Can Kickoff be MORE exciting?

FIRST General Forum
1

Kickoff is so exciting! But I was wondering what things teams might do to hype it up even more. Especially if you don’t attend a regional kickoff event. Do you attend a local event? What types of things do they do to get everyone excited? Do you simply stay at your build location? Do you have planing and strategizing immediately after the broadcast? Looking for ideas to get everyone even MORE excited, if that’s possible. LOL

Also, For the students not technically inclined, what do they typically do during strategy sessions? If they “sit in” with the “build room” kids, how do you make sure any ideas they have are heard? (Hasn’t happened to us, but I’d like to develop a plan of action just in case) How do you keep everyone engaged, and on task?

We typically go to a local event. I’ve been to 2 different locations, run by 2 different groups. At one, we sit in a large auditorium. Watch the broadcast (with A LOT of people) Cheer real loud. Then go somewhere else to strategize.
At the other, we were in a much smaller room (classroom) with a few teams, and had dedicated rooms to strategize on site.
Both obviously have advantages and disadvantages. (The large auditorium is exciting, but we seem to get more done with a dedicated room. ) But, I was wondering what other set ups are out there, and how do your teams like them.

2

We go to a local kickoff hosted by team 3102. I think there will be 19 teams there this year. 3102 has a Andymark field and will have plywood game elaments made to view and inspect after the release. They also have some attending teams host ~40 min breakout sessions on a variety of topics. Lunch is served, teams pick up kits and head home.

I teams don’t attend a event I would encourage them to find one. It is a great networking opportunity and good fun. Good luck to all this year.

3

We host our students, parents, and mentors in an auditorium style format, then we split to a different room to do a team read of the manual, then split to small groups for discussion and analysis. We come back all together and let every student speak one at a time with no questioning or rebuttal to get all the ideas out there. Then we go warm up the CNC mill and it’s nonstop 10k RPM spindle noise for 40 days straight :smiley: (okay not quite, but close.)

For the kickoff itself, we meet at 7AM PST, and we have a 30-50 minute playlist that is much better than the terrible song parody videos played last year.

4

How does your team go about this? We are a rookie team so I’m trying to decide the best way for us to read through the manual the first time. Do you read through it as a group aloud or individually then discuss your thoughts?

5

thecompassalliance.org has some great resources on this. One in particular I would recommend is this one by Brandon Holley. It is more general than manual reading, hopefully you find it useful.

Last year, on my high school team, we had everyone break up into teams for each section of the manual and put together powerpoints about their section to present to the team. This got the whole team involved, however I would look into adding an element into this that makes a few particular people experts on the whole thing.

6

Since we can’t send everyone to our regional kickoff, we just send a mentor or two to get our kit. The team meets at the build site and spends the day strategizing and prototyping and picnicking. The last two years, we’ve already whittled down to a few strategic questions for deep analysis by the end of Saturday, and make strategic decisions by the first Monday.

Um. Well, it’s the other way actually. I think all of the students on the team are interested in strategy or building or both. Everyone who isn’t really into strategy spends the day prototyping game functions like intakes or catchers or whatever. Their results help us more intelligently guess how difficult each task will be to do, and give us a leg up on developing the things we will do. If we have someone who doesn’t want to do either of these, they’re likely here for publicity or art or business - maybe we can get a good set of kickoff pictures! We’re forming up the kickoff groups at meetings this Thursday and next.

7

Since the kickoff starts at 5am HST (game video at 5:30) and the official kickoff location is on a different island, we started our own back in 2012.

We fly out one dedicated mentor, first flight, out to the official kickoff location to pick up KOP’s to bring back to our site.

The rest of the crazy mentor cadre watch and record the official kickoff.
After the initial excitement subsides and we finish texting each other, we get the rule books printed and get to school and set up for the big day!

We have the teams meet up at 9am.
This lets the students and families get that last bit of sleep in before the season starts. :yikes:

We host a localized kickoff for the entire island, though usually we only get the west side teams since the east side teams are 80+ miles away.

We provide rule books to everyone and then watch the kick off video together with a good pot luck breakfast.

Then after the initial buzz we break out into workshops.

First is the Stanford Design Thinking class. This will teach the process we will use in upcoming design and strategy workshops to everyone attending. This ensures the following workshops on game analysis and design that everyone is familiar with the upcoming fast paced design process.

The rest of the day is spent in various workshops

Stanford Design Thinking
Reading and understanding the new game manual, round table read, open discussions
Game analysis and strategy
Rules Testing
Mock game play by humans
Shop/tool safety
Fabrication
Drivetrain designs
Tools designs
Programming
Low-res prototyping.

New this year we plan on having a driver’s testing course with a few practice bots.

After the workshops everyone comes together and shares their designs / discoveries as we debrief each other so we leave all with lots of ideas and information to work with.

Much more too. Still working on the final workshops with the students.

I am sure I missed a bunch, though this will give you a rough idea.

Let me know if you would like more info,
Aloha!

8

Here is a point I can’t stress more: If your strategy discussion is technical in nature you are doing it wrong. Your first discussions should always be about the game and how it should be played, no robot discussion at all. That should always come after.

We do things a little different. After kickoff we printout manuals, go get chinese food and then disperse. Everyone is charged with reading the manual and coming up with ideas. Then on Sunday we like to get as many people involved as possible, all team members, their parents and siblings, alumni… The more eyes you have on the game the better off you are.

At the start of the meeting I always stress that you never know where that game breaking idea will come from every idea should be considered no matter how far fetched they seem. We go over the manual together, make a scoring matrix and then break off into groups. Each group charged with coming up with a strategy. It is important that in every group that there is a member that is experienced in the process to keep things on track. Then every group presents their ideas.

