With 9 days and change until kickoff, it got me thinking- how do other teams do kickoff? I’ve watched the Deep Dives where teams go into detail about their kickoff, but what does everyone else do? Particularly in regards to prototyping, strategy, and initial design work
We actually just finalized our kickoff/prototyping strategy schedule today. For us, it’s as follows:
- Break down into small groups and read the manual thoroughly. That’s all we do the first day, and we expect everyone to come in on day 2 fully understanding the rules
- Break down the game into scoring tasks. Analyze the tasks’ relative difficulty and worth
- Approximate cycle/execution times for each scoring task. Plan out possible match strategies for different alliances. Analyze how defense will affect these strategies
- Settle on a strategy for the robot. Based on the strategy picked, group the scoring tasks into categories of “need”, “want”, “wish”, and “skip”. Rank the tasks in each category in order of importance
- Break the scoring tasks down into several mechanisms. Develop a list of requirements necessary for each to be able to meet the robot strategy. Brainstorm ideas for each mechanism, then whittle them down to 1-3 ideas for each
- First round of prototypes. Test the ideas on the whittled down list that need prototyping. Make prototypes as adjustable as possible to test different configurations
- Choose one winning idea for each mechanism. Assemble them all into a “blockbot” to visualize how everything fits together and look for conflicts
- For mechanisms that need it, a second round of prototypes. Finalize geometries, critical dimensions, etc
- Design review to make sure all of the mechanisms will work together properly, then CAD everything
This whole process takes the first ~3 weeks of build season
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We are doing a local kickoff for the first time this year.
In the past, we’ve hosted a viewing of the reveal stream with several local teams.
We’ve toyed with the idea of a lock-in the night before, but we never follow through.
The day of the kickoff, we’ll host a number of workshops.
We will eat lunch, then begin reading the game manual and analyzing game play.
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We simply just watch the animation over and over and read the game manual all while planning out strategy for when we come back after our break is over this year it’ll be less of a stress considering we don’t have stop build day
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Unofficial but tentative:
Tentative Kickoff Agenda:
After returning from ViaSat, mark out field elements w/chalk etc., run simulation games as humans.
-helps understand cycle time, permutations of different functioning robots, understand consistently winning robots and why.If dont get stuff from reading the rules, people will be able to understand with the visual and physical simulation.
Go through Game Analysis Matrix with whole team
-get first impressions of various game challenges and relative difficulty.
-Results in “Don’t try” and “want to try” list
Experienced students do matrix again, offering opinions on difficulty based on experience, practicality, and goals (rps plz).
-Decide which game objectives we are and are not going to attempt this season + Which ones to postpone for offseason. Prioritize
-Results in OFFICIAL “Do” and “Do not” list
Decide based on field layout whether to use AM drivebase or custom.
If AM (use drivebase decision above), begin assembly + wiring.
Start prototyping
Start accepting subsystem submissions (due by 2nd Sunday)
The Game Analysis Matrix is based on believed importance and difficulty
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We start, watch the reveal, then we break up into groups. I believe 2019 we did general scoring, endgame, defense, and something else (I really don’t remember anymore) we work in those groups, then present our findings to the rest of the groups (this is where we came up with the flip idea and eventually did it). We also brought in other (newer/less experienced) teams to help guide them in a good direction
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Also, we don’t normally start prototyping until we’ve done a good analysis of what we want our robot to be capable of
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Popcorn, Home Alone I & II , The Santa Clause, followed by Die Hard. And seasoned with Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. Oh wait, that’s how we do Christmas 
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I commend you. Your Christmas has not become eclipsed by the looming Kickoff.
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We break into groups and talk strategy with a few other local teams, then reconvene to share ideas. Afterwards, we start a little bit of prototyping and play in our shop for a while. We end with a potluck and play a mock game with humans instead of robots.
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Our team does this:
- We watch the reveal together. Then watch it again.
- We all get a copy of the rules and read them individually.
- We review the rules as a whole group and then act out potential strategies on a full-size game field.
- We fill in a QFD, or quality functional deployment (from The Flying Toasters), and decide on a game strategy and a few possible designs for each aspect of the robot that we will prototype.
