[kaliken]

I completely agree.

Its not only difficult to keep the students from wanting to design the mini-bot/arm/telescope/grabber etc. But sometimes also the mentors. We often get into solving the problem first without making sure we are solving the right problem. It tough to tell them that I don't want a widget but want reasons why Strategy X is better than Strategy Y.

I concur with the robot task list. We did the same thing as well. Next step we are going to take is determining strategic importance and assigning level of effort. The LoE is important because our team does not have that many students so we ahve to prioritize tasks based upon complexity as well.

In the end we all want to build a robot. But we need to design the robot to fullfill our selected strategy based upon our game analysis and our techinical capability.