Team 1678 Citrus Circuits is excited to release our new 2023 training resources! Our student leads have been working hard to put together these documents to help supplement the off-season training process. This link provides access to a view-only Google Drive folder including resources from these subteams:
THIS is the big reason how top teams have been able to be so incredibly good for so long. Sustained success is almost impossible without rock solid member development and transfer of knowledge
For the software training, when do you introduce WPILib? Do you do any specific training there or do they learn as they go with the everybot development?
We take maintaining our institutional knowledge very seriously. We make sure everyone on the team understands the importance of passing on all they can. That their knowledge and skills are made more valuable when more people have them as well on a team.
Citrus Circuits wouldnāt be where we are today without a team culture that values teaching and learning from everyone in the program.
Do you have an example of the playbook for match strategy? Iām more interested in the format and less interested in the actual strategies so any season would be helpful.
Thanks for sharing such thorough resources. Iām sure weāll be borrowing some of it for our new student training.
On my team, I work on Mechanical Design ā the equivalent of 1678ās Hardware Design, I believe. Our training can be broken into about two sections: 1. CAD training; 2. Mechanical Design training.
Teaching students to CAD is decently easy. Getting them to use those CAD skills to produce quality mechanisms is very hard. Bridging that gap in training is something Iāve personally worked a bit on for the past 2-ish years, and I find it quite difficult.
Do you guys have additional training for Hardware Design? What percentage/portion of your training (even if that training is ājustā projects) is this released training? How much more do 1678 kids get that helps them design such amazing robots?
Iām not asking if you guys could release that (obviously that would be great but I totally get not doing so) but just curious if there is other material that helps your kids jump this gap ā and if so, how much ā or if the air in Davis is just different haha.
Of course! Here is a response from our current Strategy lead, Mehul:
"For anyone interested in looking at playbook format:
Our goal with the playbook is to create an easily accessible place where optimized strategies are found for different combinations of robots. The whole subteam works on the playbook, divvying up different combinations, creating strategies, and peer-reviewing strategies created by other subteam members.
In terms of format, we started by delineating the tasks that robots would likely do during a strategy meeting. Then, in groups, we had members enter their strategies into the playbook, using arrows with narrower/wider gaps to show approximately when an action (movement to a different location) would occur.
We give a quick verbal primer on the architecture basics (eg. this is a periodic loop, this is a subsystem) beforehand, but WPILib is mostly ālearn as you go.ā Our main goal for Software Robot training is to get the new students programming on a real FRC robot as fast as possible. Slides and presentations are there to get them to that first step.
This is all of the overall instructional slides that we go over with our new members, but as you say, going from step to step takes a lot of work. Our students come in with no required knowledge so we use these slides to get to the point where they understand the basics of CAD. After that, we focus mostly on practice parts, showing how to use CAD to make parts, as well as basic assembly training for build season.
In terms of getting to the point of making quality mechanisms, that usually happens in the offseason after our studentsā first year. when we make our offseason robots. Because of the extended time frame, this enables students to learn how to design mechanisms effectively with less pressure, so that come the next build season they already have experience with the process, and are ready to go at the accelerated rate.
The other main advantage of this is that during that process they get to work closely with veteran members, who are able to pass down their knowledge for designing mechanisms. Being able to have the time to slowly go through the process and explain decisions is a big help for us, as without it, it would be much harder to maintain institutionalized knowledge.
In terms of actual material we have, this is the actual slides and presentations that are given to new members, the other material that helps develop CAD skills is done through projects, like practice parts, or our offseason design projects which vary from year to year.
Thanks for releasing the resources.
I want to know how to deal with training with large amount of students.
Our team normally has a team with about 20 students. However, we have about 50-60 new members attending the training because we did a great job in the recruitment.
To teach them more effectively, we divided them into three teams and every team has specific groups like programming, mechanical things and media. We also designed an armbot for them to build after each class, I think it has the same function as building an everybot.
Here comes the problem, our lab isnāt big enough, 60 students would make the lab crowded and the tools are not always available for all groups. Also, itās hard to keep track of every member. We found that a group of 6 would be efficient but every group has about 12 students.
Could you give me some advice or whatās your way of dealing with training large amount of students? Thanks