Spectrum is moving up its Mock Kickoff to be on Oct 31st.
What is Mock Kickoff
Mock Kickoff is an event that prepares new students for what to expect on kickoff day. We go over a previous FRC game and have teams of students brainstorm robot designs and work on learning the engineering design process. We will also have workshops following the large group session in the morning.
Times
Doors Open: 8am
Mock Kickoff Starts: 8:30am
Lunch: 12:30pm
Workshop Session one 1:30pm
Workshop Session two 2:30pm
End of Event: 4:00pm
Address
Strake Jesuit College Prep - Dining Hall & STEM Building
8900 Bellaire Blvd, Houston, Texas, 77036
This should allow everyone enough time to get home and changed for their Halloween activities. (Feel free to come dressed up if you want.)
If you’re entire teams is coming its okay to have a teacher/mentor sign up for everyone. If just a few students are coming please have them all feel out the form below individually.
**Workshops
**
We will be having a set of workshops covering various topics. We have a few mentors signed up already to give them, but we are looking for more. Workshop topics could be on anything from FRC Mechanical Design, or Arduino programming, scouting, Chairman’s Award, or more. If you would like to give a presentation please let me know. Allen@Spectrum3847.org
Cost
The cost is free. However we ask that you bring breakfast, snacks, drinks, or desserts. Spectrum will be providing pizza for all attendees.
**Competition Success: Robot, Drive Team, and Scouting Management to Compete Consistently and Effectively. **
Logan Farrell, Robonauts FRC#118
Synopsis: This talk will cover the 118 strategy for managing the Robot, Drive Team, Scouting, and strategy components of a competition to maintain consistent high level performance. Specifically, this will include driver selection and training prior to competitions, scouting system setup prior to the competition and how it is run at the competition, pre-match strategy and how information is passed, shared, and used, and finally, how the pit crew is selected and run during a competition to keep the robot performing consistently at peak capability.
Just a reminder to please RSVP for the mock kickoff if you are planning to attend. This is a great event to get introduced to FRC and learn some new things as well.
We also recorded Logan’s fantastic presentation on how 118 continues to be successful at each of their competitions. I feel like this a must watch for many teams.
Thank you to all our presenters and everyone that came to Mock Kickoff this year. We had a ton of new students and a few pre-rookie teams as well who hopefully are now more prepared for the upcoming season.
This was a great event and very informative. Our small group from 624 enjoyed attending and participating (safety presentation). Thanks to Spectrum for sponsoring it.
Yes, thanks for posting the video - I’ll be watching it and forwarding to our other leadership.
3946 held our own first-ever mock kickoff today, inviting a couple of rookie teams to join us. We did a repeat kickoff of 2008 FIRST Overdrive, and had the students break into three separate teams (encouraged to share) to develop overall strategies and high level designs. Two of the teams determined that knocking the balls off of the overpass, carrying them, and hurdling with the robot remaining below the overpass was optimal, but that replacing the trackball on the trackball on the overpass was likely to be more work and/or compromises (such as high CoG and slow progress) than it was worth. They both punched the ball over the overpass, one from very low much like Einstein finalist #16 Bomb Squad. The other decided to also return the trackballs to the overpass, though there wasn’t enough detail/description to convince me that it could have worked like that. Unfortunately, none of the groups developed hybrid mode strategies after they realized that the trackball placement was determined (or at least announced) after the robots were in place. After the game reveals, we watched the Einstein finals to see what worked at the very top levels. Lots of fun, and lots of learning; we may do another before kickoff 2016, and will definitely do this at least once a year in the future.
Here is a link to the updated version of my presentation “FRC 2587 Electrical Layout & Construction Notes”. The “Resources” handout pages are the last three pages of the presentation.