[Vermeulen]

Our team had about 30 students this year, and about 6 technical mentors. We usually meet 3 nights during the week, and for about 6 or 7 hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

The day of kickoff, we ask team members to make measurements of what they think is important (i.e. the height of the hoops this year, and the maximum height and angle of the bridge). Then on the bus ride back, we read through the robot rules and the game rules, noting interesting or new things, and sharing them with the team.

When we get back to the build site that day, we review the rules and watch the game video again, then we discuss strategy options. Paying attention to things like Chief Delphi can be really helpful for brainstorming. The important thing to remember for this is to keep your options open, and don't shoot down strategies you consider improbable unless they're blatantly illegal, at least not yet. Avoid making assumptions, such as "Floor loading won't be important" (2011) or "Nobody would ever dump the balls in, that's stupid" (2009).

Sunday, we narrow our choices and get a build schedule up. Theoretically, people will have read the rules more closely the previous night, researched past robot designs, or have come up with new strategies. In general, the goal is to be an effective point scorer. By the end of the day, we try to have a strategy done, and a long list of possible ideas to achieve that strategy. We also try to get a board up with subteam goals for the season, such as Chairman's Team having their drafts done by X day. In a perfect world, we would have a reasonable idea of what the design will look like by the end of Week 1.

After Week 1 is prototyping, and with us it usually goes on longer than it probably should. We don't usually have time to build a practice bot, but we occasionally use our past robots to test.

My biggest piece of advice would be to recognize when you or the team is stuck on one strategy, or one design option, and step back to see the big picture. Most of the strategy failures we have had is when everyone else did something we had never anticipated.