[FRC Blog] Virtual Kit, Kickoffs, Payments, and a Special Post-Kickoff Show

FIRST General Forum
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Posted on the FRC Blog, 11/15/18: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/blog/2019-events-page

Virtual Kit, Kickoffs, Payments, and a Special Post-Kickoff Show

Written by Frank Merrick, 2018 NOV 15.

https://www.firstinspires.org/sites/default/files/uploads/frc/Blog/2019/photo-11-15-18.jpg

I took this photo while writing this blog!

Virtual Kit

The Virtual Kit is now available to teams! See the details here.

Also, please note that *FIRST *Choice passwords posted with Virtual Kit codes today, but *FIRST *Choice doesn’t open until Wednesday, November 21, so they are not much use till then.

Kit and Kickoffs

The deadline to sign up for kit and kickoff is coming up! Teams must make their selections before 12:00 PM (noon) Eastern Time on Monday, November 19. Teams who do not make their selections will default to having the kit shipped to their location and will incur applicable shipping costs.

To complete this task, please log onto your Dashboard and take the following steps:

Under the Team Events section, select “Event Options”

  • From the drop-down, select “Kit & Kickoff”
  • Click on “Yes” to attend a local Kickoff
  • Select Kickoff location
  • Enter number of attendees
  • Click Yes or No if you are picking up your kit at a local Kickoff

Payment

Just a just a friendly reminder that 1st Regional or District registration fees are due Monday, November 19. See this page for more information.

Special Post-Kickoff Show

After the recent announcement that teams attending the Manchester Kickoff will no longer be allowed on the field to interact with field elements, we heard from several of you with concerns. The greatest concern seemed to be that local teams will no longer be able to take photos and video for sharing with the rest of the community. We have planned ways to ease this concern.

First, we will have two independent sets of field photos available, one courtesy of WPI, one courtesy of NASA. Brad Miller from WPI has been doing this for several years, but the NASA photos from Drew Price and Dave Lavery will be new. The photos are being taken independently. This will increase the chance that something missed by one set will be picked up by the other.

Second, we are going to have an interactive post-Kickoff show on Twitch after the main kickoff broadcast concludes. As well as including the pre-recorded Field Tour Videos we normally would show, we will be taking requests from the community via the Twitch chat to show various field components or interactions. This will not be a time to ask game rules questions, as you should save those for when the Q&A system opens. But this will be a time for any individual signed into Twitch to ask field-related “show me” questions like “can you show game piece X interacting with field component Y.” We think many of these types of questions will be answered by the pre-recorded Field Tour videos, but it’s not possible to anticipate everything the teams would like to see. More details about this show will be posted later.

Frank

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While it’s not quite the same as a direct field interactions, I for one can’t wait to see Twitch Plays Destination: Deep Space.

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That’s a reasonable compromise, I think: Multiple sets of photos, and a webstream of “you tell us what you need to see”. Not the same as in-person, but close enough for most I think.

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Great and thoughtful idea, I think. For many teams this might be even better than videos taken by participants because we have a method of field interaction for any team. There are times in the past I’ve wondered how something might react but had no access to a real field or to anyone that did have access to ask them. I had to rely on combing through a bunch of videos in the hopes someone thought the same thing and filmed it.

It might not be a perfect solution, but I’m actually happy with this concession.

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I can see it now…

“Q: Can you demonstrate Frank doing 100 jumping jacks on the platform?”

But actually, this is a great idea for helping teams explore the field early.

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I’ve been very happy with how FIRST is handling things as of late—the transparency and thoughtfulness is appreciated. Well done!

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Out of curiosity, how much is everyone’s regional group charging for Kickoff events to cover the KOP shipping costs?

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Nothin.

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Our kickoff event has always been free, forgive my ignorance but is this not always the case?

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It is AFAIK but it could have something to do with international shipping, seeing as how theyre from Canada.

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It is due to shipping and customs costs, but I’m just wondering if any other teams in Canada or the Western US are having the same experience.

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Being from western US, that was never something we had to pay.

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A long time ago, FIRST used to do live rules Q&A as soon as kickoff ended, which would inevitably devolve into asking questions that were trivially answered in the rulebook. I am similarly a little bit concerned that if teams have not read the manual prior to the “interactive” field tour, most of the questions will not be very meaningful.

This probably isn’t feasible due to the likely need to break down the field the day of kickoff, but I wonder if waiting 24 hours before doing the interactive field tour would result in higher quality questions and higher impact answers. Potentially this would be even more useful than letting teams interact with the field themselves immediately.