Picking A Drive Team

[adlasa]

Our team is competing in our first practice competition on the 17th. In the past picking drive team members have been somewhat of a contentious issue.

How do you guys pick your drivers? Ideally I would like to establish some way of democratically selecting members. Also, it is unlikely are robot will be ready to practice with before the competition.

[midway78224]

We put our drivers though a series of test. We then pick a team not only base on skill put who works together the best

[adlasa]

What type of tests do you give your drivers?

[Fisher2486]

Usually our programmer(s) drive or are head driver but to make it fair we hold alittle drive test. Our coaches time and judge the driving abilites of anyone who wants to drive but first they all have to pass a rules test. As the rules are the heart of the game we choose a few and create hypothetical situations to see if they (short) answer correctly. The programer will program to their liking wheather others can drive well or not but that is the nature of the job. Ask how they set it up and practice on the bot before ship or a team run competition.

[midway78224]

Depth of Perception test, Weaving in and out of cones forwards and backwards, Reaction test, Game scenarios

[EricPalmatier]

Picking a drive team can be a tough proposition. This year we had 12 students go for it. We put our students through a written exam, a panel interview and a practical test (which includes driving a past year's robot, accomplishing tasks and dealing with different issues that may arise).

Once all of that is done, we go through all of the data compiled from the three assessments, and then we pick our driver, manipulator and human player. We also pick an alternate, just incase something happens. I will post my test to CD later this evening, so if you would like, you can check that out.

In terms of who to pick. We try to emphasize that the drive team inadvertently becomes the public ambassadors of the team at events. They, more than most other students on the team, interact with other teams, developing strategies and building relationships. They also interact with judges, referees and other VIPs more due to their proximity to the field. It is a big role. The students need to be responsible, diplomatic and have a thorough understanding of how the game and tournament work.

Good luck!

[EricPalmatier]

It's actually nice that this topic came up. I was going to start a thread about a similar enough topic, that it would be wasteful to start a new thread.

I've attached our teams FDQT (FIRST Driver Qualification Test).

Every year, I write the new driver test, and this year I would like to share it with the CD community. I would also like to ask if others write tests like these. I also invite everyone to take the test! No notes or manuals open during the test, though! If you want the answer guide, just PM me. I may just post it on CD, once the build season is over.

I have been giving this a lot of thought, and Would like to submit to the CD community that there should be a community generated, standardized, FIRST exam generated every year. It would be nice to have collaborators, and the exam can be as extensive as we want it to be. But a resource like this could help rookie and veteran teams alike in the testing of their students, ensuring a proper understanding of the game rules and FIRST trivia in general. Any thoughts!?

[MARS_James]

Originally Posted by EricPalmatier

Any thoughts!?

I started reading, and I know everything except what is "Ranking Score"?

[EricPalmatier]

Originally Posted by MARS_James

I started reading, and I know everything except what is "Ranking Score"?

So, you may have noticed that there are several questions in the test that are misleading...This is done primarily to test the confidence of the test taker. I basically want to know that they know the answer, and that they are confident that they know the answer. If I spoon feed answers and throw softball questions, I'm never going to find out what I want to know.

That being said, the answer I was looking for, in relationship to the "ranking score" is the following:

There is no "ranking score" in the sense that ranking is not scored the same way as a Match score or a qualification score. A teams ranking is determined by the calculated sum of a teams qualification score. In the event of a Tie, the sum of a teams auto score will be used as a tie breaker. Should there still be a tie, the following scores (in order) will be used to break the tie: climb points -> sum of the conjunction of teleop points and foul points -> then random sorting by FMS.

Hope that helps!

[apalrd]

This question comes up every year on CD.

John V-Neun wrote a great long blog post about the question a few years ago.

I think John sums it up pretty well. We can train students to drive the robot. We look for the things we can't train.

We also usually use similar criteria to determine the human player; they are usually a team member who we see with driver potential in the future. Frequently they become a driver a year or two later.

We will never issue a scored 'driver test' of any kind.

[EricPalmatier]

Originally Posted by apalrd

We will never issue a scored 'driver test' of any kind.

