What does your team do for Kickoff?

[viking]

Team 1777 holds a Pancake Feed / Silent Auction / Kickoff event in our school cafeteria. We have fun with previous years robots, raise some money and then watch the kickoff on NASA TV. Current team members and any other family members are invited to do brainstorming, with a pizza lunch and then inventory the KOP.

By the end of the day, we will decide on the chasis, study manipulation options and start talking about the game strategy.

Our local Kickoff Event only allows 2 persons per team, so we send a couple of our mentors to go to that, which will include a couple workshops before delivering the KOP.

[Nick Lawrence]

I think most teams learn what the game is.

-Nick

[charrisTTI]

Team 623 will attend kickoff in Washington, DC at McKinley Technology High School. We will be mentoring teams at the KitBot build session in the afternoon. We will have a team pot luck dinner for team members and their families that evening. After dinner we show the animation and selected other portions of the broadcast to get "everybody" on board. After that we hand out lots of markers and poster paper and have all the attendees help with the first brain storming session. Everyone (group or individual) who wants to gets to come up and has 60 seconds to explain their drawing (idea). Fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters, any age is welcome to participate. We keep sticking the drawings on the wall around the cafeteria. We also signup parent volunteers for various upcoming tasks during the coming build season.

Lots of fun for all. It really gets everyone exicited and involved.

[Justin Montois]

Originally Posted by Nick Lawrence

I think most teams learn what the game is.

-Nick

Right on. We read the rules, then again, then again. Then talk strategy. Like many have stated, unless you know what the problem is, you can't solve it. We talk about what it takes to win a match and then in the following days we discuss how to build a robot that best executes that strategy.

[1986titans]

Originally Posted by viking

Team 1777 holds a Pancake Feed / Silent Auction / Kickoff event in our school cafeteria. We have fun with previous years robots, raise some money and then watch the kickoff on NASA TV. Current team members and any other family members are invited to do brainstorming, with a pizza lunch and then inventory the KOP.

By the end of the day, we will decide on the chasis, study manipulation options and start talking about the game strategy.

Our local Kickoff Event only allows 2 persons per team, so we send a couple of our mentors to go to that, which will include a couple workshops before delivering the KOP.

We do something very similar with the two other teams from our town.

[Kims Robot]

1511's schedule last year was:
Saturday
9am-12noon Kickoff at RIT
We had the locked pdf manuals waiting at a printing place nearby, and call them with the password to start printing as soon as it comes out.

12-1:30pm Lunch at PHS, reading the rulebooks in small groups. We generally do the reading out loud so that everyone is paying attention to details. Students are given a Subteam Selection sheet where they can think about which subteam they want to be a part of.

1:30-2:30pm Strategy discussion as a team (listed up on flipcharts)
List all Scoring & Penalty Options
List Robot Specific Rules
List Interesting Rules
List All Autonomous Strategies
List All Offensive Strategies
List All Defensive Strategies

2:30-3:30pm Small Group Strategy Work
Groups are tasked to select 2 Autonomous Strategies and 5 (TOTAL) offensive and/or defensive strategies (7 strategies in all). Students present their strategies & why they chose them and as they presented we tallied up the strategies that were selected.

3:30-4pm Strategy Discussion
We talk about anything specific that comes up (last year it was about collection strategies) and do any votes to get a feel for how everyone is leaning towards.

4pm Break - students submit their subteam selection sheets, indicating their top 5 subteams they want to be a part of. Lead Mentors of the subteams meet and select students for the subteams we do at least 1 new, 1 returning, 1 CAD (for all but programming), and try to balance out the groups so that students get near their first choice but are broken up enough so that they are on task and its not just a social group.

4:30-7pm - Strategy Subteam Meets. They review old games that are similar to this game, find robots from past years that might work for this game, discuss critical strategies, key concepts, try to find any specific lock down game strategies, crunch lots of numbers on scoring points/penalities, determine what really is important. They also develop the Weighted Objectives Table for the following day.

Sunday
9-11:30am - Field group goes and buys materials for the field.

12-1pm - All team lunch & Review of the strategy team findings, subteams are announced.

1-2pm - Drivetrain group breaks off to go finalize design, order parts, etc.
Team breaks into small groups for mechanism design. Each group must come up with 2 designs for 2 different types of mechanisms (last year was 2 collection, 2 scoring). At the end of the time, a student from each group presents their ideas.

2-2:30pm - Team Develops different "robot types" from the ideas, people select which idea they are most interested in, each type must have at least 4 people to move on (last year 5/8 types moved on).

2:30-4pm - Fleshing out the designs, they design up the full robot idea, select motors, sensors, come up with parts details, sizing, drivetrain orientation, etc. At the end, they all present the ideas with all of the details.

4-5pm - 1 rep for each design remained with the design and everyone was given Weighted Objectives Tables and asked to go around and rate each design on a handful of criteria. This ensures that everyone understands every design and is really rating them on what is important. All of the scores are tallied and numbers are averaged to see which robot designs ranked the highest.

Depending on how things go after that, either there is a clear decision, or mentors/strategy/leadership further discusses what design we need to select to meet our strategy goals.

Monday - day off (drivetrain group may meet/communicate to get things moving)

Tuesday - We finalize/announce the robot design selection and get to work.

This is a schedule that we have refined over the years, and tend to refine further each year. It seems to work well to get everyone on the same page, and we believe heavily in locking down a design by the end of the weekend, and having a drivetrain running by the end of week 1.