What does your team do for the kick off?

[Jay H 237]

Our team holds a potluck dinner where all the students, their parents, mentors, advisors, and anyone else involved with our team get together. We go over the new game, kit of parts, rules and basically start a brainstorming session. We may also play video clips from the previous years. This also gives us a chance to show the new members how much work you actually have to crunch into six weeks!

[robot180]

We do most of that in the fall season. For kickoff, we meet at our county's comission chambers and watch the kickoff from a live feed or something. As soon it is over we begin brainstorming immediately. From then until the ship date we are working day and night, while at school and work, play and rest, sleep and... well you get the idea.

I may have exaggerated a little, and we really do enjoy all of the stress and lack of sleep knowing that it is helping us to become great engineers, programmers, graphic designers, siters and watchers, playing around and getting into troublers, and whatever else people do at meetings.

Before I go off on a tangent, I was always wondering what other team's meetings, especially kickoffs, are like.

[Marygrace]

Well, we have a building in our school called the futures academy. We hold the whole thing there. We set up three/two televisions (can't remember which) and connect a lap top to record the whole kick off. Then everyone comes and we have bagles donated and peple bring chips, donuts, cookies. Then at lunch Hectors donates sandwiches. We have to be there at 6:30 am......i hate time differences. lol, N-E wayz, we invite all of our sponsors, principals, counselors, robotics friends we made through out the year (like parents and mentors of lego league teams) We also invite other teams, or anyone in the community actually.......yeah, n-e one can go. We put articles in the newspaper about it...BTW, Kick off is taking way too long to get here! ONLY A WEEK!!

[Alaina]

Team 814 has a parent and a few students go to the remote kickoff in San Jose...Somehow it gets recorded...And then that evening there is a potluck at a member's house and we all watch the recorded kickoff...and eat...and talk about robotics...

[charlie_grr]

well, we have our advisor and three other students drive up to San Jose for the day while the rest of the team stays down here. The rookie team we are mentoring got in touch with the county education channel on the cable network and they're going to air the kickoff live on the tenth. This is really good because no one on our team seems to have the nasa channel on dish. so now our whole team can just go into someones house and watch the kickoff live.

[Arefin Bari]

for the past two year motorola is broadcasting kick off and inviting teams in for kick off. so mainly after the kick off the teams get their kit and then our team gets together ... either have lunch together... and talk about the whole game... try to get a basic idea of the whole game.. brainstorm and then come up with a shape of the robot... just like last year after kick off our team got together and decided to use a U shape bot. i know that some teams get together and have a mini competition with the edubot... i would really love to do that. most likely we will have our last years bot at this years kick off and run it around to (after attaching stuff to it)... such as for last year we had somebody hold a pvc pipe to push the bins to get an idea of the whole game and the best way to get the bins off the ramp. cant wait till the kickoff... i am just so excited... it feels like that the kick off is another 4 years away... when it is only 4 days....

[RoboCoder]

hmmm.....well since the remote kickoff is just downtown for team 1002, we send a few of our build team members down to attend that. The rest of our club/build members are encouraged to watch on NASA TV or webcast the kickoff so that they know the basics of the game. then, in the afternoon, the entire team gets into a meeting room to go over the rules and have a huge brainstorming session. I expect there will be a lot of "discussion" heh heh. (ok, so we have a tendency to be a litle loud . Basically we're dedicating all of saturday to FIRST and studying the rules, developing strategies, etc.

[Elgin Clock]

Originally Posted by Jay H 237

Our team holds a potluck dinner where all the students, their parents, mentors, advisors, and anyone else involved with our team get together. We go over the new game, kit of parts, rules and basically start a brainstorming session. We may also play video clips from the previous years. This also gives us a chance to show the new members how much work you actually have to crunch into six weeks!

Hey Jay,
That usually happens the day AFTER kickoff!!
Anyways, our team usually gets together at someone's house for the actuall kickoff viewing, and I always tape it - Yes, I do have NASA TV!! lol
But as Jay mentioned, we do have a potluck dinner the day after kickoff..

Then monday, is our first "Official" meeting day for the team!

[MissInformation]

We watch it at the school, and when it's over, the majority go home. A few stay to start working on the playing field and some people stay to discuss it and plan the next day's Stubot. Stubot is where the students act out the game as though they are the robots. The first round or two of Stubot they are allowed to choose on their own what type of a robot they are. But then they are told what their robots can and cannot do (some are even made to not function for the whole round). Stubot is an amazing amount of fun and I always get some great, silly pictures, but the best thing is that it gives everyone a better unerstanding of the game. And it starts them thinking about design, what they would like to see the robot do.

Heidi

[ChrisH]

Our team will be getting together to watch it at our church which also happens to be our school building. We are also inviting any other teams that want to come to join us as we have plenty of room, like 600 seats. Next year, with a little planning maybe we can put on the REAL Remote Kickoff. NOTE: Our little function is not intended to replace the USC Remote Kickoff but rather to provide a place for those who couldn't fit there.

If you are on a team in Southern California and want to come check out this thread:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=23364

We already have a few teams that are planning to join us, but we're nowhere near capacity yet.

[_NiKki_]

Since my team's associated with CSUN we get a huge room and a huge overhead projector like thing and play the tape of kickoff around lunch. We plan and stuff for about 6 hours and have catering (this year El Pollo Loco) for dinner. Then we usually stay for another 6 hours planning more

[Matt Attallah]

Well - we basically get the students in a nice class room and watch the kick-off via webcast. Lunch is usually provided by a parent or someone. (but for the past 2 years we've been going to the remote kick-off) but this year we are going to back to good ole' times of just watchin' it via the web!

[Jeff Waegelin]

We're sending 10 students and mentors to the remote site at Northville HS, and the rest are watching the NASA TV broadcast in a room at Oakland University. We were going to do it at one of the local high school auditoriums with some other local teams, but the schools all wanted to charge us lots of money to do that. So, instead, we got a parent who's an OU prof to reserve us a room on Saturday. After that, we'll probably just discuss the game a little, and go home to start working on ideas for the big Sunday design meeting.