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Our team gets together at the college downtown. That’s where we get our kit and figure out what’s up with the game with other local teams. After that we break for lunch and meet at our school after. There we read the manual for 30 mins silently, Then start to put together a strategy, inventory the KOP and programming begins updating. Once this is done (and this takes at least 2 days sometimes), Ideas begin to flow on the how of our strategy.
In absence of another plan, I highly recommend your team use this worksheet as an outline for the day.
If you answer all the questions and discuss as a team you’ll be in a great place for season.
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We usually host several teams to have breakfast and watch kickoff together, and then we go to another room and sit down to read the rules semi-individually (with mentors strategically sprinkled around the room to help interpret the documentation for students who are confused). A couple of people step out during this to do KOP inventory. The other teams tend to head back to their own shops at some point during this part. We eat lunch, and then we have a full-team discussion of the rules, focused on the Arena, Game, and Tournament sections, with student leaders and/or me guiding the discussion to make sure we stay on track and come to a joint understanding of what is and is not allowed. If there are any areas where we think there’s a hole or critical ambiguity, we make notes for when Q&A opens.
After that, we break into smallish groups, making sure every group has an experienced mentor, someone from student leadership, and some newer students in it. These groups start talking about how we want to play the game and how we think other teams will play it, keeping the focus on what not how. As one of the experienced mentors, the main things I’m doing during this are making sure the newer and/or more timid students at my table get heard, answering history questions, and making sure we stay on topic and don’t charge off and start designing mechanisms before we know what we’re trying to accomplish. We reconvene and have a full-team discussion with a student from each table volunteering to present the consensus from their group. That’s the end of kickoff day for us.
Day 2, we get back together, review the “what” discussion now that people have had quiet time to think on things, discuss our complexity budget, and then break into about four largish groups, each led by one of our four most senior technical mentors (I’m one of these) and calibrated by our coach to spread out student leadership and keep each group fairly diverse. I think each of the senior mentors runs their table a little differently (I have too much going on with the 15ish students and 1-2 newish mentors/parents at my own to know exactly how my peers do this), but I can speak to my process. I try to do as little designing as possible and focus hard on making sure all my students get heard and understand that I care about what they think even if yesterday was their first day, helping everyone get their ideas out in a way that the rest of the table can understand, and keeping things moving along briskly so we finish on time. We give the groups several hours to develop a high-level robot design and then we regather and the students from each group present their table’s idea(s) and then takes Q&A from the rest of the team. After everyone has presented, we develop a consolidated list of ideas we need to prototype before we develop a final integrated design and ideas where we appear to already be in consensus, student leads get assigned to specific projects, and we charge off and start doing things.
There are a lot of great teams with excellent first day processes. We stress the importance of proceeding in order and not jumping the gun. Understand the game first. Then decide how you are going to play the game (strategy). Next develop requirements for your robot and drivers (size, weight, speed, auto goals, qualification and maybe elimination specific capabilities, scoring mechanisms and timing to meet your requirements etc). Only after mastering the rules, developing your strategy and laying out your requirements should you start designing. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time and lose focus.
Good luck!
Our kickoff plan is:
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Watch the game animation twice
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Break into groups to read and summarize, and communicate the rules.
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Create lists of everything a robot can do, sorted into “defensive,” “offensive,” and “assistive/other.”
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Start talking about the flow of the game, covering most of the topics shown in 2791’s excellent kickoff document that Adam already linked to.
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Build up an idea of what an attainable-but-winning strategy looks like, and use this to create two lists:
- Functional requirements for the robot
- Unanswered questions that need further digging
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Sometime in all of this, we also split off a contingent to go build some very temporary field elements out of cardboard and PVC and start running some mock cycles with old robots to get a feel for the field.
My Saturday morning duty is usually to go to the office to print some physical manuals, but I’m tempted to abdicate that in favor of crashing 3128’s waffle breakfast. Decisions, decisions.
Here’s my attempt at a systematic approach to ‘breaking down a game’. It incorporates a lot of ideas, some our own, some borrowed, some good, some bad and a ton of trial and error. The entire process is definitely a marriage of art and science. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the system though, feel free to give it a look!
https://www.thecompassalliance.org/single-post/2017/12/07/Game-Breaking
-Brando
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