Lessons from a rookie

[lemiant]

As the captain of team 4334 I thought I would like share the experience of our team in our rookie year. This year has been a roller-coaster ride for our team. We have learned many things about the world and about ourselves. I'd like to think we did a good job as a rookie, building a simple bot that carried us all the way to Einstein. I learned so much this season, but I'll save most of it for later. There were however some really big things that I think everyone can learn from our season.

You don't need start with much of anything to create a successful team, not money, shops or even time. We sure didn't! As you can tell from our number we registered literally weeks from the deadline, only thanks to a grant from FIRST Canada (Thanks Mark!). In fact for a good portion of our existence as a team my lofty objective was just to run a season; it was only in the last few hours of our season that we dared to imagine a finish like we had. What you do need is dedication, this team has been all-consuming for most of us for the past 8 months. And one of the most incredible things I learned from those 8 months is that you can overcome ANYTHING!

The second lesson is that its not enough to know the principles, you actually have to follow them. So many teams rookies and veterans alike know that you should build a simple robot, but we all get sucked into the “wouldn’t this be cool” trap. When you hear yourself say something would be “cool”, that should start alarms going off in your head, what you want to be is “simple” and “elegant”. We had a strategy discussion early in this year and being simple and defensive only won by a hair, but I’m awfully glad it did .

Another strategic consideration is to know your meta-game. You aren’t playing the game in a vacuum, so it is important to know what context you are playing in. We might have gone with a fender shooter but we knew we were showing up at an 1114/2056 regional so our best shot was not to try and outscore such incredible teams, we had to find a way to complement them rather than face them head on. Next year we will hopefully be attending a Seattle regional (and the brand new Calgary regional) so going offensive may play more into our strategy.

Simple lessons but hopefully this will help reinforce them,

- Alex