So, to follow up, tonight I called the team to a meeting, reminded everyone that “It’s much better to be quite good at a few things than be relatively poor at many things.”, and assigned everyone to work in a group to work on our pressing concerns. I'd say it worked well, and everyone (including the mentors, who I now believe weren't really at fault in this situation) had something to do, other than play online games...
Here's an excerpt of the speech I prepared, feel free to borrow from it if you are experiencing the same difficulties.
Quote:
Guys: lets face it. We’re almost halfway through the build season and we don’t have much to show for it. This has been a problem in past years for us, and I was hoping we could resolve it this year, before it’s too late.
First I want to say that in the interest of time, we should scrap the hanging mechanism and front arms. Many folks on chief Delphi agree that we shouldn't still be in the design phase this late in the build season. It's never worked in the past for our team, nor is it particularly promising. In past years, whenever we take this long to complete a robot, we never do very well because we need to spend a bunch of the competition time refining the code and practicing, which means we aren’t on our best at the start.
Why do I think we should scrap these two big ideas right now? A wise man once said, “It’s much better to be quite good at a few things than be relatively poor at many things.” That's why we’re on alliances, so one robot doesn't have to be good at everything. After all, we have a pretty good list of capabilities.
I'd also like to point out that just cause you saw it on robot in three days, doesn't mean it's a good idea. Ri3d teams usually try to bundle as lot if ideas into one bot without refining the design and strategy in order to be effective in competition. If we try to refine all the possible ideas and incorporate them into our strategy, we’ll never get done.
We need to assign a group leader to each category and make sure they get the right about of people to work on their specific job, but we have to make sure that the higher priority jobs get filled first. We should do this at the start of every meeting, to make sure that there are people working on the most important stuff first.
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