This year I am helping to run kickoff for my team. My question to all of you is, what does your team do during kickoff, especially when it comes to new team members, coming up with strategies for the new game, and dissecting the game manual?
I’ve been giving a presentation for the past few years about how we spend the day of kickoff breaking down and analyzing the game. The first section goes through our basic process for kickoff. It was put together with the help of 2 other members of my team, Josh Pordon and Kevin Kolodziej (who weren’t able to help with the presentation this year, but I wanted to give them credit) and takes a lot of cues from similar presentations that are referenced at the end.
Game Analysis and Strategic Design
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Have everyone download the encrypted manual on a phone, tablet, or Mac/PC (preferred).
Pick up the kit at a kickoff.
It is useful to have clipboards with paper and pen/pencil to write down thoughts and ideas.
I prefer to have people sit silently at cogitate for at least 15 - 30 minutes.
Then, have pairs “play” the game to try to calculate the highest score possible.
This makes them review the game rules and discuss any points of contention or misunderstanding.
Move the pairs into larger groups and encourage arguments.
Take a Deep Breath, Fire Neurons, Make Connections, Go on Chief Delphi, Build Robot, Go on Chief Delphi, Take a Deep Breath, Go on Chief Delphi, play from March through (Go on Chief Delphi) April, Bring Robot Home, Lie down, Avoid Chief Delphi, Do other Robot Stuff sporadically, Vacation Somewhere, Avoid Chief Delphi.
Rinse.
Repeat
Our process is pretty simple.
- Learn the rules. Every person should read the manual (at least the game part, getting high schoolers to read 200 pages in a sitting is unreasonable). If you don’t understand the manual at this stage, you have no way of understanding the game.
- Understand the game, how do you score? How do you stop people from scoring? How can you help your partners?
- **WHAT **
do we want our robot to do? Not HOW, don’t discuss designs at all, but discuss the list of functionality you would like for your robot, keeping in mind your resources and goals.
This past year, we formalized our process into a strategy worksheet that goes step by step through the kickoff process. Feel free to take a look and adapt to your needs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RRDbhtOQykJrgu0Z_aCOsFrRtXsg3pao8lFZAJECZKU/edit?usp=sharing.
1.Watch the kickoff recording with the whole team (As it plays live early in the morning here).
2. Watch the field tour videos and go through the manual. An experienced alumni or two give interpretations of the rules for the newer members and come up with example scenarios.
3. Break off into small groups to discuss strategy to decide what we want to do (rather than how)
4. Bring the groups together to present to the other groups, and get feedback.
5. Send the groups back off to work on their feedback.
Then we usually bring them together a couple times.
We try to distribute the electronic copy of the manual at the beginning of the day so they can reference it.
It’s actually worth taking a listen to how 1678 does their Kickoff and how they go into the build season. It can look daunting (I know it does for me) but even just doing one of these things or taking a step closer to one of these things can make a world of difference when starting off discussion at kickoff for a robot. I highly recommend watching the whole video but I copied it at the part where Mike Corsetto talks about Kickoff specifically.
One of the most important parts of 341’s kickoff is the human simulation, and we’ll be doing it on 2641 this year.
We have students act as robots and play the game.
The first few rounds are low pressure, just getting everyone firmiliar with game and anwering rules questions.
For the next few rounds, the alliances try to come up with new strategies, and anyone with an interesting strategy idea can hop in the next match.
For the last few rounds we start assigning difficulty points to each task, and students have a limited number of points to use for their robot. If they didn’t spend 3 points for a floor pickup, they can’t pick up off the floor.
By the end of the human simulation, the goal is to know all of the rules inside and out, know what the flow of the match will look like, know how many points we will need to score to (insert season goal), and be able to see how various tradeoffs play out on the field.
For our kickoff, we normally spend the whole day kickoff-ing
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We normally go to a kickoff event (shoutout 3015) and watch the livestream there. It gives the new students a good opportunity to socialize with other teams and watch the livestream on a nice theater screen.
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Once the livestream is over, we make our way back to the school to eat lunch and continue our day. This gives us a chance to relax and start to understand the game.
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We read the rules. We normally skip over parts that are usually the same every year, and for this part everyone participates in reading the rules and understanding the constraints.
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Go over scoring strategies. At this point, any idea goes. The team goes over the scoring opportunities and the points values, then splits into smaller groups. The groups come up with different ideas on scoring (no mechanisms yet) and reconvenes after a while to discuss the strategies. We go over all of the strategies, how they compare to each other, and get a rough idea of what we want to do. (We don’t set in stone what we want to do, but may throw away things we don’t want to do, example being low goal scoring in 2017)
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Now, we start going more in depth on scoring strategies, as in what we want to/can do in auto, teleop, and endgame. We get input from all subteams, programming, mechanical, etc.
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At this point, we have a rough game strategy, although it is not set in stone (you don’t want to 100% decide your detailed strategy until most of the way through prototyping). At this point, it has been a very long day, and people start to go home.
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Students may break off into smaller groups after the meeting, to go more in depth on the game and possibly start to decide what they want on their robot and how they want to score. (Keep in mind that we are not discussing specific designs yet, just how we want to score)
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Go home and rest
We changed the way we do kickoff last year and the team loved it and it lead to a way better build season than we’ve had in many years so we are going to stick with it again this year.
We meet at a local Technical College that graciously allows us use of an auditorium, lunch room, and several class rooms.
We have various meeting with parents, students, and sponsors in the morning before the broadcast and during lunch.
After the release of the game we split into small groups and read the rules out loud. Each group has a white board/ big pad of paper that they write questions and the different ways to score and their associated point value.
We then come together as one big group to read the rules and answer every groups questions. We also create a nice chart that lists ways to score and their associated point value.
We break for lunch.
After lunch we clean up the areas we used and head to our build space where we start prototyping. We prototype any mechanism we feel might be important for the game this year.
We let the prototypes and their successes/failures dictate what the robot is ultimately going to do.
We used to do what a majority of teams do and come up with a list of strategies/requirements we want the robot to do on the Sat/Sun of kickoff but we rarely followed it and never when back and updated it if we decided we wanted to do something and just ended up trying to do everything. So last year we said fine “were doing everything to start and we are going to let the prototypes and experience dictate what actually ends up on the robot”.
It worked well last year hopefully it works again this year.
We basically have everyone huddle together and watch the stream, distribute the KoP, then have every member of the team read the manual front to back. Last year, we thought about quizzing people on the rules, but we never really had time to. Basically after having everyone read the manual, we just grab a whiteboard and throw out mechanism ideas.