[Grim Tuesday]

Let me preface this by saying that we have a very large, 50+ person team. We pride ourselves by being student run, and students are a driving force behind the robot, building it, and designing it. So much so, that we consider Mentors, while extremely valuable, to be essentially the teams safety net.

We have concepts of Brainstorming to follow, based directly on the PLTW curriculum:

1.) Quantity>Quality; once you have a lot of ideas, you can sort through them to get the best
2.) Piling on; Add to others ideas, don't take possession of it
3.) No criticism; we can pick out infeasible ideas later

Now onto our actual process, on Kickoff day, we recognize that everyone's minds are going crazy with ideas, so there is just a freeform discussion of anything. Groups are broken up into, with between 5 and 7 people, each including a mentor. During this time, we would like people to be thinking of how the game works, but in invariable breaks down into "this would be a cool robot" discussions. We would like to, this year, play a "practice game" in which each person assumes the role of a robot, and the team observes, to see how the game is played, though our team has never done this before.

On the first day of the season, Monday, new groups are broken into, and strategies are brainstormed, following the same rules. At the end of the night, the team votes on which strategy we will go with, prioritizing various areas. Mentors do not get a vote, though they certainly have a lot of influence in the decision.

The next few days are spent in yet new groups again, where each one designs essentially a whole robot. It has various parts. Eventually, these are presented to the team, and the subsystems are broken apart, each one being voted on separately. Eventually, we have a whole robot decided on.