The First Seven Days of the Season

[mfine]

Can you explain more about the analysis you did? It sounds really interesting

[Abhishek R]

We start prototyping the day after kickoff. We try to come up with as many initial concepts for mechanisms on kickoff itself.

Once the prototypes near completion and we test their efficiency out, we settle on a design and start putting bit by bit a wooden mockup of the robot. We have to run a pretty tight schedule since we build two (as close to as possible without CAD) identical robots, but we don't build them simultaneously. We begin with the practice robot and aim to finish that by week 4, then build the competition robot in the remaining weeks (it goes by faster once we've built the first one).

Something I've noticed we do differently, for better or for worse, is we don't dedicate an entire week or even a day to strategic planning or an attempt to model the game beyond kickoff. This is probably something we may want to think about a bit more as the games get more complex (in most years, it's basically been score max autonomous points, score a lot of teleop points, then accomplish the endgame as fast as possible). This may have led us to rethink the importance of being able to pick up the ball quickly for assists.

[mklinker]

Day 1: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 2: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 3: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 4: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 5: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 6: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 7: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

The rest of the season....CRAZY!!!!!!

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by mklinker

Day 1: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 2: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 3: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 4: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 5: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 6: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

Day 7: School closed due to snow and cold no robotics

The rest of the season....CRAZY!!!!!!

Weren't you accumulating the 45 pounds of components that you could take to competition?

[Citrus Dad]

1678 will have a session at our fall workshop addressing this part. We've evolved into a highly structured approach. After we've prepared materials for our workshop, we'll probably share them here in October. Message me then to remind me to post them.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by mfine

Can you explain more about the analysis you did? It sounds really interesting

Basically, we broke down the scoring mechanics of the game. I wish I had the charts and graphs to post but I don't at the moment. I might put a student on posting them before too long but they are working on some other number crunching for us at the moment.

The charts aren't anything special really but they forced the conversation for our team to be about optimum scoring strategies rather than the less productive "lets build XXXX".

We used the EWCP TwentyFour blog posts as the basis for a lot of what we did: http://twentyfour.ewcp.org/. This post in particular has been very helpful for breaking down the timing of tasks: http://twentyfour.ewcp.org/post/5892...hat-time-is-it

That whole blog is required reading for many of our students.

Speaking of reading... read the rules and understand them. That's a critical component to being able to analyze the game. One of the objectives on the second or third day for us was a group reading of the rules. It worked out well and I suspect we will be doing that again. Many of the newer students on our team weren't fully familiar with everything and reading the rules gave them additional insight and gave them an opportunity to have their questions answered.