Do any teams have a mock kickoff?

FIRST General Forum
1

At the end of this past season, those of us who were graduating talked a lot about the future of the team with the mentors. Mainly we were brainstorming ways of getting the younger members of the team more involved. Our team this comming season will be rather young in both experience and age (lots of sophmores and freshmen).

One of the things that we tossed around and that everyone seemed to think was a really good idea was to hold a “mock” kick-off event. Basicilly we would get the team together prior to kickoff, like early/mid december, and have a “mock” game prepared (this could be from previous year’s games) and present it to the team. Then we would do everything as we would for the real kickoff. This way the newer members would know what to expect come January, and be more able/willing to contribute to the design of the robot.

I have since designed a game, and we are planning on holding this “mock” kickoff around December 13th. I would post the game, but i dont want any of our members to see it early, only myself and 2 of our mentors have seen it. I may post it after so you all can check it out.

So what do you all think? Are there any teams out there that do a similar event? If so, do you feel that they work?

2

Our team did two “mock” kick-offs last year.

Once with the vex game, and once with a game that we designed.

We went all the way through with the game we designed, breaking off into teams and building vex robots, and holding a micro competition.

If you do design a game, make it really simple. Ours was just to see how many ping-pong balls you could get in a can in 2 minutes. One kid filled multiple cans :ahh:

3

Last year we didn’t do a mock “kickoff,” to be precise, but did an engineering game involving getting a ping pong ball into a can using only rubber band power and household materials.
In the previous year we did one for Stack Attack, but I’m not sure if everyone got the concept well enough. We’re trying to work things around slightly to be more successful in the mock kickoff this year.
This year we have been holding round-robin style training to teach everyone about all the subteams, and once subteams are set will begin training more in-depth. As we approach the kickoff, we’ll spend one meeting doing a mock kickoff brainstorming session (this year we’ll be doing it for Zone Zeal), and another meeting basically explaining to the newbies what they should expect and doing more strategizing.