Quote:
Originally Posted by kiasam111
In terms of the robot, we built 2 this season. The first was for prototyping, and was a backup in case our compbot was not ready. What we did was spent the first 2 weeks on protobot and then, using what we learnt on that, built our compbot in the remaining weeks. During this time, half the team continued building the protobot (as it wasn't completely done) and the other half worked on compbot.
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You bring up a very effective stratey most large teams can adapt to increase team participation on success.
In 2008 our team was large, I forget the numbers but it was a large group with a good number of mentors. Our team was hung up on whether or not we should build a fast lap robot or go with the flow of hurdling. It wasn't an easy decision. How many laps can you do while trying to hurdle? Considering our large sizea decision was made that we could resonable build two robots: our main hurdling robot, Fezzik, and a lapbot, Speedracer, to be used if Fezzik wasn't done in time or proved to be inefficient. Unfortunately both were finished and proved effective come the end of build season so we stuck with Fezzik robot for competition season and used the Speedracer at off-seasons and fill in. In following seasons we adapted to an iterative build process and a practice bot. Attached is a photo of the two at Beantown Blitz where both competed.
If my current team grew to a large size both in students and mentors I would seriously consider having a small team work on a very simple backup robot. Not only is it a great contigency plan, it keeps students busy, and during the off-season you can enter both depending on the event you attend.