Kickoff Procedure?

[EricH]

Watch kickoff at a remote location with other teams. (We usually host.) Sit down with anyone else who wants to and do a little "what stands out to you" session. Break for lunch. Spend the rest of the day playing the game with humans as robots (full scale, if possible) and strategizing, after a full reading of the rules. Repeat the next day, and try to narrow down how to win. Ideally, we figure out how to win in the first couple of days. Oh yeah, and inventory the kit somewhere along the line.

[Cory]

We usually send 4-5 people to the remote kickoff at San Jose State (Teacher, myself and other mentor, and 1-2 of the top students)

The rest of the team meets us back at the school where we inventory the kit, and then talk about student contracts, rules and guidelines for working in our lab, procedure to gain access to NASA, etc. Then we show a tape of the kickoff, explain the game details to anyone who has questions, and begin brainstorming of basic robot strategy. We stress that this point is not where you say "I think we should have a double jointed arm that picks up the tubes like this and puts them on like so" but rather figure out WHAT we want the robot to do. How comes later.

After that we bring a smaller group of students to our lab at NASA to begin building the field, and brainstorming specifically how to accomplish game challenges. In the past two years there hasn't been much debate as to what the best way to play the game was, so immediately after returning to the lab we got into the specifics of how to do things.

It sounds like a lot of teams don't work too much on Saturday. We go straight from 6 AM to pretty deep into the night. I think we all got tired and went home at 11:00 or midnight last year.

[lukevanoort]

A few members of our team go up to Richmond to attend the kickoff there and pick up our kit, and the rest of the team meets at one of the schools we're based out of and watches the kickoff on TV; after the kickoff is over we brainstorm and eat lunch (always pizza). In previous years, Sunday was not used and we started to refine ideas on Monday with the goal of completing the design by the end of that week. (didn't work out last year, somehow we overlooked the 72x72 rule and discovered on Thursday that our design wasn't legal. That forced us to start over, after a fashion. (the idea remained the same, just drastically different proportions)) This year, we will have a limited Sunday meeting (experienced build team members only) to refine the concepts from the Saturday brainstorming and do a more in-depth analysis of the game in order to go into the build season with a better idea of where we are headed.

[IndySam]

The team will go to the remote kick off at IUPUI while I and my son go to the kick off in Kokomo to collect the kits for us and a couple of other Indy teams.

The team breaks for lunch while one group scurries to print the manuals.

We will meet up again after lunch at school and strategize until 4:00 or 5:00. This year we are going to coble up whatever simulation we can of the field and try to play the game with human as robots.

We rest on Sunday (that’s the theory I can never not stop thinking about the game) and hit the ground running on Monday afternoon.