Kick-Off Worksheets

[RunawayEngineer]

As has been mentioned before - make sure everyone understands the rules.
This is my mental worksheet:

List every possible way to score points in this game:

Are there any opportunities to directly reduce your opponent's score?

What forms of defense are disallowed?

How many phases of the game are there? What is their order and general significance?

What are the game pieces? What do you know about their size/weight/geometry/material?

What can the human player do? E.g. do they assist the robot in collecting game pieces directly or indirectly?

Is there a maximum possible score?

What ways are there to get a penalty?

What rules don't make sense? Use the Glossary and the Find feature on the PDF to find related rules until it does make sense.

If everyone understands these, then your Strategy discussions will be much more productive.
Important strategy questions include:

What are the necessary steps for scoring? E.g. Human player introduces game piece, Game Piece collection by the machine, traversing the field, placing/scoring the piece, returning to human player

What are the variations for each of these steps? E.g. human player loading vs ground loading

Estimate how much time that each of these variations will take - act out the operations and time it

Using these time estimates, you can get an estimate of the total time that it takes to score from start to finish. This is a crucial number because it gives you a ballpark for a lot of useful info: how many scoring cycles will probably be in a match, what a typical match score total will be, the point/time efficiency of variations, etc.

That's my first pass at a sort of worksheet to get through the first day or so. From there, it's up to you to identify different strategies and evaluate them.
When you have a handle on good strategies -and not a minute before - then you can start talking about robot design.
The teams that I have been on have wisely banned discussion of particular robot designs until at least the second day - ensuring that students (and mentors) don't get swept up in their brilliant robot ideas and miss crucial rules or other strategies. I suggest that everyone have plenty of paper handy so that they can save robot design ideas for later discussions.

I would suggest looking at the Simbotics Strategy Seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ysSvxR-tAs You could probably take their slides on the subject and basically turn that into a checklist.

[Alex2614]

We usually just tell our groups to come up with the most crazy, off-the-wall, completely impossible ideas possible. Come back together as a team, present as a group to the team, and break up again. We do this a couple times.

The first hour or so in our divided groups is usually just a "what do we need to do" and "how is the gameplay going to look like?"

The second meeting is where the specific, impossible ideas come from.

We usually see some trending themes throughout our groups.

We always say it's better to tone down a crazy impossible idea than to build up a bad one

[BJC]

Engineering_Design_Process_in_Competition_Robotics _20091204.pdf

I generally recommend reading this paper around this time of year. I always re-read it the night before kickoff. It is so easy to jump to step four - unless you are paying specific attention not to, you'll find your team jumping to conclusions about the game. Those first three steps really drive the direction the rest of the season goes. (Even in this thread, I see a lot of skipping step one.)

A great brain exercise to do (in step four) is to determine the Minimum Competitive Concept. Frequently, once you identify the simplest robot that can still be competitive in the game, you can then tweak and improve it to meet your specifications (step 2). This is basically what 33 did in 2014.

When thinking about robot designs, I often think in terms of elevators, and polycord, and four bars, and shooter wheels. Another valuable thought experiment is to draw the robot size box on paper and try to optimize the travel path of the game piece through the robot without considering mechanisms. You can often zero in on how you want the robot to interact with game pieces this way. This is also a fantastic way to directly engage newer students beyond "having them come up with crazy ideas". Team 33s 2013 robot was partially the result of this thought experiment.

Cheers, Bryan

[rick.oliver]

This is the process we use. It has been derived from the process illustrated in the 1114 information and my own experience.