Pre-Build Activities for rookie team

[ahartnet]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

When I took over as head mentor for Spectrum our pre-seaon project was to design and build a cart. It used pretty much all wood and parts from Home Depot and it served us well for a couple years. It's useful and you can use it to go through the engineering design process without actually building a robot.

I'll second the cart building.

When is your first regional? After build season is done, as a rookie team you'll likely still be overwhelmed trying to prepare for the competition. What are things you can do that would be beneficial at competition? To that end - depending on space available to you - I'd recommend a building your pit, a robot cart, and/or a battery cart.

Side note: I personally like the idea that the last week or so of build season all robot fixes should be handled in a 10 foot by 10 foot area to represent working in the pit. If you have a pit put together of where you'll have tools, work places, etc then that's event better so you can make sure you have all your necessary tools at competition. For a rookie team - this may be completely impractical...but it can be a good goal to work towards.

This is an obvious one, but make sure all tools are assembled. We had some funnies in meeting in the fall before our build season our rookie year, so we spent a lot of our first weekend assembling a tablesaw, mitersaw, drill press, and bandsaw. That's obviously not ideal.

We also had enough experienced mentors to have a day where we just did a round robin style about each subsystem - and borrowed components from some nearby teams to give physical examples (a crab drive module, a frisbee shooter spare part, a drivetrain that the programming mentor could connect to and program, etc). This past year, we added an additional "subsystem" to our round robin day about speaking to judges, team goals, business plan etc. We probably spent about 30-45 min with 5-6 students per mentor talking about what kind of things can be done in that system. If you need to, you can probably get a mentor or experienced student from some nearby teams to lead those lessons.

I wish we would have done a mock kickoff our pre-rookie season. We were unable to go to one hosted by Spectrum, and didn't do one of our own. It showed the first day when many of our team members had no idea how to read the rules to extract the important bits - what are the major constraints, penalties, and ways to score. Assuming you have the experience, I'd recommend watching the game animation, giving them 30-60 minutes to look through the rule book and come up with a game strategy in groups of 3-4, (let them take notes on the important things), and then see if they've gathered some of that important stuff.