What advice would you give?

Heres what I would do....FIRST, take all the parts and have the team sort and label each part on tables... after all parts are sorted, get to know them like the back of your head....you will need to know these things really well if u ever want to be successful....when designing your robot, think back to the kit of parts and see what you can use and how you can use it....but remember stay under that 130 pounds...

Make sure you get all the inovation first parts, spikes, speed controls, fuses, control boxes into one group here is a link to the manual:
http://www.innovationfirst.com/FIRSTRobotics/

Get a group of people to learn the pneumatics and other parts...if you have people that know how to use them, you could benifit real well...

For tutorials or explanations you can dl and view last years competiton guides and manuals... you can find them here: http://www.usfirst.org/2001comp/Docs/

I gave a start and i expect others to add in details onto this and other ideas