[cadandcookies]

It's been mentioned before, but bears repeating: read the manual. Lots.

Here's how Team 2220's kickoff weekend will go (we are doing this a little bit different this year, though):

Saturday: Half the team goes to the University of Minnesota kickoff event to pickup and help distribute the KOP to other teams. The other half stays back at our home high school and watches kickoff there. After distribution is done, the UMN people inventory our kit quickly and then come back to our high school to start brainstorming. While they're on their way back, the people at base are busy reading through the manual and watching the game animation over and over to get a feel for the game and the important aspects of it. Some of our students are speedreading the manual through to get a feel for the major rules, which are compiled to a one page document that we can share with everybody else.

After everyone is back at the school and fed, we split into small groups of mixed subteams. Our team is very large (around 70 students and 30 mentors), so we need to split up in order to gather strategy feedback most efficiently. The subteams do a few major things: they discuss and develop a position as a whole on what the most effective game actions will be in the game, specifically using math and expected values to try to get ballpark figures of how efficient actions will be, as well as breaking these actions into groups of complementary actions.

We cut these groups off around 6 to send everybody home to sleep on their ideas-- as well as let everyone read the manual through and have some of our students develop a "scoring spreadsheet" to let us play with robot scores-- basically this lets us see how effective certain strategies will be at different levels of efficiency.

Sunday: Everyone comes back to their small groups. They consolidate all of their ideas into a coherent game strategy of what the robot will do during auto, tele, and the endgame, as well as sorting out all their supports for that strategy. After that's been squared away, the leads for each of these groups convene to argue out the strategy. They meet without the entire team to allow the rest of the team to focus on planning prototypes, watching Ri3D/BB, and otherwise planning out essential tasks for the build season. The leadership group basically spends the rest of Sunday hashing out the strategy for the robot, as well as into Monday if necessary. After we have a strategy, an even smaller group of the captains and strategy leads meets to determine tests for whether a given design meets specifications. These tests, like the strategy document, are prioritized. Team members go home and finish any homework they have to do for Monday.

Monday: As before mentioned, Strategy meets to determine tests, and necessary continuation of the strategy discussion happens. No meeting for regular team members.

Tuesday: Presented design requirements for each subteam and the whole robot. We begin with brainstorming all possible mechanisms to achieve these goals. We also meet with one of our sponsors, Skyline Exhibits, to run our strategy and game plan by them.

If our schedule seems fairly intense on just coming up with game strategy, that's because it is. It's important to make use of those first few days when everyone is super invested and all the ideas are flowing to channel into strategy creation and debate.

The main thing to take away is to just have a very precise schedule for how those first few days are going to work out-- those first few days are a very good indication of how the rest of the season is going to go.