[Chris Fultz]

I believe a common thread to consistent high performing teams is that they "take their time" to get to a design decision, and then execute that as absolutely best they can.

Many teams will post that they have a design and are building within a few days of the game announcement. In many ways, that is detrimental.

Take time up front to understand the game itself and the rules. Talk about strategies and how to possibly play the game. Determine the main aspects of the game and then assign a value to them to assist you when making design decisions. Think of a "perfect match" and then decide how much of that you could do. Try to think like a top team, ask yourself "what would team xxx do?".

Talk about what you want the robot to do, make those decisions, then decide how to make the robot do those things. In many ways, you need to really understand the problem you are trying to solve before you design to solve it.

Once you know what you want to do, work on prototyping the how. Use FTC, VEX, LEGO's, pipe, cardboard, CAD, whatever to experiment. Then make room (schedule, space, money, resource) for the most important systems and begin to get into details.

This is where you need to then be realistic with your capabilities, resources, materials, budget, etc. Push and stretch, but be honest with what you can really pull off. A good design that is well done and robut will always beat an awesome design that is thrown together.

When talking about the game, try to keep high level for the first part of the discussions. More on this one to follow.