As with every year, we go through that first week brainstorming on what to build. I figured a thread asking this question would help many of the rookie teams and give them an idea of how to have a structured and organized meeting to fully maximize their student think tank.
So how does your team hold your brainstorming meetings? How many students do you have? What’s the goal of the brainstorming meetings on your team?
-anton
rambots, 419
As it was on my old team, and how I would like it on a team (if I ever start one)…
…everyone should be involved on the brainstorming.
First off, make photocopies of just the game rules, bind them and hand them out to every team member. Everyone should know the game and be able to draw it on a napkin and explain it in under 2 minutes if necessary.
This serves not only as a good brainstorming tactic, but is a good PR resource (aka, it makes any team member a walking advertisement for FIRST and your team), and preps the team for when its time to strategize, drive, etc.
You just never know where that “great idea” is going to come from 
I have never brainstormed for the FIRST competition but I do know from other experiences that NO IDEA IS A BAD IDEA
I know sometimes its hard to accept it when someone starts talking about the robot flying, but as Jessica said “You just never know where that “great idea” is going to come from”.
I remember back in the lego competition I was in last year a team member mentioned a track that would pull the robot up onto ours and then the bot would drive to the edge and reverse the motor and throw him off. (Sumo wrestling, also the robots were autonomous) while it didnt seem likely it ended up turning into a VERY effective set of upward turning gears which was very good at removing traction from the other robot. Making pushing easier.
So if someone throws out a crazy idea just see about using the concept and simplifying it to a feasable one
For us, the brainstorming is simple.
The first brainstorming is just after the game is annouced. That’s a rather disorganized session. People have millions of ideas in their heads, many of which are really strange but all are listed to. The most important ideas are written down. That session is mainly whoever talks the loudest gets heard.
The second session is the day after kickoff. Everyone’s had a day to calm down about the new game. We meet and have a more organized session. We all talk together and agree on what exactly we want the robot to do. Not necessarily how to do it but what we want it to do. Everyone really gets involved with that, even people like myself who have no idea how to make things work.
Sessions after that are run by the engineers who will ask students with ideas to present CAD drawings to the group (or occassionally drawings on our little wipe-off board in the pit). Everyone helps to criticize all of the ideas that come to light (mainly the students ones are pulled apart more, mainly b/c most of us don’t know the calc to do the proper calculations).
One thing is always true. The engineers must always listen to students and be willing to answer questions. Most kids have no clue how things work on these bots, and engineers just saying to them “oh…it works…don’t worry” just doesn’t cut it.
I guess that’s it.
~Angela who honestly hadn’t planned to write that much.
For us we sit around a table, someone has a book and a pencil (and sure enough some pizza 
) . We all share our ideas and we write them down. We toss around a object and you cant speak unless you have it, this way we keep the session orderly. We then go through the list for plausible ideas that could work then we think about those more and test them. The ideas that are not used are still in the book and might prove helpful in future games. And more ideas and problems useally pop-up :rolleyes: . More ideas useally come later, even untill the last build day!
hope this was helpful
No one has mentioned the absolute first thing that your team must decide (after reading & understanding the rules of course). Come up with a strategy to win the game. Every design choice you make should come out of your team’s strategy.
Last year, our team realized early on that balancing both goals on the bridge and having all four robots in the endzone was the key to winning. So we designed our robot to enable our alliance to easily accomplish that. Unfortunately, Beatty also knew the key to the game and came up with a better strategy 
Mike
Here is how my teams kickoff event is going to run.
I agree with Mike S. above. The most important thing is to decide what we want our machine to do before we even begin to think about how we will be able to do it.
Most years, the way to maximize your team’s chances of having a good robot is to figure out what is the rare skill that your robot will have that most others will not have.
Having that rare skill and being able to perform it well is one of the keys to being able to rank high in the seeding rounds if you have some luck with partners or to being drafted by those that are lucky in the seeding rounds in the case that yours runs out.
Our students, teachers, and engineers are pretty good at making the robot do what we want it to do. The trick is deciding what we want it to do.
My 2 cents.
Joe J.
Basic Brainstorming that has worked well for the RoboDAWGS:
On Kickoff Day we get together and view a tape of the Kickoff and attempt to get at least the basic rules copied and distributed to all team members. At this session there is not a lot of discussion, mainly review and clarify the “Game”. Everyone is sent home to get more familiar with the game and think on their own.
At the following Monday meeting, we have some models, full scale mockups, or scale diagrams to give everyone a feel for relative size (Get a few volunteers to do this on Sunday or late Saturday).
The first discussions work backward from the goal (win):
How do we win (win matches, be a good alliance pick, etc.)?
How do we do that (offensive tasks, defensive possibilities, etc.)?
What kind of mechanisms, characteristics does a robot need to accomplish these? (Lots of ideas, drawing, modelling, etc.)
Each of these questions are handled in small and large group brainstorming sessions, followed by decisions (voting) at each step.
At times the decisions in an earlier stage get revisited, but a strategy and basic design has to be firmed up in the first week.
The basic idea is to control the process enough to keep it moving and prevent everyone from being overwhelmed, but not so much as to discourage creativity.
Mark
For Blizzard(#188), brainstorming is always a team effort.
Usually, there is no meeting on the day of the Kickoff for us. That’s a day for everyone to stay home, absorb the rules, and kick around individual ideas.
On Sunday (or Monday), our main brainstorming session is held where all our team members meet to share ideas. We first go over the basic rules of the game to clarify any questions, uncertainties or misunderstanding. Then the team breaks into small groups to discuss different ideas for what our robot should do and how it should do it. Each member is given a few sheets of paper to sketch out his or her ideas and present them to the group.
During the next few days, team leaders meet to go over each idea presented and to extract the best of these ideas. These are then re-presented to the team and usually, a general vote is taken to see which of these are the most popular. Overall, our brainstorming lasts approximately a week. Although this may be a big chunk of time to spend on brainstorming, we find it is better than starting on an idea thinking it’s good and then finding out that there’s something wrong or there’s something better.
Anthony.
I would definitely agree that the WHAT has to come before the HOW. Here’s how our brainstorming sessions work.
We start by going up and down the rows of people as they are seated, and every person says one idea about what the robot can do. Noone is allowed to say a second idea until everyone has given their first idea. This continues until all the WHAT ideas have run out.
Next is a discussion about those ideas. We eliminate the few ideas that have no possible way of working, such as those that violate the rules, but anything that might just work is saved and written down for later reference. You never know what those crazy, off-the-wall ideas could become. Once we finish the discussion, we have a pretty good idea of what the robot could or should do.
The next step is to figure out HOW these ideas could be used in our design. We make columns on the board, dividing it into segments for each of the main components of the game and robot (balls, goals, drive train, etc.). We use the same “1 idea at a time” format and come up with every possible way of acheiving the WHAT ideas. These get written down, and we break for the day. Everyone gets a chance to think overnight, and come up with new ideas.
The next day, we pull out yesterday’s work, add any new ideas, and begin to think about what the robot will actually do and look like. After a few days of this, and some preliminary work, we decide, and the build begins.
We usually get a few oddball ideas, like “The robot should fly and make pizza” but overall, it is a very efficient and productive way to brainstorm our ideas as a group.