Reflection 2005 Season
 

This season FIRST has stepped up the competition and continues to provide us all with challenges and lessons.
Now that the 2005 season is over with the exception of a few off season competitions. What are your opinions of this year? What have you and your team learned from this season? What are your final thoughts and comments about this season?

I will post my responses later. . .

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

What I learn is that we need to be better at team organization and what we really need to do next year is have better communication and teamwork. We lack that this year and it really show during competition. What about the game, I though that the autonomous period was hard with camera and was a big effort for a lot of teams to cap during it.But it was an amazing game.Everyone had they own approach and it was cool to see had teams did it. What in long part, for my last year in robotics, it was a great one and I had a blast with everything that occur. You never know what FIRST is coming up, so until next year.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

I think for my team we learned that having a good bot isn't the only thing that matters. It's how you market it and how you sell it to the other teams that count. Also making a name for your team by providing and inspiring other teams. Like Dean said at the beginning the robot is just a vechicle.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

What I learned is the fact that I will always learn something new. I came in this year knowing nothing and careless, and now I exit knowing how much more there is to learn and a newfound fanatic!

Our team has come a long way but, with the great opportunity to see other teams, we have learned how to further ourselves and most of all, we have gained the confidence to know we can take our team to a new level.

Next year calls for more organization, more dedication and more enthusiasm. As techtiger1 stated, at the beginning, the robot is just a vehicle -- it was for us. Now we know it is about outreach, about learning, about working as a team, and enjoying the process. We didn't do that this year, but you have to make a mistake to learn your lesson, right?

I can't wait for the next season to start and my anticipation has already started. But in a way, if you think about it, the season's already started. =)

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

"It doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It's how you play the game." My team may have run into some bad luck during the competition, but I'm proud of what's happened this year. This is a recap from Team 141's year

-Hold a Lego League camp at Hope College during the summer
-Start Weekly meetings when school starts along with planting Dune Grass and doing community service in various forms
-Starts the Wo-Bot C.A.R.E.S calculator drive for the elementary schools for the kids who can't afford math supplies
-Lose JCI as our sponser right before lego league
-Lego League starts late and the Robotics team helps them to stay on track
-Manage to get enough donations to pull of the West Michigan Lego Regional with Team 85
-Get JR Automations to help sponser us in time for build season
-Has a very rocky start with the robot because of our new JR mentors, old JCI mentors, and various parents are constantly arguing
-Barely finishes Robot for ship date
-Robot improves every regional
-Win Engineering Inspiration at the Buckeye
-Win Entrepreunuership at West Michigan
-Head to Nationals

(Left to Do)
-More community service and the elementary tours

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

I like Triple Play in the sense that is forced teams to build a manipulator that worked well and most did. There were not too many boxbots. I didn't like the idea of pretty much only one game option (stacking tetras) but it was good in the sense that everyone HAD to do it well, and they did.

The kit of parts was nice in the sense that now everybody had a good reliable drivetrain so they could immediately start work on an arm, but I think WAY too many teams used the kit provided gearbox. The drive system was the passive subsystem of this game and with 3 vs 3 I think it should have been an active subsystem in playing this game. The kit gearbox is good for getting rookies into this more fairly and it is good for teams with not many resources but I'm disappointed when I see 5th year teams using that gearbox. I want to see a game that makes us strive for a better drive system than they provide in the kit.

But at least the provided drive system did allow everyone to make a really good arm.

Finally, let the robots touch each other. I know safety is key but 6 robots on a small field all trying to avoid each other isn't much fun to watch from the stands. I want to see the pushing and shoving.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

Me too--then again, I'd feel really bad if a human player got whacked in the head with their robot's arm. (Especially 85's screw setup this year--ouch.)

Of course, for 2006, you could still have that interaction safely; it simply takes a bit of trickery in game design. Luckily, FIRST has a few masters/mistresses of trickery on the game design committee.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

I learned that anything is possible with dedication.

As most of you know by now, we had some communication issues, and at kickoff we had a sponsor, a high school, some facilities, and mentors...

but no students. I personally thought we had no chance, or that we would end up with 3 kids and a horrible machine.....I was wrong.

Finally, we had a call out meeting the Thursday of week 2. We had 19 or so kids show up. We ended up training these kids who have never seen a FIRST competition before, designed it in the next 2 weeks, built a robot in 10 days (actual construction), finished and submitted an animation entry, wrote a chairmans award (for the NASA grant) and even got our own website up and running. We had a slow start at Boilermaker regional, but by the end we got the hang of this and even walked out with the Rookie All Star Award, qualifying us for Atlanta. Midwest regional we ended up as the 8th seed, ended up being the 6th alliance captain and highest rookie seed. Last weekend we walked out of there with a 5-2 record, 21st seed and inspired kids who before this didn't know each other, but now are all good friends and worked very well together.

To sum it up, with what little time we had, this team became a true team and I'm proud of everyone, and this proved that anything is possible.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

The best part about this year's game I thought is that it really did level the playing field. There wasn't one strategy or robot that could "do it all" because the whole game consisted of stacking tetras. The thing that distinguished one robot from another was the amount of tetras a robot could score, but at that, almost all the robots could score tetra's (on top or beneath). A lot of well-known teams didn't stand out as well as they had in past year's games.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

Although I was thrilled to see the unbelievable performance at the Einstein finals. The goals that high....wow. However, I was very surprised by the way the game evolved. I really expected the game to become much more defensive in a very specific, focused way, as teams realized that the other team simply is better at capping. That is, strategy becoming ever more important. However, this wasn't the case. The very finals were determined by who got on the goal last. However, what I wanted to see were teams preventing other teams from scoring by taking advantage of the advantages of their own bot, and flaws in the opponents. If a bot is weak and slow, staying in between it and the goal it needs to take would be more than reasonable. Same thing with a bot that can easily lose their tetra. Knocking it loose (whether due to an unstable, shaky base, or lifting it out of their ineffectively designed gripper) is unbelievably effective. There were bots that would have been able to do such things, and didn't. I was extremely disappointed to see how one dimensional the game became - capping on top of your opponents tetras...over and over.

