Kick-Off Worksheets

[crollison]

Anybody have any worksheets or guides to help guide team members through brainstorming on Kickoff day? We've had a problem in the past of nobody spending enough time on the manual and I know there are many teams that spend the entire first day going through the manual and brainstorming. I'm looking for some paperwork to help us work through that.

Thanks for sharing!.

[K-Dawg157]

My team doesn't have paperwork per-say for kickoff day, but we have a test that students must take in order to be on pit-team, meaning they can come on the sleep-aways and be in the pit with the team. The test is very difficult, and requires the students to read the manual to really understand the game.

Just a suggestion, and this can also help with students being able to answer questions for judges while in the pit.

[Gregor]

Here's a thread from last year on some general kickoff strategies.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=123247

[The_ShamWOW88]

The most important thing immediately after kick-off is to have the team read and understand the manual. If they don't, any discussion regarding design or game strategy won't make much sense.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by The_ShamWOW88

The most important thing immediately after kick-off is to have the team read and understand the manual.

I thought the most important thing right after kickoff was to have a credit card and a solid internet connection handy to buy all the game pieces before they sell out.

[seg9585]

Yes, the list of To-Do items for kickoff day is as follows:

1. Read the rules. All of them.
2. Generate trade study charts and brainstorm game strategy approaches, including order-of-magnitude scoring estimations
3. Inventory entire KoP, contact FIRST with any missing parts if applicable.
4. Configure the entire new Control System and mount to a dev board
5. Generate a list of materials to prototype with and build field elements with, and must-have parts to buy (either from hardware store or AM), purchase parts the next day

[Harman341]

On kickoff day, we have at least 5 separate brainstorming parties where 3-10 people go to someone's house and brainstorm, so we all look the manual to address questions that come up. If you have kids in groups like that they'll probably have a good grasp of the game.

[Cyberphil]

Originally Posted by Harman341

On kickoff day, we have at least 5 separate brainstorming parties where 3-10 people go to someone's house and brainstorm, so we all look the manual to address questions that come up. If you have kids in groups like that they'll probably have a good grasp of the game.

Quick question, is this strategy brainstorming, or design brainstorming? Cybersonics did a similar thing a few years back, but it was purely strategy discussion brainstorming as well as reading and understanding the manual.

[Harman341]

Both, I had one at my house last year and we talked a lot about whether we would want to catch, and how important assists would be, but then after we came up with some shooter/intake ideas. The idea is just to have somewhat refined, but diverse ideas for the full team strategy&design brainstorming meeting.

[MrForbes]

There are lots of ways to get started. We try to first understand the rules of the game, then talk about how to play the game. After we have a good idea of what we want the robot to be able to do, then we go over the robot rules to see what is allowed, and brainstorm robot design ideas.

[Cyberphil]

Originally Posted by Harman341

Both, I had one at my house last year and we talked a lot about whether we would want to catch, and how important assists would be, but then after we came up with some shooter/intake ideas. The idea is just to have somewhat refined, but diverse ideas for the full team strategy&design brainstorming meeting.

I see. We tried not to get into design in our early post-kickoff meetings. We brainstormed designs and, "Decided," as a team, so our meetings consisted mostly of strategy discussions. Interesting to hear what other teams do.

[seg9585]

Originally Posted by Cyberphil

I see. We tried not to get into design in our early post-kickoff meetings. We brainstormed designs and, "Decided," as a team, so our meetings consisted mostly of strategy discussions. Interesting to hear what other teams do.

While it's not the first thing you should discuss, brainstorming robot designs (via rough sketches) based on the strategy designs discussed can help constrain the problem (for example, could we even build something capable of achieving all desired functions given robot dimensions and weight).

Also, I like the students to think about mechanism design ideas before the "Robot in 3 days" reveal videos come out. Once that happens it seems like creativity becomes more restricted

[MooreteP]

We break our students into small groups and ask them to calculate the maximum number of points possible in a match.
This requires team members to look carefully at the game rules, scoring values, multipliers and time constraints.

Then we ask them to analyze the game pieces/field features and how we can manipulate/overcome them.
This requires team members to start thinking about the mechanical systems.

Then we ask them to rank the attributes that they think will be most desirable for the Robot. This helps to establish priorities.

Then we watch Ri3d.

[The_ShamWOW88]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I thought the most important thing right after kickoff was to have a credit card and a solid internet connection handy to buy all the game pieces before they sell out.

ok...then read all the rules

[RunawayEngineer]

As has been mentioned before - make sure everyone understands the rules.
This is my mental worksheet:

List every possible way to score points in this game:

Are there any opportunities to directly reduce your opponent's score?

What forms of defense are disallowed?

How many phases of the game are there? What is their order and general significance?

What are the game pieces? What do you know about their size/weight/geometry/material?

What can the human player do? E.g. do they assist the robot in collecting game pieces directly or indirectly?

Is there a maximum possible score?

What ways are there to get a penalty?

What rules don't make sense? Use the Glossary and the Find feature on the PDF to find related rules until it does make sense.

If everyone understands these, then your Strategy discussions will be much more productive.
Important strategy questions include:

What are the necessary steps for scoring? E.g. Human player introduces game piece, Game Piece collection by the machine, traversing the field, placing/scoring the piece, returning to human player

What are the variations for each of these steps? E.g. human player loading vs ground loading

Estimate how much time that each of these variations will take - act out the operations and time it

Using these time estimates, you can get an estimate of the total time that it takes to score from start to finish. This is a crucial number because it gives you a ballpark for a lot of useful info: how many scoring cycles will probably be in a match, what a typical match score total will be, the point/time efficiency of variations, etc.

That's my first pass at a sort of worksheet to get through the first day or so. From there, it's up to you to identify different strategies and evaluate them.
When you have a handle on good strategies -and not a minute before - then you can start talking about robot design.
The teams that I have been on have wisely banned discussion of particular robot designs until at least the second day - ensuring that students (and mentors) don't get swept up in their brilliant robot ideas and miss crucial rules or other strategies. I suggest that everyone have plenty of paper handy so that they can save robot design ideas for later discussions.

I would suggest looking at the Simbotics Strategy Seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ysSvxR-tAs You could probably take their slides on the subject and basically turn that into a checklist.