This year 1124 did a bit of everything during the first week (before the Polar Vortex took us hostage).
On Kickoff, our superintendent got us the auditorium and we were allowed to play the broadcast on the huge projector screen. Our team, our mentors, and many of our parents piled in to celebrate the occasion.
After the broadcast, our activities for the rest of the day consisted mainly of using sticky notes to write important notes about the game and sticking them under the appropriate columns on the whiteboard in our school's community meeting room. We had everything from the basic rules to robot specifications that everyone else needed to know. We also took to the gymnasium and played a slightly modified version of the game using team members in place of robots to get a good idea of how the game would play out. With our last two hours or so, the team started to come up with basic brainstorming ideas as far as what designs would be efficient for the game.
On Saturday night several team members stayed up and read the entire manual. These members were part of the strategy meeting on Sunday, while the rest of the team headed to the shop to get started on a few prototypes. The strategy members then reported back to the rest of the team in the shop to rule out a couple bot designs that were against some obscure rule or seemed inefficient given the discussion at the meeting.
The next five days were a total mess -- a mashup of prototyping various models, getting more members acquainted with the rules, and, of course, gusset making. It wasn't too long after that our meetings were stalled because snow and because polar vortex, so it was good that we squeezed so much work into that time period and pulled just a couple meetings ahead of schedule.
