Advice for Rookies at their first regional?

[feliks_rosenber]

I'm sure everyone will chime in with answers to all of your questions.

Right you are!

Well I will chime in and share my experience from last year winning of the Rookie All Star.

First of all, prepare something to leave the judges with. A scrapbook, for instance, might be a great idea.

Second, prepare something unique and surprising like the team I'm mentoring is going to do. (It will be kept secret until the Tel Aviv regional )

Buttons and stickers, are great, but always ask yourself, is there anything bigger?

Believe me, the answer is yes!

[DonRotolo]

1. Some pits are just a table and piles of boxes and crates, and others are elaborate workspaces. Some teams leave their pits a mess, and others keep them clean and super-well organized. Some teams allow anyone to hang out, other teams strictly limit the pits to those that are really essential. Some teams regularly exceed the 10' x 10' boundaries, and others do not.

Guess which teams are winning in competiton? generally the latter.

2. Judges love buttons and other give-aways. NO FOOD OR CANDY!

3. That would be both gracious and, assuming it's not in poor taste, professional. All the rookies are competing for Rookie All-Star, but that's no reason not to become good friends with them, since they're in the same boat.

Don't forget - when you are at the comp, be helpful, share whatever you can with everyone (keep track of tools with a pad & pen, who took what, coross out when it returns), bring all your extras to give away to someone who needs, etc. Go and look at the other robots, get ideas, ask questions, get help, give help... all that.

Oh, and for all the kids who are not essential but want to be in the pits? Get them to help someone else (there will be several teams who need it), after all, they like working on robots right? Does it matter whose robot it is??

Don

[CarterM]

About the pit question, here's our rookie pit from last year....



I'd recommend that one would make it with enough storage area for supplies/tools. Have enough space around your robot so one may work on it without a huge "crowd" on one side of it. Make it safe and presentable inorder to earn bonus points for the safety (Clean Pit)/ and image award.

[Bongle]

For your pit, have something long you can put around the edges that will give it some bounds. Whether these are toolboxes, tables, or just outright fencing, it will aid against intentional or unintentional expansion from your neighbours.

Probably too late for shirt advice, but if you're attending a big regional (50+ teams), make sure your shirts are uniquely colored. In 2006, my team at GTR had flat black shirts with text, and it made it VERY difficult to find each other in the stands because many other teams also had dark shirts and the stands aren't usually lit well. We got new red ones for Atlanta and it worked nicely at keeping us together.

Bring lots and lots of buttons or other clip-on stuff. It is the currency of the pits and stands.

This was my team's biggest change with the biggest payoff in the 2006 season:
Make a checklist of pre-match things to do, with specific people assigned to make sure they get done. Before each match, have the team leader specifically ask each person if they finished their task (even if he thinks that it has already been done). Here's an example:
[ ] - Mechanical Mike changed the battery
[ ] - Programmer Pete ensured the correct version of the code is installed
[ ] - Electrical Erica made sure all the wires were tightly plugged in.
[ ] - Driver Dan put the robot through its paces
*[ ] - Motors work in the correct directions for all orientations of the drive stick
*[ ] - Arm operates through all its possible orientations
*[ ] - Pneumatics open and close as expected and with the expected pressure
*[ ] - IR Board is responsive

We implemented this because we had one regional where we had 3-4 matches with catastrophic but avoidable failures: unplugged batteries, uncharged batteries, test versions of the code that made the robot undriveable, unfilled air tanks, unplugged PWM cables. All small things that, if unchecked, end a match for a team. Assigning people to each task is important because it makes people accountable. The person named for each task is more likely to ensure it gets done if their name is written down and the team knows exactly who is to blame if their task goes undone. I know that I (as programmer that year) made very sure that the correct version of the code was loaded, even if it meant redundantly re-downloading the correct code to the robot.

[RoboMom]

http://www.firstnemo.org/resources.htm
has suggestions, like
"18 Tips for in the Pits"
"101 Things I Wish I'd Known Before My First FIRST Competition"