Can you elaborate? A scored test, in conjunction with an interview and practical driving test has always served well to accurately assess a driver's knowledge and ability. There are obviously other things we look at, but it certainly helps to know the candidates seriousness and overall knowledge of the game.

Driving is a privilege. It should be a position of prestige on the team. That being said, that candidate should exhibit:

-Role model material ( Someone the team members should look up to)
-strong speaking skills
-aptitude for strategy ( understanding it and developing it)
-problem solving
-thorough understanding of the game
-scoring
-rules
-be able to drive the robot

I wouldn't take the best driver in the world, if they didn't know the rules. I run into loads of drive teams at events in strategy sessions before a match that clearly haven't got a clue. ( you all know them, the ones at the driver meetings asking the questions that have been beat to death here on CD) I know not all teams go through such a rigorous vetting process for their drive team candidates, but the students should earn the position.

[apalrd]

Originally Posted by EricPalmatier

Can you elaborate? A scored test, in conjunction with an interview and practical driving test has always served well to accurately assess a driver's knowledge and ability. There are obviously other things we look at, but it certainly helps to know the candidates seriousness and overall knowledge of the game.

We don't really care how good a driver candidate is at driving their first or second time behind the sticks. All of them won't be very good at that time. The majority of them will be lucky to hit a wall less than 3 times. If we tried a course with cones or something, the cones would likely be destroyed on the first run. I've spent days pre-season monitoring underclassmen driving in the basement. It's a scary thing to be standing on the field with them behind the sticks.

We also don't think a written rules test is important, since we both read ALL of the arena/game/robot rules several times with the team over the course of the strategy sessions, AND we can train the driver with drills or such.

Basically, anything that we can measure and score, we can also train, so we don't care about it in our driver decisions.

The real driver test is how the driver candidate handles themselves during offseason competitions, VEX, and OCCRA. We've learned far more valuable knowledge about their driving skills, dealing with pressure, and dealing with people from these events in the fall than we could ever learn from a written rules test or obstacle course test. I could probably tell you more about a few of our driver candidates driving styles and +-'s than they could.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by apalrd

This question comes up every year on CD.

John V-Neun wrote a great long blog post about the question a few years ago.

I think John sums it up pretty well. We can train students to drive the robot. We look for the things we can't train.

We also usually use similar criteria to determine the human player; they are usually a team member who we see with driver potential in the future. Frequently they become a driver a year or two later.

We will never issue a scored 'driver test' of any kind.

On 422, it has always been something along the lines of the drive team always being "go-to" guys who rose above the rest throughout the season. The people that clock in every day probably know every nuance about the robot that you can't train or test. No obstacle course will teach it. My drivers had a sixth sense about the robot last year, they could feel how to lift it, turn it, spot the best places shoot by themselves... it was incredible.

There was no test. It was just them on the field, knowing how it worked.

[Johnbot]

2607, for the past few years, has not had to pick drivers. We are a fairly small team, and we just let whoever wants to drive drive the robot. I, as our head programmer, write the code specifically for our primary driver and primary copilot, and the others either adapt or have me add a driver toggle (which I don't recommend, we almost destroyed our Logo Motion arm because one of the copilots didn't know there was a switch that inverted the controls.) (We had one dedicated pilot, and two pilot/copilots, and they made up the entirety of people who wanted to control the robot.)


The only thing we pick is the driver we base any human error prevention code off of. One of our drivers rammed something during Logo Motion, and our minibot tray came off.
Then, in Rebound Rumble, he tried to get a ball under the opposing alliances bridge, and earned us our only technical foul all season.
Since these events happened, we always joke about how we need to use the code to stop him from doing something with the robot.
However, yesterday, he was replaced by someone who drove our t-shirt robot off of the stage during a school show. (No one was hurt even a little bit, and the robot should be fine too.)

[waialua359]

Our recent records as of late is an indication that, using VEX as a training ground and recruitment/demonstration can be highly effective.
In 2010, we had 2 upper classmen ready to take over the driveteam duties. One of them was replaced by a freshman driver after we saw what he did during VEX in the Fall. He joined FRC during build season that year.
Unfortunately for our team, he and his family moved to Santa Barbara during this past summer. He was supposed to still drive as a senior.
We have 2 underclassmen now who we are confident as being just as skilled.