Tips to make your team a contender?

[Citrus Dad]

There are many great suggestions here. This should be a "classic" thread that we steer rookie and young teams to each year. In fact, if someone could compile this into a white paper we could post it here and also get FIRST to post it as a resource on their website.

I'll describe what I think has led to our success over the last 4 years. Until this year, our "shop" was a shipping container in the field behind Steve Harvey's math classroom. We had a bandsaw and table saw, and last year we got an old Bridgeport mill. I think many other teams are in similar situations so I don't believe that resources need be a limiting factor to achieving significant success. Within these constraints, here's what lifted us since 2012:

- Fundraising and sponsorship: Our team budget increased from $35k in 2012 to $125k this year. We had to get the money from somewhere. Fortunately we were able to get initial seed money from UC Davis, and we've used that to leverage into other sponsors. In a small community like Snohomish you can get to know every business personally--start with your Chamber of Commerce and the city's economic development office. You also can reach out to large companies in Everett like Boeing. Teams in large cities can contact the large corporations with HQs there. Sell the "program" not just the team aspect. We're not the local baseball club; we're an integrated project-based education program that uses a sports-model to inspire students. To achieve this you need non-technical students to lead this effort. Bring in students who are interested in business, media, presentations, even the arts. You can make your team a bigger community.
- Outreach: We have developed projects outreach both to our community and other FRC teams. Somehow that has provided a catalyst of dedication of our team members. I think it makes the students realize that they are part of bigger effort. I don't think it's coincidence that most of the Hall of Fame teams are also competitive powerhouses. Again, you can involve students who are interested in more than engineering. Education, arts, media are all needed for this.
- Constant improvement: If you look at pictures of our 2013 bot at CVR vs champs you wouldn't believe that it's the same machine. We constantly work on improvements throughout the season. Until this year 1671 would build a machine that very good at their first regional but it would be static and other teams would pass them by. This year they were constantly making improvements. They weren't particularly close to us at CVR but they outscored us as Sacramento and then took a riskier pick with a higher upside to go for the win. Taking risks is part of the constant improvement mindset.
- Strategic analysis: Karthik's talk at Champs covered most of this. Think before building. Game out all of the possibilities. Be willing to go down potential dead ends and cast aside your failures. We have developed a braintrust led by our mentor Mike Corsetto. You can't duplicate Mike but you can get most of the way there by duplicating the process. We make a list of what we would want to achieve and then slim it down to what is really achievable. For example we dropped landfill loading because we realized it was a tradeoff and that we couldn't do all types of loading plus a fast cangrabber. Last year we decided that being the top finishing shooter was less important in our overall strategy.
- Scouting: we start developing our system even before build season. We push data via smartphones to our drive team. We've integrated our pit scouting into our electronic system so that we can see that data in the pits before we develop our pick list. We game out potential draft scenarios. (We knew what was coming in 2013 on Curie and if the other teams had been able to see it as well they may have made different decisions.) Our scouting system was critical to identifying 840 and 295 at CVR in 2013; we did not have the best robot at that competition (3970 did.) A side benefit is that you use your excess programmers to develop and maintain your scouting system. There's really only so much programming needed for the robot. Plus you can bring students who are interest in statistics and "Moneybot". Karthik said this is how he got involved with robotics.

We will post videos from our fall workshop that address some of these topics, and will have another workshop in October in Davis.