To prepare students, rookie and veteran alike, our team tries to make a habit of doing a mock kick-off. To do this, we usually watch the kickoff video from a year prior that no student members have experience with. We look at the manual and we discuss brainstorming ideas and how we would attack that game.
There’s not usually a large problem with this, but it’s too easy for a student to grab their phone, go on thebluealliance, look at a winning robot from that year and then all of that work brainstorming isn’t as genuine.
I’ve heard of teams creating mock games to do a mock kickoff. I was interested in finding some of these, as well as creating one from scratch, writing a part of the manual, just getting the skeleton to a game. If anybody would want to collaborate with this game creation, please feel free to PM me and we can work on something. Additionally, if anybody has some complete mock games that they would like to post, or any advice about this topic, please post below. Hopefully we can create something great
To be fair, there are usually a ton of repeat elements from other years in each game. On the day of actual kickoff, I’d also be grabbing my phone and going on the blue alliance and looking up successful robots from games with similar elements. But usually the key is in execution anyway. I.e. cheesy poofs in 2014 was fairly straightforward design but the details were done so excellently that it made it what it was. The details being a combination of code, excellent subsystem design details, ect.
I guess the moral of my story here is doing research like this should be encouraged because FIRST likes to recycle game elements. I’d even say to have them look more into successful robots to find out just why they were so good.
Last year I helped Andrew Lawrence with the creation of Quad Quidditch, for the 2015 Summer Design Competition. This game, and the resources associated with it (including the game manual and CAD) can be found here.
While Lawrence is too busy this year to formulate a game, I will hopefully still be putting out a game, likely around the same time as last year.
It’s full game with a complete manual and CAD field. It should be very easy to prototype for this game as all the field elements can be purchased at a hardware store.
I also have a partial game that we haven’t published yet as well, PM if you want it.
Ahad Bawany and I developed a game last off season for a CAD challenge. I would rather not make it public as I plan on using it with my teams this off season but if you are interested I would be happy to PM it to you.
The Oakland County Competitive Robotics Association (OCCRA) runs a competition slightly smaller in scale compared to FRC during the fall in SE Michigan. The majority of teams in this league are FRC teams who use this as a training program for néw students.
Make things a little harder on the kids. TBA doesn’t have much before around '04/'05 timeframe or so; TechnoKats History Project has most if not all of the info for '92-'05 archived…
While there are videos, they’re a LOT harder to find. Find a video of a really, really dominant/remembered (er, infamous?) team from the late 90s? Eh, not so easy… And remember, this is a team that was remembered for a long time.
It also seems that every year there’s a thread with game ideas. While some game ideas are more baked than others, I doubt any will have all ~50 rules defined. But that sort of thread will definitely provide a grindstone for ideas.
Last year our team did FRC lite with Capture the Flag. We worked with another local team and designed a game where a 3x3x3 foot cube held a flag pole top center, set 6" deep into the cube surface. The pole was a 1.5" stick of pvc pipe. The goal of the game was to capture the opposing team’s flag and return it to a trash can on the other side of the center field line. Robot rules were basically the same as 2014, with max perimeter, weight, height, bumpers, starting configuration, etc. We had a six week design and build season and finished with a competition. Here’s a highlight video:
We didn’t really take to make time to develop the game or write the rules; we just reused the 2014 manual and changed the game, so that students could familiarize themselves with FRC manual reading.
…just take their phones away before starting the exercise? It’s going to be a lot easier than making a good game from scratch, and you won’t have any idea how well they analyzed a game nobody has ever played.
From my experience, this probably won’t work all that well. Students on our team know most of the design features on all of the notable robots ranging back to about 2010.
2004 is a GREAT game for this, because it’s really old, there are a wide variety of different tasks for teams of varying resource levels, and there probably wasn’t one “right answer” for the robot to build that year.
Generally though, if your kids are inspired enough to research 6 or 7 year old robots and understand why their design decisions were made, they are way ahead of the curve anyway.
Here’s a funny story… I usually would do these Mock Games as part of my robotics class’ Fall Semester Final. They would be broken into groups and have to design a strategy and robot to play this pretend game and make a presentation to the class. The class would then vote the best one and they would get some bonus points if their group were chosen. I usually gave them about a week and half in class to work on it. So I had been incorporating Pool Noodles into the game a couple of times AND even had a year with the Trash Can. I did the Noodle Frenzy2 game in the fall of 2014. So when Recycle Rush was released last year, we saw the noodles as a game object - FINALLY!! I guessed the game… well kinda.
I’m still waiting for traffic cones to be a game object!!
