Re: The hype train departs...
 

What my kickoff day looks like:

Arrive at Northrop (kickoff location) 7:45-8:00 AM

Help however necessary until kickoff is done around 11 AM

Run to library to print off a couple of copies of the manual

Run to the building where we're running the GOFIRST Post Kickoff Event

Accept the delivery of 30-some pizzas for PoKo lunch

Get 100 people through lunch while speed reading the manual

Do a Q&A on the manual with those people

Run PoKo until 3:00

Run back to GOFIRST shop to start Ri3D

Do Ri3D until midnight.

There's a lot of running involved, basically.

Re: The hype train departs...
 

My team will be going to Grand Valley State University tomorrow for our local Kickoff. The stream viewing will be followed by many hours of intense strategizing. Nothing special really, but it's still a lot of fun!

Re: The hype train departs...
 

701 is having a kickoff in our shop and as their parent team, invited our esteemed guests 2085 and 5496. We'll have lots of food, lots of rule reading, and no building or prototyping until Monday. Saturday is all strategy planning, our WHAT, and Sunday is all mechanical ideas, our HOW. There's going to be lots of discussion over the weekend, and a heavy use of weighted objective tables!

Re: The hype train departs...
 

We've given up on doing the official kickoff event, as our local only allows 10 people per team, which splits the team up for the big day and keeps us from hunkering down with the rules and ideas until everyone's back together. We're sending Lester (a mentor) to get the KoP and print out several sets of rules (he's employed by NASA Stennis, one of our sponsors and host of the local official kickoff, so it all works out).

Instead, we're hosting our own unofficial kickoff. We invited a number of teams, and our two rookie protegee teams, 5953 NOLA Bots and 5971 Raider Robotics, will be joining us for our most formal game requirements analysis to date. We'll start with a continental breakfast as we watch the kickoff video, then do some general around-the-room discussion bordering on brainstorming to get initial impressions and identify key questions to find in the rules.
Then, we'll break up into 6-9 groups to read sections of the rules (by topic, not rule number). We will be sure to spread out so each group has at least one veteran and three rookies, one from each team. These groups will "work through" a lunch of pizza, then we'll come back about 1 or 2pm as a big group to share the key rules and begin brainstorming possible game strategies. Our brainstorming is intended to provide not only the strategy that our teams might use, but also as a baseline to evaluate strategies. That should take us to about 3-5pm, when everybody goes home.
About two hours later, after home-cooked meals and showers, our leadership and strategy team (mostly students, a few mentors) will come back together to evaluate strategies and get us down to a short list to develop for presentation to the team at our next session on Monday evening.

During most of this, we plan for some of the mentors to break away and start building field elements. Hopefully the rain will end before noon tomorrow! (Note to self - El Nino year, get paint or treated lumber for wooden field elements that will be stored outside!)

Re: The hype train departs...
 

I'm gonna head to 624's kickoff at their school at 8:00 AM, and stick around the whole day till probably 9 PM, maybe later depending on how things go. Of course, going out to get lunch at some point so we can vent our hype for the game outdoors for a bit.

Re: The hype train departs...
 

Our team arrives at our school bright and early at 6:45 am, so we can leave at 7 to go to the official kickoff at Georgia Tech. We then carpool down to GT and get there by 8:30 (when the event starts) and we wait around and eat at Georgia Tech because (thankfully) they provide us tired, hungry kids with food. We sit and hear about how much Georgia Tech wants us to apply to and go to their school, hear from Georgia FIRST, and then we all wait in anticipation to see that Plowie aka Dozer aka the cute game animation robot is back this year. A few of us definitely fall asleep waiting and then and only then does the official broadcast start.

The game manual password will undoubtedly be some combination of numbers and letters to form some really obvious word and I will feel mildly disappointed that I didn't already figure it out.

(At about 12:30 in the middle of this I also get my decision of acceptance from Georgia Tech, so let's hope for the best on that one.)

We then eat our team's traditional kickoff lunch at Moe's and then head back to our school to brainstorm. We'll be reading the game manual meticulously on the way home, be at the school at about 2ish and then we'll stay until 7 talking through rules, coming up with strategy, designing our robot, and hopefully getting pizza to eat somewhere in that time as well.

Then I'll go home and come on here and soak in the game for this year and pray that the next 6 weeks go as smoothly as possible.

Re: The hype train departs...
 

Me and a few friends are going up to the kickoff event in Manchester, which should be a lot of fun. Hope to see some of you guys there!

Re: The hype train departs...
 

Rookie team 5920 the VIKotics from Palouse Wa will see you in Cheney. Then part of the team will go to Spokane and brain storm with team 1595 Dragons. The part of the team will go to Colfax Wa and brain storm with team 4061 the SciBorgs. Then we will regroup to work together. OH! what FUN.