[Chris is me]

I was pretty much responsible for the kickoff meeting on my old team (2791); here's how we did it.

We attended a local Kickoff viewing at RPI as a team, waiting to see the game announcement like everybody else. We then broke off into an empty lecture hall on campus and began reading the manual while eating lunch. I would project the manual on screen and we would as a team read every word of the Game and Robot sections, and also skim the Arena and Tournament sections. Students would ask questions as they come up - veterans would try to answer them and anything we were unsure on we would write down for later. Reading the manual as a team is absolutely mandatory before starting any work in the build season, and this is the only way we could actually guarantee everyone read it.

Afterwards, we would do a brief simple strategic analysis - listing all of the game actions we thought were possible within the game, and making a brief priority list of those actions. We establish this priority list immediately in order to decide where to direct our resources to for prototyping and design, and in order to resolve any conflicts for where to put our attention.

We do not talk about any mechanical design on the first day of build season. Everyone's wheels are already spinning thinking about what robots could look like for the game, but we don't worry about that until Monday. We don't want mechanical design ideas influencing our strategy.