9/10/24 Offseason Recap:
VorTX ended the 2024 season by celebrating at our annual Banquet. This year alongside recognizing the year’s success, such as the Engineering in Excellence award we received at the FiT Houston District Event and our qualification for states, we also celebrated our Graduating seniors and Our new leadership team, which you’ll meet soon.
2024 was an amazing season, however, unfortunately we were unable to qualify for the world championship by only 7 ranks. With the use of Retrospectives our teams productivity and willingness to advance and make improvements has increased.
Using the same Retrospective system from last year we were able to improve our teams performance significantly. The team was able to prioritize improvements and eliminate common issues. The team’s success was thanks to looking at what our flaws were and how we could fix them. Implementing this process played an important role in the team’s success this past year. We initially used the format for post-competition and then gradually extended it to the Robot and Season at the end of the year. The goal is to identify 3 things and break them down;
- What went well?
- What did not go well?
- What can we do better next time?
The order is important for morale purposes and to encourage discussion, a common management tool for meetings - start on a positive, get to the point, and end on a positive. To quote from the sustainability award requirements, this is how our team “celebrates success and documents lessons learned” to prevent repeating mistakes. It’s a simple matter of continuous improvement that allows all members of the team to provide feedback and have input on the future direction of the team. What’s important is feeding the lessons learned back into the next event, which we will do with pre-competition meetings to discuss all points and have them covered.
With the Leadership Team being announced to the team by mentors at the banquet, the next most important task was Recruiting New Members. The team organized and scheduled “Demos” at the district’s high schools, which involved the 2022 and 2023 Robots, posters, awards, presentation, and a QR code sign-up link for the team. Through several successful demos, the team had many new members sign up for the team. We then organized Parent & Student Informational Meetings where we introduced the team (and its leads and mentors), played the FIRST FRC videos, presented what we do throughout the year, and outlined expectations and cost. After the meeting, we distributed Parent permission and student sign-up forms (if they hadn’t already been completed), and chatted to people. We received great feedback from parents from this meeting and everyone is seemingly on the same page, we also have an excellent accounting of everyone on the team and their status. To date, the team has 110 sign-ups, with over half being from new members.
The first week in June of 2024, we attended and volunteered at the first KISD Enrichment Camp. A camp that instilled the importance of STEM into the minds of young children. At this camp we taught them how to build, program, test and debug VexGo robots. They eventually held a mini competition accumulating the most points possible. There we opened the world of STEM to youth and gave them encouragement for the future.
Later in June, we once again collaborated with Team 1477 Texas Torque in hosting our annual Robotics Summer Camp. We lead youth through fun and engaging STEM related activities in small groups to learn critical thinking and cooperation skills. The camp was hosted over the course of four days with different challenges to start each day. Following the day’s challenges, the groups worked on their Lego robots, which were completed on the final day of camp. We also collaborated with one of our sponsors during the offseason in order to spread awareness for STEM in the community. We were invited by Campus Kids; a leading sponsor for the team, to give robot demos and introduce our team to elementary school students at 4 different schools. These three important events strengthened our bond with Campus Kids, 1477 Texas Torque, and furthered our mission to “provide youth with the skills needed for future careers in the fields of STEAM” and to “spread the principles of FIRST everywhere we go.”
This past weekend we competed at “The Remix” offseason competition hosted by our local friends, Team 1477 Texas Torque. Our goal at this competition was primarily to get our new members competition experience.
Using Remix as a learning opportunity, we were able to teach new members the importance of scouting, and select our new Drive team and potential backup drivers. This process involved pairings for different drivers with previous competition experience, however this meant our match-to-match performance was unpredictable and was hindered by robot reliability issues that plagued us during the season. Overall we accomplished our goals, and still managed to have fun. We were chosen to be the 4th bot for the #5 alliance, and allied with 6357 Spring Konstant, 1477 Texas Torque, and 324 Chips. We write more about our experience in the retrospective above. The Remix is a fantastic event where our new members were able to run the pit, turn the robot around successfully every match and execute our strategy well.
Shop Organization was a big carryover issue from last year. This year we removed unnecessary shelves and racks, re-arranged the shop layout and recycled scrap and unused materials. A new addition to our shop is our new rack for our stock metal, clearing up some space in our workshop and rearranging miscellaneous parts.
Before:
After:
To wrap up this update, we expect to continue the training plan through October, finish shop organization, and even complete a few hands-on projects for training. We have plans to work on our practice swerve with integrated motor controllers, redesign an intake for our 2022 demo robot, and much more for our other subsystems. We will make new additions to our robot cart as needed, and finish our battery cart design for fabrication. Lastly, our final job is closing out the many smaller tasks in Monday.com (which we transitioned to this summer), and getting our pre-season buy list purchased so we are ready for kickoff and build season.
