Lessons Learned the positive (2006)

[Tetraman]

Originally Posted by irishninja

Human player had a fun job. I loved being human player. Definatley one of the coolest games ever.

Being a Human Player is the greatest. I loved being HP last year. As you can see my team named me accordingly for loveing the job so much.

[deficite]

At nationals it seemed to me that communication was a lot better this year. Also, the pits were very accessible and easy to find.

The game was perfect in my opinion. Last year's game really bored me and I never was interested in it, but this year's game so so intense and everybody really had a chance. Also, I'm glad that programmers get a lot of payoff this year. A good autonomous program can mean the difference between winning and losing.

[Master Dictator]

Autonomous mode was so important in winning. It was in most cases the difference between winning and losing.

[KTorak]

I didn't keep track in the finals matchs on Archimedes or Einstein, but every match that we won Autonomous, we won the match. The only match we lost in in seeding was the match we lost autonomous. I don't remeber if we lost autonomous in the quarterfinals on Archimedes when we lost the match.

[Aaron D.]

- I liked how simple the game was. yet it gave way for incrdeible inventivness and creativity and never a dull match
-I liked the game piece, like in 2003 when FIRST uses a household object I think it makes the game more interesting
-It was so much easier to say to a bystander "our robot shoots balls" than " Our robot caps these large tetrahedral shapes with smaller ones in hopes of making a row"
- The periods made for better strategy
- this game required more teamwork
- defense was just as important as offense this year, I dont think this was true last year

[Koko Ed]

This was one of my favorite FIRST games.
The strategy elements were amazing. Best use of autonomous ever!

The championship was well organized for the most part and ran pretty smoothly. Atlanta does a top notch job hosting the event!

[Towel]

I enjoyed this game much more than last years. FIRST made autonomous a must: a great idea, it made the game much more competitive. The bumpers also worked very well (my team didn't have bumpers, we said that we would use everyone elses ). I also liked the flag idea, it was much easier to tell which team was red and which was blue, making our scouts jobs a breeze. I was amazed at the fact that even though this game was much more competitive, this game was also easier to understand to the spectators, it had a much more human feeling to it.

[BBnum3]

From the perspective of a rookie:

This year has been absolutely amazing. FIRST did a great job putting on the regional and championship events. I can not imagine a better experience, especially coming from a team that had absolutely no prior experience with FIRST.

I loved the game this year. It was a sufficiently simple to be understood and complex enough to warrant a lot of strategizing. Having the autonomous mode be so important was a really great element of the game, and allowed my team to be extremely successful at the Championship, successful beyond our wildest dreams at the beginning of the season.

The whole season and experience was amazing for my team this year, and has made me decide to be involved in FIRST for the rest of my life. Nothing could ever be better than this amazing rookie season, and thanks to FIRST for making it so.

[Freddy Schurr]

Bumpers and flags need to come back next year. This two items helped make the game more enjoyable.

Regionals were perfect this year and the Championship was awesome.

[dhitchco]

As was stated during the pre-build anticipation back in December....this year's game was:

a) Great because it relied more heavily on the autonomous period; continue to push use of autonomous control in the future!
b) Great because there were many ways to score (hi goal shooter, low goal dumper, defensive blocking, bumpers; and BEST OF ALL, the added 'third-dimension' of the game with the up-ramp!
c) Great because alliance selection became all that more critical and scouting really came into play this year; lots of advances int he methods and tools that teams are using for scouting databases.
d) Great because it was a quickly-intuitive game to the guests and newbies watching the events.
e) Great because there were not many copy-cat designs at the championship (200+ different designs all doing the same thing....)..wow!
f) Great because FIRST gave us better tools to do the design (AutoDesk s/w and Easy-C s/w).
g) Great because the pits 9design, advertising, safety, etc) and the non-robot portions of the events (e.g. FIRST conference) are getting even stronger overall.

Looking forward to our 3rd year!

[Ken Streeter]

Most of these have been stated by others, but some of these were just such great aspects of this year that they need to be mentioned again in case anybody from FIRST is reading...

* Autonomous really mattered this year, giving the autonomous winner a big advantage. Yet, the match wasn't a "given" for the autonomous winner, so teams that didn't get autonomous to work still had a (slim) chance.

* Autonomous featured a defensive element as well as an offensive one.

* The game was easy to explain to spectators -- both little kids and grandparents could quickly understand the game.

* Colorful poof balls!

* Bumpers were encouraged by a weight / volume advantage. In past years, it wasn't sufficiently advantageous to use bumpers.

[Mark Pierce]

Again this year, many people have highlighted items that would be on my list.

The game was very good, lots of challenge for programmers, controls people, fun to watch, etc.

Improvements to the kit of parts were welcome, as were a very complete set of rules at the start.

Amazingly, very little if any backsliding was done on what made 2005 so great. 2005 Positive

Our local regional had a new website, which wasn't perfect, but so much better than none!

The Q&A system seemed to be better, as did much of the team communication. Documents were updated simultaneously with the updates.

[prettycolors91]

As a rookie who doesnt touch the robot (chairmans and scouting all the way!!) I would say that
*Defense was key...if you couldnt hold your ground you didnt stand a chance
*The hall of fame went very smoothly, and got a lot of traffic
*It was easy to navigate the pits (Making showing around the ambassadors of FIRST sooooo much easier)
*We really got the message of FIRST out there this year
*Team work was absolutly essential in everything that went on in the competition (half of my head was my team colors (red) and the other half was green for 503 and 1403) and everybody was so incredibly helpful about everything

Overall, awesome first year of FRC for me!