Hello everyone,
I’m curious about how your team handles the build season, especially the first few weeks. My team has recently started an FTC team, and there was a lack of focus during it’s build season, so we would really like to avoid mistakes this year with FRC.
I’m hoping this year we can start off strong, so my question put simply is:
What does your team do on kickoff day, and weeks one and two?
::ouch::
Thank You!
Kick off day:
Read
The
Manual
We get together and the students take turns reading sections of it out loud to the rest of the team. Nothing else happens that day.
GameSense and FIRST have partnered to create Behind The Lines. We’re working together to create YouTube videos that cover a variety of educational topics.
It just so happens that our latest episode was about this topic! You can watch it, and many other Behind the Lines episodes on our YouTube channel.
This year we plan on delegating tasks between sub-groups for kickoff. The groups will be comprised of mostly new members with veterans to give guidance. We will compare differences in this years manual and last years. We also hope to assemble all the game elements so we can do some real world tests on how we can manipulate the elements.
We will spend the first few days brainstorming ways we can play one part of the game exceedingly well. After the brainstorming for all the possible ways to play the game we will decide on a drive train (Tank, slide, ect.). This will all hopefully be all done by the middle of week one.
By the middle of week two we hope to have our drive train assembled and wired up for operations (programming) to start programming. This is also the time that we hope to have our manipulator design set in stone. By set in stone, I simply mean that we are done with pre-prototyping and can now move into prototyping a manipulator to mount on our drive train.
The assembly of the manipulator and subsequent attachment that goes on our robot should be done by week five. That will leave our operations team time to work on programming and get drive practice. At the same time we will be assembling a “carbon copy” practice robot. Since our build team will have experience building the bot we should have it done soon after bag 'n tag. Since the robots will (hopefully) be identical in behavior that will earn the operations team more time to practice and make tweaks to the code.
We will prepare for the regional we go to with drive practice, team marketing, and scouting.
I do not know how well this plan will work out in reality, but as a second year FRC team this seems like a solid approach. We wish you the best of luck and hope to see you at St. Louis this coming year!
First day, get familiar with the game…meaning understand the rules, and play around with the game piece(s). Then figure out how we want to play the game, by analyzing different ways of scoring. Once we do this, we can brainstorm robot ideas, and prototype devices to manipulate the game piece(s). By the end of the first week, we should have a pretty good idea what the robot will have to do, and how it will do it, and how we might build most of the parts. Then we can order parts, and get serious about the design, as well as building more detailed prototypes, and ordering more parts.
The goal is to have something that looks like our final robot, moving around and crudely scoring points by the end of week 4.
Time flies, so get to work right away!
And don’t be afraid to post novel ideas here on CD. If it’s a good idea, you won’t hear much. If it’s a lousy idea, you’ll probably get loads of helpful criticism.
We are trying something new this year because our school decided to have exams during week 2 of build season this year rather than before winter break as it has been for the 6 years we have been a team.
Kickoff day: read the manual, come up with prototype ideas
Monday: come up with more prototype ideas
Tuesday-Thursday: Build prototypes
Friday-Saturday: Test prototypes
Week 2 (exam week): do not go to build space, have short meetings at school instead to discuss prototypes, while also working on Chairmans.
See this recent thread on kickoff day.
Here’s our coarser build season plan. We’re calling kickoff Day 0, and starting week 1 on Sunday.
Day 0- Saturday Jan. 9 2016 Kickoff
Week 1
Day 1 Monday, Jan. 11
Pre-practice strategy meeting 4pm
Figure out how we will play FIRST Stronghold
Presentation of ideas
Narrow down to 2 ideas per manipulation
Field build- mentors and volunteers
Day 2 Tuesday, Jan. 12
measurements
materials
main points
Day 3 Wednesday, Jan. 13
Day 4 Thursday, Jan 14
Sensors
chassis/drive
manipulator 1
manipulator 2
programming
Day 7 Saturday, Jan 16
basic for testing
alterations
Week 2
Day 1, Monday, Jan. 18
Day 2, Tuesday, Jan. 19
Day 4, Thursday, Jan. 21
Day 6, Saturday, Jan. 23
Week 3
Day 1, Monday, Jan. 25
Day 2, Tuesday, Jan. 26
Day 4, Thursday, Jan. 28
Build
cont.
Day 6, Saturday, Jan. 30
Week 4
Day 1, Monday, Feb. 1
Day 2, Tuesday, Feb. 2
Day 4, Thursday, Feb. 4
Day 6, Saturday, Feb 6
Week 5
Week 6
Kickoff is ONLY reading the manual and the first two weeks are prototyping and material acquisition.
Funny, we did the exact same thing and had some similar issues. I was actually going to write out a very long post about the “good, bad, and ugly” of my experiences as an FTC mentor. We met only once a week for the first 8 weeks or so, so we basically spent the first 2 weeks deciding exactly what we wanted the robot to do. Week 3 was sketching ideas, and the rest was prototyping/building.