is my experience. Having sponsors and raising money to go to Worlds BEFORE you qualify is nice too. If it is pre-budgeted then you don't have to worry about it. If you end up not qualifying you can save the money for next year.

I would also recommend that you and your team are on the same page. Like the majority of the people here have said, it takes WORK! Not the work of one person, but the work of your team. You don't need a huge team, but the people you do have need to realize how much work it will take and be willing to do what it takes. I guess the bottom line is you can't do it alone. You need your teammates, your community, your mentors, and your sponsors' support.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

how to get better= spend more time on FRC

more time in the off-season
more time in the build season
more time at events
more time

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

The thing about being a contender is that there's really a variety of things you can do to do this. also since you're a local team I'm gonna try to use mostly PNW teams as examples

Outreach: if you want to be a Chairmans' or Engineering Inspiration team, Do lots and lots of this: 1540, Flaming Chickens always makes relatively good robots, but are really known for their outreach programs. 2980 also does a lot of this stuff.
Outreach can be hard if you're a small team or have limited money resources, so allocate well; holding robotics camps and volunteering in your community and at as many FIRST events as possible are great ways to do good things while looking good for an award.

Cool Engineering stuffs: if you can make nice CAD designs, or build a beautiful robot, it can really help you be competitive. my team, 2046, was average this year, but our awesome powder coating and our design won us 2 awards at district events, helping us to qualify for St. Louis (just barely, but whatever).

The robot: Building towards the game is a great way to be a contender. this was a year of letting lesser known teams really shine, since specialization was encouraged in finals. you could make a simple but effective robot that accomplishes the game task (like 3663, 1318, 2550, etc. from this year), or specializes (like 900, 1425, 1987, that one robot that just canburgled and dealt with noodles). in games that have defense, it becomes even easier to do well if you build a strong drivetrain, have good drivers, and can do at least OK the other parts of the game. 4060 in 2014 was the most terrifying defensive robot, able to shut down even the best of teams. my team that year had one of the fastest and strongest drivetrains, and learned very quickly that ramming into robots that didnt hold the ball very steadily was a great defensive strategy.

In the end, it's easiest to do well with a simply designed robot that is built to do what it's supposed to do. 4488 had one of the simplest robots around- it was a lift and a little claw thingie for containers- they didnt even have a collector! 4488 was also really simple in 2014; a collector and a catapult with a fast drive. 1425 in 2013 was the best feeder station robot in the world (or near so), and they just had a shooter and a little climber thing.

I just wrote a lot, I hope I didnt get off topic

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Mentors.

FRC is a game of mentors.

Just about all of the fabulous ideas in this thread come down to this one thing.

Build and diversify the mentor base, and everything else can follow.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

I'd say FRC is game of People (mentors and students) and Money.
You need all 3 Mentors, Students and Money. Take any of those parts out and there will be no FRC team.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

The minute you get a functioning mechanism start working on a better one. We must have went through three, maybe even four intake styles this season. Good is never good enough.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

When it comes to deciding a strategy that you want your robot to follow, I do something with my FTC kids that I call point analysis.

First, I give my kids a detailed quiz on scoring. It tests them on every single way to score points, and how many points each scoring way is worth. I do this for two reasons: save the results for driver selections, and to figure out the max points you can score.

Once you figure out the max score, you can figure out where most of the points come from. You can compare different parts of the challenge to see which would be a better option. For example, if we were to apply this to 2013, it appears that the frisbees get you the most points. You could compare that to climbing the pyramid to see which is better. 4 frisbees at once and 3 pts per high goal is a 12 point cycle. Compare that to a climb and dump of 50pts. It would take 5 cycles, or 17 frisbees to score more than the pyramid. Ask yourself if you think that is possible, and then go for that.

We first did point analysis for Block Party, and we ended up finalists at Michigan States and a spot to a super regional.

Point analysis isn't perfect, but a very good starting point to lead you to victory.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

There are many great suggestions here. This should be a "classic" thread that we steer rookie and young teams to each year. In fact, if someone could compile this into a white paper we could post it here and also get FIRST to post it as a resource on their website.

