2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative

[Cynette]

Thursday Matches in Atlanta: As much as we all liked having extra qualification matches, I did not like what it did to the "intensity" of Thursday. Too short of time to practice and make final repairs on the robots, too short of time for inspections, team members trying to get pits organized while competing, pit scouting, match scouting, giving conference presentations and trying to attend the conferences. Our team also organizes the All Rookie Meet and Greet and we had invitations to deliver. Even with a detailed team schedule, our team members all ended up trying to do several things at once which was very stressful!

I am not a fan of the red and blue bumpers, but I have to admit that they win out over the flags! But my team really missed it's red camo bumpers. Or even the choice of putting red camo numbers on the bumpers. We would have made sure they were visible from 300 feet, so I still don't understand why we were limited to a solitary color.

The changing dimensions in the game manual. We build a whole field and also make a game test for our students. The manual said the tower was this tall, the drawing said it was this tall. The manual said the target was this diameter, the drawings said it was this diameter. We were convinced that the bump height changed multiple times until it finally settled down to one dimension in the manual and +/- 1/4 inch in the team update. We rebuilt field elements and revised the team test more than once. In the end we all had to go with eh, its close enough.

Not allowing teams to measure field elements at competition! Our robot hanger lifted the robot to the same dimension every time - guaranteed to be at least an inch above the platform - according to the drawings. At our second regional, it wasn't tall enough. We asked to measure the field so we could make a spacer for the robot hanger and were denied.

Little things - not showing the Chairman's videos at each regional. We are zero for two for the past two years at different regionals. And the list of WFFA nominees should be shown as part of the WFFA presentation.