Thread: Team Kickoff Meeting
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Unread 16-12-2013, 17:10
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Re: Team Kickoff Meeting
Saturday-Watch kickoff at local kickoff. Then everybody goes home and reads the rules. Occasionally, a few of the kids (drive team and captains) meet later in the night at the school, inventory the KoP, and do a little shop prep. The programmer (we only have one) takes the laptop home and sets up the control system.

Sunday-Everybody is now a "rules expert" and has memorized all the rules. This makes brainstorming 10x as fast. Instead of having somebody get excited about an idea (let's dump basketballs into the top goal!), waste time arguing with somebody else (no, you can't dump the balls... yes, you can, show me the rule!), then discover the ideas is invalid (see, I told you the robot couldn't be that tall), all ideas that are considered all legal. During morning, ONLY STRATEGY is discussed, no design. Then, once it becomes afternoon, basic designs start happening. Quickly decided are the drive base and a few possible layouts. No set design is locked in, but instead the separate design teams prepare for prototyping, and the drivebase team starts to finalize gear ratios by the end of the night. At the end, many desirable feature lists are made, but we tend to want to do a few very simple mechanisms (can be made with hand tools), and one pretty complex one (CNC stuff needed).

Monday-First real day of build. Team splits into three. The people who want to work on the real complicated stuff get to build the field models. We also use the field drawings provided by FIRST as a comical example of how not to dimension parts. The drivebase team assembles the kitbot and revives a previous robot for prototyping. Finally, the prototyping team puts together prototypes. We're fans of rapid prototyping, and we find that spending 30 minutes before making any parts to think of a design really helps. This let us have a working 775 shooter on the first day of build season that could shoot form the front and back of the pyramid. The programmer goes home with the laptop and drafts drive code as well as the rest of the robot code.
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