How are your teams brainstorming?

[achen15]

It would be interesting to see the different methods and processes each team goes through while brainstorming. How does your team go about brainstorming for a new game?

[Canon reeves]

One good method is to define the problem first. Look at all the things that you could do, crunch the numbers for the points and different strategies. Then come up with at least 3 unique robot designs, it helps if they all focus on the same general strategy. Then make a design matrix, so on top put all of the things that matter, such as ease of build, ease of control, score capability, how much left over time for driver practice, simplicity, and then list the three designs and rate them on each category, then total them up for which to use. Of course you can use this for individual designs and parts of your robot, but it's a pretty good way to start. Also, google drive is beautiful, our BEST team makes a big folder that contains different aspects of the team, but we have a separate folder for robot design, strategy, and what ever else we need to discuss. so if you wake up at 2 in the morning and come up with a revolutionary idea, you can type it up in the drive and share it with everyone, and they can pull it up and look at your drawings while you talk. You can also organize the specific designs this way, listing your different ideas in separate documents, for example a drive train document, a manipulator document, and maybe a sensors or programming. One cool thing we did in BEST this season as well was take minutes, meaning one person records the topics discussed, ideas, and the jobs assigned. It makes things easier whenever someone misses, or for going back and reviewing things you previously discussed, but don't remember well.

[staplemonx]

Yesterday we

1. Read the rules.
2. Asked a lot of questions.
3. Read the rules again.
4. Listed everything we can't do.
5. Listed all of the the ways we thought people could play the game during auton.
6. Listed all of the the ways we thought people could play the game during teleop.
7. Listed all of the the ways we thought people could play the game during coopertition.
8. Then we read chief delphi to see if we missed any....we did, so we added them to the list.
9. Then we identified if each way to play the game was going to be common, uncommon, rare or impossible at a regional
10. Then we went through and picked which strategies we would design for.
11. Then we started brain storming ways to make the stagey that we picked and listed all of the mechanism options.
12. Looked at 2003 robots
13. put together a baseline solution based on low risk.

Our definitions

• Common 25-50 teams could do it
• Uncommon 10-25 could do it.
• Rare 2-10 team could do it
• Impossible 1-2 teams could do it.
• We limited ourselves to 1 rare or 2 uncommons or 3 commons this year.

This week we will prototype the baseline idea and several of the other ideas, read chief delphi, do more research and watch the 3 day builds.

On Saturday we will review the strategies we picked today, see if we want to stick with it or change.
Then we will review the baseline and decide if we want to stick with it or change.

Then the design will be done and it will be time to cad and prototype detail solutions in week 2.

[brandon.cottrell]

Usually over lunch.