[hyperhawk]

Our team tried to make a practice robot this year, but the process for us was very much so disconnected from the building of the actual robot. We intended to build the chassis to practice driving and also to get a head start on the coding. For us, quite possibly since it was the first time with a practice robot, it didn't exactly seem to have a significant impact on the quality of our coding advances or drive training. We seemed to fall behind on the main robot and ended up not adding any of the additional components to the practice robot for testing or any of those things. It may have been a personal thing for our team, and I can definitely see how having the second robot could be better in years to come as we get more experience with it. Some ways that I can see that it could have significantly helped us would be that we could have worked out our climbing mechanism (which was not used until our second competition), while working on other parts of our competition bot. It almost seems as though we forgot that we had another robot. It seems that the most difficult thing about having the second robot would be managing the time around it.

tl;dr Practice bots are a great idea in theory as long as efficient time management is present