[Kristina]

Our team watched the kickoff all together at someone's house last year and then everyone went home to brainstorm and let it all soak in whilst I got to memorize the rulebook.

The next day we all met at the local pizza place (very fitting since we lived off of pizza during build season) and formed different teams. Each team would work on a strategy and then we would have mock competitions against each other. We had mock fields drawn on tables, used cups as goals, and these funky mock M&M's as the balls on the field, and something else for the robots, I can't remember. Oh yeah, it was also really fun because I got to slam down my gavel whenever there was something illegal since I was the rule book girl.

Everyone participated in this and it was fun and we basically got the essentials of what our team wanted to focus on. Then a smaller group met for another few hours worked on more strategy. Then the designing went to individual groups.