FIRST can be tricky to understand, especially for newcomers. Teaching things like strategical design and match strategy can be difficult as a lot of prior knowledge is required to begin to understand these topics as a newcomer. I believe that events are the best place to learn these things especially when it comes to strategy and strategy adjacent topics.
How do you/ your team approach teaching at events?
What was your most valuable learning experience at an event?
Off-season events, like tomorrow’s Bash at the Beach are invaluable for our new students and parents to experience FRC in an environment where the outcome simply doesn’t matter and the robot on the field will never compete again. It often comes home in pieces.
Is there any specific event training that your team does?
A lot of it is learning by doing and watching. At an off season competition we care much less about winning, so we will definitely have rookies scout matches. Depending on amount of students we might have multiple people scout the same robot to verify that their data is the same. Back at the shop we do a scouting training to explain why we are collecting the data and why it is important. For pit, we are putting rookies in pit and having them deal with problems alongside the veterans. The people chosen to go to pit were people who wanted it and those team leads thought would be effective, so we should have people who are very eager to learn down in the pits. For field captain, first driver, and second driver, we only have veterans for two main reasons. One is that there are very few drive spots, so we want to reward people who have shown a lot of dedication to the team. Second is frc is very very stressful especially for drive team. We want people who know what they are getting into handling the controls. Having a year in first allows for better performance and a higher stress tolerance given the understanding. Finally, for human player we have rookies there because we want more people to see what the game looks like from the field level. It gives a different perspective on strategy to see how quick things happen.
Ive never thought about teaching parents, so I can’t really help with that one.
It’s their introduction to scouting and to our pit processes, which include our pre- and post-match checklists, battery rotation, etc.
It’s also the first time they get to see how Gracious Professionalism actually functions, and how we can be competing fiercely on the field one minute, and repairing each other’s machine the next minute.
We usually like to have rookies drive and operate at off season events for a couple different reasons.
It gives them a chance to be a valuable part of the team no matter how much they have learned about the robot, and we can only fit so many people in the pit.
Bringing them around the other teams is a great way to show how alliances work together. I remember driving as a rookie last year, and it was a magical experience that really reaffirmed my love of robotics.
By placing that trust in our rookies, we show that we really are excited to have them on our team, and that we can’t wait to work with them further.
We always do driver training with the rookies before hand, so then driving in a match is not the first time they do it 
We have a chapter about Competition on frczero.org that might be useful. Ignore the out of date event schedule for last season, the other sections should be good.
What is FRC explains a full season and competition in detail with tournament layout, playoff explainer, etc.
The Events page explains some basics terms, links to event rules, and tips for at competitions.
Then there’s a game specific page for the current game and breaking down the game manual.
The students on our team made up a funny parents guide to competition as well.
All of that is stuff to read in advance of going to the competition and not specific on game strategy as that changes year to year.
At the competition all team members are involved in scouting, spirit and awards (if they were part of an awards team) rookies or not. Part on the job training, part practice in advance with preseason matches or previous competitions in earlier weeks. For example Pit Scouting. We can’t practice that at home but we have a lead scouter and then two rookies go around in rotating groups to cover all teams at the event. The lead is there if the rookies get stumped on their first time out but they handle the questions and introductions. Let the newbies learn by doing, just give them as much material ahead of time as possible. If you can have them practice with other local teams in preseason have them do mock pit scouting and share notes on strategy. Week 0s are great for getting the kinks out, even just a scrimmage with one other team is a great help
In addition to what everybody else has said, I want to add what we’re doing since we are going to two off-seasons:
Tomorrow at Boiler Bot Battle, I’ll be driving our robot (I drove in 2023 and at R2OC) along with the operator I was with at R2OC. I’m driving because we didn’t have an opportunity for drive practice (we are very busy building a mini robot, and we were having trouble with background checks for our mentors so we’re behind) and we didn’t want somebody driving who’s never driven before when we have another competition after this. But we will use this competition to get new people into human player and technician roles, and have new members experience scouting and the pits (and get to see the other aspects of competitions, like GP).
In a few weeks at Roboteer Rumble, we’ll have two drive teams (our 2023 robot and our minibot) comprised almost entirely of people who haven’t been on drive team before, including new drivers; this will allow more new members to go to a competition before the season (since Boiler is still early enough in the year that a number of new members weren’t able to go) and gets new people into a competition where the stakes our low, since it’s our last Charged Up competition.
I would actually argue that although you can learn a lot at events, they are not necessarily the best place to learn any individual skill or topic.
If you want to learn match strategy, watching match videos and breaking down what works and doesn’t work is going to be much more efficient. You can focus on your old matches or matches with certain archetypal robots to learn how you can compete best with your bot, or you could look at week 1 matches and Einstein matches to see how strategy changes across the season. A competition will have fewer matches and won’t lets you focus on any particular robot or strategy. If you want to get time driving the robot, a practice field (even a partial one) at your build space will get you a lot more drive time in a day than a competition. Training scouts? Get out a big TV and train on match videos where you can pause to discuss rules or run matches back to back without waiting for field reset. Even things like quick repairs or in pit maintenance can be simulated by setting up a pit with only what you bring to comps and doing repairs with a stop watch. It may even be possible for your team to simulate several aspects of a competition at once.
While there is much to do at a competition I think most individual skill can be learned more easily in a controlled environment where you can focus on a single aspect at a time. Use of season events to practice running scouting, match strategy, maintenance, team communication at in unison. As a side benefit of practicing the basics before competition, you’ll have more fun and perform better.
Whatever you’re trying to learn at a competition, try to give yourself deliverables. If you’re training scouts, set a goal for minimum matches scouted and accuracy. (You can calculate a score from your data and compare to TBA to check your accuracy) If you’re looking to practice integrating a bunch of individual skills you learned at home, record how often your pit crew is late preparing the bot for a match or make notes on how well the drivers are able to get information from the scouts and improve their play. If you don’t know how you can measure what you’re learning, then you might find your goal is tool vague and you’re not learning anything at all.
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