I’ll be blunt: though it’s exciting and unprecedented that four Denver teams (and a record number from Colorado overall) attended Champs this year, realistically two of the four were waitlisted, one was a second pick wildcard, and one was the second pick on the winning alliance. We have so many passionate and dedicated teams, but we are kind of spinning our collective wheels in terms of making a real impact in FRC. I think it’s time for this to change. Anyone interested in some boot camp work to improve our robot designs, team structures, and design processes? I’m willing to host, help organize, and do what I can to contribute. I haven’t spoken to many members of my team about this yet, but I get the buzz that they want to get better too.
Any thoughts?
Our team attended the Colorado Regional for the first time this year (our first out of state event as well) and we were incredibly impressed with everyone we met.
It was fun to play with so many great Colorado teams with such dedicated and welcoming adults and students. The spirit/culture of FIRST was incredibly strong at the event and I’d love to see more local teams make it to a Championship!
There’s no doubt that Denver teams, and teams in the rest of Colorado, are getting better every year. The fact that five Colorado teams were selected or were a captain for divisional eliminations this year stands as a testament to that.
Nonetheless, a workshop like this sounds like it could be fun and beneficial to all teams involved. I hope it gets off the ground, and am sad I would not be able to be a part of it.
I would talk to Ann Fairburn (the FIRST senior mentor for Colorado). She and I recently had a discussion at a Jr. FLL expo about how to improve FRC, and FIRST, in Colorado. She saw two things that she thought we really needed to have.
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A skills camp like the one you are talking about
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An official offseason event (I’m planning one just so everyone knows)
I also think it would be good to get more team to team interaction in general. I remember going to Hub City this year and being amazed at how friendly all these Texas teams were with each other. Every on every team seemed to know everyone else and I thought that level of friendship was very cool and totally something we could achieve here in Colorado.
Joel,
I’ve been thinking about something like this since the Colorado regional. I was thinking about doing a webinar series or something similar to try and help local teams achieve their potential on the field and raise the level of competition so Mountain Man has more to talk about. There is an overwhelming abundance of information on the web about building competitive robots but it might be more useful if condensed and talked about in relation to specific, familiar examples.
I’m more than willing to help out. I’ll PM you and we can start nailing down some details to make this happen.
159 is happy to have a seminar/webinar about how to reorganize and restructure a team to help make them more successful. We just went through (and are still going through) this process and have a wealth of information about what brought us from where we were in 2015 to where we are now.
4944 has been planning to host workshops for our own team this summer to make some big improvements. With our best season yet, including a Chairman’s win, WFFA, and placing 17/67 in the Hopper Division, we are very motivated to push to be even better for next season.
Unfortunately, the closest FRC team to us is 1332 in Collbran, which is an hour away so we haven’t had the chance to collaborate with many teams. However, if there was a day or two of workshops in Denver I’m sure we could arrange for team members to go! We’d love to learn from older teams.
One workshop that we’re thinking of hosting in our team this summer that we’d love to implement with other teams is a game analysis workshop. What we’ve found to be our problem is not in robot design specifically, but that we don’t really design our robots to play the game that ends up getting played. Our idea this summer is to take old game manuals and sit down for 4-5 hours and figure out what the game will look like when it’s getting played at the competitive level. From there we’d figure out what we want our robot to do, maybe sketch a design on paper and then research the game and judge our interpretation. We hope this workshop will help us a lot. For example, when our team looked at the game this year we thought there’d be no need to pick up gears off the ground since we thought no one would be dropping them. What we found was that it was hard for many teams to line up on the return loading station and gears were dropped, and people would misplace gears on the lift and they’d be dropped. This season we switched to a ground gear intake before champs and our average gear cycles went from 2-3 to 5-6. If we had seen the advantage of this earlier we could have been way more successful at regionals. We’d love to host a workshop like this if you guys do end up organizing an event.
Keep us updated!
EDIT: We’re in Grand Junction, CO
Just wondering if there have been any updates to this?
Will,
I’ve reached out to Joel on this. I’m interested in helping make this happen. We need to figure out the proper platform (webinar, in person conference, etc.) and the proper timing. A lot of teams scale back their efforts during the summer months so we might not get as much participation as if we waited until the school year ramps back up. It would be great if we could get multiple teams in the area to help spread their knowledge of the aspects of FIRST in which they excel.
As a somewhat related sidenote, I’m also willing to help teams run a mock-kickoff of their own this off-season to help develop a solid plan for game analysis and strategic design and get some practice before the real thing comes in January. I don’t have a lot of contacts here in the Colorado area but if you know of teams who might be interested, PM me and we can get something set-up.