I'll describe what I think has led to our success over the last 4 years. Until this year, our "shop" was a shipping container in the field behind Steve Harvey's math classroom. We had a bandsaw and table saw, and last year we got an old Bridgeport mill. I think many other teams are in similar situations so I don't believe that resources need be a limiting factor to achieving significant success. Within these constraints, here's what lifted us since 2012:

- Fundraising and sponsorship: Our team budget increased from $35k in 2012 to $125k this year. We had to get the money from somewhere. Fortunately we were able to get initial seed money from UC Davis, and we've used that to leverage into other sponsors. In a small community like Snohomish you can get to know every business personally--start with your Chamber of Commerce and the city's economic development office. You also can reach out to large companies in Everett like Boeing. Teams in large cities can contact the large corporations with HQs there. Sell the "program" not just the team aspect. We're not the local baseball club; we're an integrated project-based education program that uses a sports-model to inspire students. To achieve this you need non-technical students to lead this effort. Bring in students who are interested in business, media, presentations, even the arts. You can make your team a bigger community.
- Outreach: We have developed projects outreach both to our community and other FRC teams. Somehow that has provided a catalyst of dedication of our team members. I think it makes the students realize that they are part of bigger effort. I don't think it's coincidence that most of the Hall of Fame teams are also competitive powerhouses. Again, you can involve students who are interested in more than engineering. Education, arts, media are all needed for this.
- Constant improvement: If you look at pictures of our 2013 bot at CVR vs champs you wouldn't believe that it's the same machine. We constantly work on improvements throughout the season. Until this year 1671 would build a machine that very good at their first regional but it would be static and other teams would pass them by. This year they were constantly making improvements. They weren't particularly close to us at CVR but they outscored us as Sacramento and then took a riskier pick with a higher upside to go for the win. Taking risks is part of the constant improvement mindset.
- Strategic analysis: Karthik's talk at Champs covered most of this. Think before building. Game out all of the possibilities. Be willing to go down potential dead ends and cast aside your failures. We have developed a braintrust led by our mentor Mike Corsetto. You can't duplicate Mike but you can get most of the way there by duplicating the process. We make a list of what we would want to achieve and then slim it down to what is really achievable. For example we dropped landfill loading because we realized it was a tradeoff and that we couldn't do all types of loading plus a fast cangrabber. Last year we decided that being the top finishing shooter was less important in our overall strategy.
- Scouting: we start developing our system even before build season. We push data via smartphones to our drive team. We've integrated our pit scouting into our electronic system so that we can see that data in the pits before we develop our pick list. We game out potential draft scenarios. (We knew what was coming in 2013 on Curie and if the other teams had been able to see it as well they may have made different decisions.) Our scouting system was critical to identifying 840 and 295 at CVR in 2013; we did not have the best robot at that competition (3970 did.) A side benefit is that you use your excess programmers to develop and maintain your scouting system. There's really only so much programming needed for the robot. Plus you can bring students who are interest in statistics and "Moneybot". Karthik said this is how he got involved with robotics.

We will post videos from our fall workshop that address some of these topics, and will have another workshop in October in Davis.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Some really good suggestions here. I'm taking notes.

The practice robot thing was one of the biggest takeaways I had from last year, and it served us really well this year to have one. *But* if I can rant a bit, the fact that you need one to be competitive is quite frankly unfair.

FIRST set the bag rules (and crate rules previously) to put some kind of cap on the labour teams sunk into their bots. This is good for the sanity of the mentors, and was a noble attempt at leveling the playing field. Unfortunately it back fired on both counts. Now *all* successful teams build two robots so they can continue practicing and developing into the competition season. That puts a doubly high cost barrier between rookie and poorer teams and ever being competitive. Everyone knows this is unfair (not to mention a complete waste of resources), but the image of "stop build day" is so compelling that no one is willing to acknowledge the problem.

As far as I'm concerned, we should stop the expensive farce and get rid of the bag rules. Changing the marketing literature build a robot in 7 weeks, or 8 weeks or 10 weeks is just as impressive as 6. End of rant and derail :p

edit:
We did the same, and that's good advice. We were lucky to have old drive base parts donated to us by 4039 and 2056 for the job and it certainly saved us money to withhold our elevator for the practice bot. The rest of our mechanisms weighed more than 30 lb so we still had to (pointlessly in the big picture) build a lot of stuff twice.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

This and some more of this. Before you even start thinking of designs, read ALL the rules with the entire team, and then decide on your strategy based off the game and scoring methods. For example, this year your priority list for scoring may have looked something like this.
Once you set your strategy, you can start looking at designs on how to accomplish it. The important thing is making sure something low on your list doesn't trump something high on your list. For example using the list above, your ability to load from the HP should never jeopardize your ability to cap with an RC.

Re: Tips to make your team a contender?
 

Get as many people on your team as possible over the 10,000 hour point.

I believe someone could do an entire paper on the rise/fall of powerhouses within FRC as related to the arrival/creation & departure of these individuals.