I have been planning a robot design session for the offseason, that doubles as a CAD learning session. I want to use an old FRC game, as they have known dimensions, however I was wondering which games would be best for a learning and design session. I have people that have expressed intrest from all sorts of pre-existing knowledge, so i want a game with a wide range of skill. My current thought has been Overdrive, due to needing a minimum of one subsystem to be playable. Any thoughts? I can answer questions below.
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Many of the older games are fun to remember, but no longer very helpful for a CAD exercise because they didn’t require bumpers and were constrained by a less capable ecosystem of COTS components.
I would select a more recent game, from 2014 onward. There are several good ones. My personal favorite design exercise was 2014.
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IMHO… using older games pollutes the creative ideas of some that might have prior knowledge of previous games (or a YouTube tab open). In my experience leading offseason CAD lessons using CADathon games or the 2021 design competition games is much more useful as students will have to come up ENTIRELY with their own ideas just like at the beginning of the season instead of “taking inspiration” from robots that have come before.
As Richard said though, if you would like to use actual FIRST games 2014 onwards is a good start, but I would be bold enough to say that 2012 and further could also be useful. Good luck, wish you the best!
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OTOH, reimagining them with bumpers and/or the COTS components… it would be quite interesting to see what people come up with.
Or, if you want to do something entertaining… find a BunnyBots or OCCRA game and do that. Those are meant for training anyways, and aren’t FRC-specific.
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I completely forgot about OCCRA, thanks for the reminder!
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You could always pick something from the 2021 game design challenge. There were a lot of awesome games in the finalists: 2021 Game Design Challenge Finalists | FIRST also if you would like a game reveal video for our teams game “Chain Reaction” it can be found here, we were unable to get it completed prior to submission deadline and they would not allow submission after the initial deadline: Team 4488 Shockwave - 2021 Game Design Reveal - Chain Reaction - YouTube
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This spring & summer we’ve been using 2013 as our major CAD project. Our intent is that we actually make this robot to use the manufacturing as fall training and within the next year we replace our 2013 robot with a newer & more updated demo friendly robot. Yes, it’s an existing game, but old enough only a few mentors were involved. We’ve also added a few design constraints we didn’t use in our 2013 robot so we are trying a few new things: NEOs, printed racks/gears, no pneumatics, and stuff like that.
We will probably start a build thread in the near future as we start moving from finalizing the CAD into plans for manufacturing and turning on some CNCs for the first time.
Really - any game can be a good design challenge with some added constraints. I’d lean away from shooting balls since those have been done a lot recently. It’s good to familiarize yourself with other objectives that aren’t just intaking or storing a ball.
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2013 remains my favourite FRC game, partially because of the various well balanced strategic tradeoffs teams were presented with. I’m curious to see how this design progresses, especially with more modern FRC technology.
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plz just build this for the memes
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I second using a Bunnybots game for design training. Last year when we were training new members we did a similar thing and used the 2013 Bunnybots game which worked really well. Here’s a link to all previous Bunnybots games if you’re interested.
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