[BB] 2010 Game Hint #1

[JVN]

Originally Posted by jamie_1930

I have to disagree with you here, following kick off we have a huge brainstorming session and as should be with all brainstorming sessions there are no bad ideas. If you come up with something that's against the rules you can always tweak it to fit the rules and that illegal design may lead you to numerous legal ones that would be any better. By the time you agree on the final design yes it should be checked for all of the rules, but saying that it'll only cause trouble isn't entirely correct. Although, yes you should understand what you need to design before you do so, but isn't that the whole purpose of the game animation?

Hi Jamie,

If you're designing a robot to the game animation and then "tweaking it to fit the rules" later, I would say you're doing some shoddy engineering and missing the entire point of this process.

One of the most important parts in an engineering design process is to DEFINE THE PROBLEM. If you don't properly understand your problem, how can you solve it? Reading the game manual (the ENTIRE game manual) is the only way to understand the problem given to us in the FIRST Robotics Competition. The animation is just a pretty tool to help outsiders understand the game; the manual is for me, the animation is for my grandmother.

On 148 the first thing we do is read the "key" sections of the manual as a team, this ensures that every student is familiar with all the rules.

You mentioned brainstorming...
Brainstorming is a creativity exercise where a large number of ideas are generated in the hope that a few of them are good. This typically happens early on in the process.

When it comes to brainstorming on 148 we like to throw around illegal ideas just like everyone else. There are no bad ideas during brainstorming. However, our team spends a LOT of time referencing the rulebook during brainstorming to make sure that all the ideas we move forward with are LEGAL. We also typically make a long list of questions we need to get answered (legality questions we will answer via Q&A or functionality questions we will answer via prototyping.)

We've only got 6-weeks...it would be downright irresponsible for us to spend any significant amount of time on an illegal idea; those are by definition, "bad ideas."

If you get a minute, take a glance at my paper on using an engineering design process and look at the section on specifications, pay careful attention to "design constraints."

-John