Kickoff Weekend: 
Team 6328 had a great start to the season this weekend, with our team’s discussion circling around understanding the game, high level strategy, and design plans.
Saturday:
Our day started with reviewing good strategies for reviewing the game manual and some key things to keep in mind when brainstorming. Then, after watching the stream, the team broke up into groups to review the rules and fill out our very own rules test.
Rules Test:
This year, we created our very own rules test for our students. Before the stream, a group of student leads brainstormed what was important to know about any FRC game and created a preliminary list of questions. After the stream, we regrouped and created more game-specific questions, categorizing them and compiling them in a google form which all of our students and mentors then filled out. We aimed to make the questions and answers relatively clear to understand, simple to answer, and relevant to students’ understanding of the game. With our own rules test, we found that we were able to quiz our students on the most important information while also focusing on learning the rules instead of punishing students for incorrect answers. Everyone was able to understand that game in a complete way in a relaxed environment.
After the rules test, groups began to fill out our 2025 Kickoff Worksheet. (Blank copy). This year, we aimed to make kickoff more engaging for our students: we provided more choice in format and more open-ended questions. We found that groups benefitted from being able to choose between working online and on paper, and both options were equally popular. With more brainstorming opportunities, groups came up with unique ideas and strategies which we then collected in a single team worksheet for the team to reference.
Sunday:
We started the day off with a round of “humans play the game” with a makeshift field. This was a first for us, and we had a lot of fun while also learning more about the game.
Next, we had a whole team discussion and brainstormed an exhaustive list of tasks that a robot could do in the game (we think of these as the “what”s). We then had a team presentation about team strategy and various role complexities to better understand our goals. We discussed various roles we could play in the game, our capability in reliably executing roles of increasing complexity, and their respective point values during a match to help guide us through the build season.
Keeping these in mind, we ranked our tasks to create a robot priority list to help us think about the “hows” of completing our goals. We sorted these into “Needs”, “Wants”, and “Nice to Haves”. While this is not a perfect system, it proved to be a simple way to categorize and rank robot tasks. With some elements of the game being more nuanced and there being less of a consensus among team members, we “starred” some tasks to indicate that they could be placed either a category higher or lower.
After this, the team divided into groups one last time to brainstorm robot and subsystem designs. We had many great ideas and will soon be deciding on which prototypes we want to build. Many groups took inspiration from 118’s 2018 robot, thinking of a similar intake and handoff mechanism to an arm that can work with both CORAL and ALGAE, much like our 2023 robot’s claw, which was able to manipulate both cubes and cones. Below are some student sketches of possible designs!
We will be starting to prototype this week; stay tuned for updates!
-Lesia
me smashing the subscribe button
Can’t wait to follow along this season!