[bigbeezy]

Do teams have any dedicated "programming only" days? For instance, you say that no matter what the Wednesday before Bag programming gets the robot for the night. No matter the state of the robot, that build day is for programming only.

Kids, well people really, are used to cramming for a deadline. So making an artificial one about a week out tells your mechanical kids that things need to be assembled and electrical that things need to be wired. Not 100% done, not pretty, just functional so that programming can get some of their work moving forward. I haven't done this specifically, but we do use our Week 0 event as this artificial deadline. Basically, we are inviting a ton of people and we need something to show and its the only time when we have our full field assembled. Does it put more pressure on us earlier? Yes, but in doing so we give ourselves time to figure out what things work and where we need to really focus for the final 3 days.

2015 we were really good about getting programming on the robot early and often. Had things pretty much fully operating during week 5. 2016 not so much...