Team 696's 2014 Build Blog

[saikiranra]

On behalf of FIRST Team 696, I am proud to release our very first Build Season Blog.

This year, we decided to track our progress in a more concrete manner. This blog allowed us to keep our friends and family up to date with lab proceedings, provide a means of holding members accountable for their team roles, collaborate and share findings with other teams, and pinpoint which processes we can improve in the future.

Most of these blogs were written by a rookie "reporter", with a few written by David Black or I, in his absence. We hope to improve on this process next year to provide a more cohesive reporting style.

We are excited to finally be able to share this with the FRC community!

[tim-tim]

Thanks for sharing! I'm only part of the way through, but it has offered a lot of valuable insight. Always looking for ways tom improve our process and learn how others tackle the same challenge.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Thank you for posting this. I'm glad to see more teams are documenting their season.

[sanddrag]

While it was our first time doing a blog, I felt we made a rather decent run at it. The one thing I wish we did better was post-bag updates. We'll improve this area next year. Our students learned a lot through the process and I enjoyed taking a break from the robot to write a bit every now and then. It's amazing to look back at how much we accomplished in so few days. The documentation of schedule will serve us well next year. It was really a crazy schedule when you look at the lab opening and closing times each day on many of the posts. There's also some detail in a few of the photos that some of you may enjoy.

[dcarr]

Just getting started but this is a great read! Among the many great reasons for doing a blog, I think keeping everyone on the team up to speed is certainly a great one. I imagine that having a central log of everything that occurs helps a lot in keeping all team members up to date on a day-to-day basis. Definitely something I'd like to start in the future. I also like your idea of appointing a new student to manage the blog - I'm sure that student has a significantly greater understanding of the team's operations after doing this.

[Scott Morgan]

Thanks for posting, I look forward to reading it.

[Mastonevich]

I am a little blown away that a team who created a robot with a 3-ball auto was not able to make the championships.

Thanks for sharing the blog, it will be a great tool for other teams to look at and possibly inspire their own process improvements.