How do YOU start designing?

[Chris Fultz]

Cyber Blue (Team 234) works this way.

We all attend the kickoff event to see and hear what the game is firsthand.

We then meet Sunday evening and talk about the game, the rules, the assumptions, scoring, etc. Our only focus is on the game and rules.

The next 2 - 3 days we begin brainstorming. All students have input. All ideas are written down. Once we have exhausted ideas, we break into smaller groups and each group prepares their best choice for a robot.

All of these groups then come together and each group presents their robot. We discuss, critique, review and try to identify strengths and weaknesses of each idea.

Then we form a "Rubric" - a grid of each feature and its' importance to the game and the way we want to play. This helps identify the most important features and we set a priority of capabilities for our robot.

From this, we agree as a team on the path to build. Sometimes the engineers lead this final step to be sure we have something buildable, but we work hard to keep all students involved.

Sometimes we do preliminary design and build work on systems 'just in case'. Some of these end up on the robot, some do not. (for example, in 2003 we had a brake mechanism that worked really well but fell to the weight reduction sword about week 5).

We then begin formal design and building as subsystems are completed.

We continue to regroup and talk about what is working and what is not and trade-offs that have to be made.

For 2004, we are implementing 4 mini reviews. A concept review, preliminary design review, critical design review and production review are planned. All but the critical design review (CDR) are informal. The CDR is a formal event with the students making a complete presentation. We invite a team of senior engineers (not associated with the program) to conduct our reviews.

Each team has to find what works for them and their 'culture'. THis process has worked for us in the past and we are implementing a few enhancements for 2004 to make it better.