[Kims Robot]

1511's schedule last year was:
Saturday
9am-12noon Kickoff at RIT
We had the locked pdf manuals waiting at a printing place nearby, and call them with the password to start printing as soon as it comes out.

12-1:30pm Lunch at PHS, reading the rulebooks in small groups. We generally do the reading out loud so that everyone is paying attention to details. Students are given a Subteam Selection sheet where they can think about which subteam they want to be a part of.

1:30-2:30pm Strategy discussion as a team (listed up on flipcharts)
List all Scoring & Penalty Options
List Robot Specific Rules
List Interesting Rules
List All Autonomous Strategies
List All Offensive Strategies
List All Defensive Strategies

2:30-3:30pm Small Group Strategy Work
Groups are tasked to select 2 Autonomous Strategies and 5 (TOTAL) offensive and/or defensive strategies (7 strategies in all). Students present their strategies & why they chose them and as they presented we tallied up the strategies that were selected.

3:30-4pm Strategy Discussion
We talk about anything specific that comes up (last year it was about collection strategies) and do any votes to get a feel for how everyone is leaning towards.

4pm Break - students submit their subteam selection sheets, indicating their top 5 subteams they want to be a part of. Lead Mentors of the subteams meet and select students for the subteams we do at least 1 new, 1 returning, 1 CAD (for all but programming), and try to balance out the groups so that students get near their first choice but are broken up enough so that they are on task and its not just a social group.

4:30-7pm - Strategy Subteam Meets. They review old games that are similar to this game, find robots from past years that might work for this game, discuss critical strategies, key concepts, try to find any specific lock down game strategies, crunch lots of numbers on scoring points/penalities, determine what really is important. They also develop the Weighted Objectives Table for the following day.

Sunday
9-11:30am - Field group goes and buys materials for the field.

12-1pm - All team lunch & Review of the strategy team findings, subteams are announced.

1-2pm - Drivetrain group breaks off to go finalize design, order parts, etc.
Team breaks into small groups for mechanism design. Each group must come up with 2 designs for 2 different types of mechanisms (last year was 2 collection, 2 scoring). At the end of the time, a student from each group presents their ideas.

2-2:30pm - Team Develops different "robot types" from the ideas, people select which idea they are most interested in, each type must have at least 4 people to move on (last year 5/8 types moved on).

2:30-4pm - Fleshing out the designs, they design up the full robot idea, select motors, sensors, come up with parts details, sizing, drivetrain orientation, etc. At the end, they all present the ideas with all of the details.

4-5pm - 1 rep for each design remained with the design and everyone was given Weighted Objectives Tables and asked to go around and rate each design on a handful of criteria. This ensures that everyone understands every design and is really rating them on what is important. All of the scores are tallied and numbers are averaged to see which robot designs ranked the highest.

Depending on how things go after that, either there is a clear decision, or mentors/strategy/leadership further discusses what design we need to select to meet our strategy goals.

Monday - day off (drivetrain group may meet/communicate to get things moving)

Tuesday - We finalize/announce the robot design selection and get to work.

This is a schedule that we have refined over the years, and tend to refine further each year. It seems to work well to get everyone on the same page, and we believe heavily in locking down a design by the end of the weekend, and having a drivetrain running by the end of week 1.