That said, it was overall an amazing season. No matter how it was played, the games were close and fair. Though there certainly were some major referee messups here and there, they happen, they're human. There were amazing robots, by both rookies and vets, and it was amazing to see them compete.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

Yo,

This season, I could not have asked for anything different. It went amazing, except for some bad luck at regionals, which changed to good luck at nationals. Man o man, we have a very impressive list of accomplishments that our team has never ever done before. I was going to be very very happy for regional chairmans, which we got. Then we went to nationals, did amazingly sweet, I'm the arm operator from team 503. Our alliance couldn't have been better. This season was insane, for the HOT team I bet it was even better. Congrats to everyone who participated this season.

BHOP

Team 503 Frog Force
2005 National Champs

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

Given our team's success last year, this year I had to cope with losing in FIRST for the first time :D .

That being said, though, I think I got more out of this year than I did last year. Last year, with a senior class of 16, we really didn't need any underclassmen help, at all. This year was completely different, and I got chances to do a lot more things than I did the year before. I worked with the camera a bit, and learned a lot of different programming concepts from that, as well as bits and pieces about electrical, pneumatics, and manufacturing concepts as well. However, the more valuable knowledge that I gained this year was probably not technical:

-Sometimes, we work so hard on these robots that it is hard to see flaws in them. It is hard to cope with losing, and oftentimes the blame goes elsewhere, such as on the refs, or poor alliance pairings. However, sometimes it takes a thing, like not getting picked for eliminations at Philly did for me, for you to truly take a step back and look at what you've done in comparison to everyone else's.

-Everyone else works at least as hard, if not just as hard as you do on your robot.

-Volunteers really put in a ton of time and effort; I know I was personally wiped after a day of volunteering at nationals. I recommend trying it out to all of you, it's a ton of fun.

As for reflection on this game, overall I liked it. Multi-tetra capabilities were unnecessary this year, as we saw no teams that could handle more than one in the final rounds. Simple robots that could cap extremely quickly, and had incredible drive teams, as well as good on-field strategy could take it all very quickly. The tide would often turn extremely quickly in these matches. In one of them, I turned away for a few moments to see a red triple play become a blue one. The tetras were an innovative game object for this year, and field reset was not nearly as tough as it was last year (unless you're relatively short, like me, and trying to grab tetras off the center goal).

-Alex Pelan

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

Our rookie FIRST experience taught us to love learning again.

Team 1559 learned that it takes a team to get things done--not just a few people. This being our first year we had no idea what to expect, but when it came down to the competition we surprised ourselves in how supportive we could be of each other and of other teams.

We have also learned that it is very helpful to make friends with other teams, and that networking is very important. It is better to make friends than to win, and having fun and learning is what FIRST is about--not blowing away the competition.

Furthermore, we surprised ourselves when we saw all we had accomplished in just 6 weeks--and what everybody else could do, too. For all us first-year FIRSTers, this changed our lives, and our futures. I know it changed mine. While our team had a few internal issues (which we sorted out), I think we are still in shock at how amazing the FIRST experience really is. On the bus home after FLRC we were talking about what we need to do next year. We want to go to as many regionals next year as we can afford (this year it was only one) not so much to compete as to take in the atmosphere and meet the people. Oh, who am I fooling? Competing was awesome too!

In short, we learned more in 6 weeks than we have in all our high school careers. We learned about ourselves, about our team, and about gracious professionalism. On behalf of team 1559 I would like to extend a huge thank you and WOW to everyone who makes FIRST possible and all you people on other FIRST teams. We are a part of something so specacularly special...its hard to describe. But then again, all you guys know what I mean. Cogratulations everyone on your success, and see you next year!
If FIRST give us anything, it is vision.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

I want to first congratulate teams 67, 503, and 303. I especially would like to thank Team 303 (Beach Bots). Were in the pit next to them in Newton. They help us in many ways including borrowing tools when ours did not come in on time and letting us use their spare backup battery when we forgot ours.

In my opinion this year’s game had its advantages and disadvantages. For one it leveled the field to produce robot that generally all manipulated tetras. However, I liked last year’s game (FIRST FRENZY) better because it produced robots that did totally different things because of the many field components. This made the team really think about what your team wanted to make and what alliance partners you wanted.

Our team this year has learned many things. For one, we have learned teamwork among ourselves and other teams. We dramatically grew in number this year, which became difficult at times. We brought teamwork by having played many games and other activities with the team (and other teams) to the point where everyone is good friends with everyone.

Something else learned in 340 was winning is not everything. Generally 340 does well in competition. This year, the students designed a more complicated robot than normal. This brought some problems at competition. But, the team became more united to solve the problems and continue competing. This not as successfulness brought us to cheer for other Rochester NY and Newton teams and be satisfied that the team did the best possible.

Re: Reflection 2005 Season
 

for my last year as a student it was really great! i've learned a lot more this past year..from machining parts and design work. i've gained even more confidence being serving as a team captain.

my team improved on many levels..organization needs to some improvement but s.p.a.m. is becoming like a corporation...

i loved the competitions of course..pits were great at all the ones we attended.
FIRST and the kit of parts..gotta love FIRST...great job and the game well..in the end i really did like it...pretty cool concept..i wonder about next year...hmmm..can't wait...

there is so many things soo great about this season from my team to FIRST and friend...this has been a great ending to my career as a highschool student on a FRC team.