The goal is to come up with a priority lists of what we are going to try and do. If it goes well we may decide on a drive concept but that’s about as far as a robot discussion as we have.

9

Agreed that strategies should be identified independently of mechanisms! However, in order to robustly evaluate strategies, each team should somehow estimate the cost (in time, effort, risk, and dollars) to develop and build a robot capable of executing each strategy before selecting one. Using a recent example, 3946 decided in 2017 that while creating a robot that could pick up fuel and throw them high enough to get in the goal would be fairly easy, getting the many dozens of fuel required in a short time was rather high in terms of effort and (given the limited experience we have with wheeled shooters) VERY risky. We also recognized that the goals of climbing and delivering gears were inherently compatible (best met with a small, fast robot), where a fuel robot would likely be larger in volume if not weight. In the end, we (like many mid-tier teams) decided to build a fast gearbot (goal of 4-6 gears in 2:00) with a climber. This was our leading candidate strategy by close of business kickoff day, and pretty well locked down at our one Sunday meeting of the year. The first drawing that really hinted at what our robot would eventually look like came late on Tuesday, at which point it was still one of a dozen viable ideas. Even as we started to build the first prototype, we had not decided whether we would prioritize an active hanger or floor pickup. The decision to prioritize a hanger was made a week or two later, after we viewed the mechanics of the hang and were confident that we could receive gears from the HP station effectively. If we had not bothered to estimate what fraction of our resources each thing might take, we would have decided on an “everything” robot, or perhaps (If we’d decided to do two things up front) a fuel+climber because there was a very high number of fuel points which could theoretically be scored.

10

These are all great guidelines. Thanks. It wasn’t exactly the direction I intended the thread to go :rolleyes: but not really unexpected or unwelcome. (I was probably looking a little more for how you get the kids energy levels up, but as I think about it, the answer is probably sugar. LOL)

Thanks. That website has some great useful resources. I will be bookmarking that one for later use.

We also have at least one student we call the “Rules Master” They are responsible to read through the entire manual, understand it (ask for help if they don’t), download rules updates every week, and make up short quizzes for the team to take each week. The winner of the quiz (whoever gets the most right the quickest) each week earns a prize, and it lets us know who isn’t reading the manual. It’s an “open book” test so it’s kind of amazing how many of the questions they get wrong. We can then talk to that person and see if they didn’t use the book, didn’t understand the book, didn’t understand the question, or if something else went wrong.

I don’t disagree with you. Some of our best strategists and scouts have been from the “business” side. But sometimes it can be intimidating to the “business” members to even voice an idea about what the robot should do because they don’t know how any of the mechanical stuff works. Our “technical” students tend to voice strategies and mechanism ideas in the same breath.

Most of our students tend to apply themselves to both sides of the team, but I do notice some stay very quiet even when they have an idea. (It seems to happen a lot to the rookies too) Luckily, we’ve had some awesome student leaders that have kept things very open and inviting for everyone. (Like I said, hasn’t happened to us yet.)

I love this. We would have to be WAY, WAY more organized to put something like you guys have together. But, I’m in love with the idea of having workshops. Something to strive for, for sure. :smiley:

11

Just have Mountain Dew and Pizza. Totally not a bad combo!

12

I’d like to urge some caution about this. If every student is relying on this one student to know the rules inside and out, if on the offchance they miss something, then the entire team may not catch it. You may spent all build season using an illegal strategy because you missed something. We didn’t in 2015 when we inevitably read that 6ft = 60 inches.

Everyone needs to know the rules, inside and out.

13

I’ll give you an idea to help curb the robot-focused discussion: On 1923, we refer to the robot as ‘the cloud of mist’ or ‘the thing’, until we know how we’re planning to play the game. (This is definitely not an original idea; but for the life of me I can’t remember who we learned it from and I apologize for not properly crediting.)

Essentially, talking about what a robot can do is really important, but if ‘what’ turns into ‘how’ on Kickoff day, whoever’s leading the discussion at that time gently reminds the speaker that the robot is, as of this moment, a cloud of mist that somehow magically completes the objective. No definitions yet.

We ask that everyone bring a notebook with them to kickoff - if you have an awesome idea in those early discussions for what the cloud of mist looks like, then sketch it, write it down, remember it - but until we know what it is we want to do, we try to avoid discussing too much of the how.

It sounds silly, and I’m not even sure I’m explaining it well enough, but it seems to help for someone going, ‘I think we should do X but I don’t know how’ to voice their opinion comfortably.

14

Provide free coffee to mentors and parents

15

We typically host our team at our school, just in our cafeteria rather than i our build room so we have room to spread out and have access to wi-fi. We have also gone to 1939’s school a couple of times which was really fun! They host teams for breakfast and we went into their auditorium to watch it as a whole which was exciting. We have continued to stay at our school just for costs, however.

It’s the same reason we only take a few people with us to our local event at Garmin HQ to grab our KOP. This will be my third year going since a mentor and the co-captains go for our representatives and it’s such a joy even if it requires waking up earlier. They feed us breakfast which is a huge perk of it (especially the coffee).

No matter what, we’ve always had direct time after to strategize and mainly clarify rules that are in the manual. We have time to download and read the manual first before we separate up into smaller groups. Each group is randomized and is assigned a mentor to allow for better communication and clarification. In those groups everyone is getting their word in which can give a variety of inputs in an organized way.

What I’ve always wanted to try was making a mock game out of people as the robots. It’s always sounded like a fun idea to get a grasp of the game but we’ve never done it. I’m probably going to suggest it when mentors meet this year.