Off Season Practice Ideas

[Photo Storm]

As the FIRST season is over we all head into the offseason. Its not official yet but my team was thinking about meeting in the offseason. We were talking about building a swerve drive, training new people, team bonding, generally things and activities like that. In terms of facilities we have a wing in our school, and a shop with band saws, chop saws, belt sander, mill, lathe, and a break press (I'm sorry if I spelled that wrong). I was wondering in anyone had any ideas or things that their team had done in the offseason that benefited them during the real season. Thank you

[Joe195]

One beneficial practice to partake in is CAD training. Obviously this only applies if your team has a CAD team. CAD is all about practice and the off-season is the perfect time to get that in.

[Jacob Bendicksen]

As you probably know (I've seen your robot at the event!), we host BunnyBots, and that's how we train our new members. We try to have the rookies do the bulk of the robot-intensive work and have veteran members take on more of a leadership role (and less of a hands-on one), and that's worked well for us for the past 6 years.

To address each of your possibilities:
Swerve: I know 2471 did an awesome swerve this year at BunnyBots, and they're using it on their current competition bot. That seemed to be a great platform to test the swerve.
Training new members: BunnyBots seems to do this well, but smaller projects can be good, as well. Small Arduino-based projects can be a good way to get used to building physical things alongside an easier programming environment.
Team bonding: try to have semi-regular meetings during the offseason (monthly at the very least). I'd imagine that you get together at some point to build your BunnyBot, so try to have most people show up to those build sessions.

[Tyler2517]

We do a lot of programming in the off season. If you have the students who want to give it a shot you can try Zero Robotics(programming challenge hosted by nasa/mit).

If you guys want to do swerve we would love to do a joint project with you. They can get speedy plus if we can get a few teams running a joint project it could off set the cost. Along with more view points from different back grounds.
Plus if we get 3 teams in the same area with identical drives we can split machining resources making building them faster and slightly cheaper. Along with specialty parts.

Our team does a lot of events in the off season. We also continue to meet at least once every 2 weeks usually every week. Keeping a strong friendly environment is important.

[geomapguy]

Maybe trying getting your students to specialize....like getting one super good at turning parts on the lathe or one great at milling and reading machining layouts....