Preparing for Kickoff

With Kickoff rapidly approaching less than a week away, what are your teams doing to prepare for it? Any ideas and thoughts on productive ways to prepare other than theorize about water games?

We try to run a mock “week 1” scenario on our team. It helps to answer questions and set some expectations.

Haven’t even met much of our our team yet…will start this Thursday as we move stuff from The HS to our “robot season” workshop (garage)…then six weeks of robot season madness. Saturday is the official start for the full team.

This is the first year we have an actual HS class involved , should be interesting. Year 5 all new as everyone graduated.
In my mind…Find a new driver!

Similar to the Zebracorns, our mechanical engineering team ran through about the first week and a half of a mock build season, using the Logomotion game. It was a good way to test and improve our design process.

I’ve been working with our team’s captains and they’ve been working directly with some other leads from our team. We’ve been setting up more concrete ideas for how we want to have our Kickoff go, which we need to prepare in advance since both captains will be with me for retrieving the KOP.

In the past few years we have had it where the team is split up into smaller groups for early strategy sessions and clarification, just so it’s not 40 students and a handful of mentors out there trying to answer questions and throw out strategies all at once. We’re bringing back the set groups, so that way each group isn’t unbalanced friend cliques, but near equal amounts of students with a variety of rookies and returners from most if not all sub-teams in each group.

Each group has a specific student with more leadership tendencies to promote productivity, which is the group the captains have been working with. We’ve also been setting up an outline of things to keep in mind while leading these groups for effective strategizing. Things like making sure all ideas are considered, staying on track, different aspects of the robot/field, etc. We’re all meeting on Wednesday to make sure everyone is on board before Saturday.

The best way to prepare is to have mentors prepare a simulated mock kickoff.

I suggest making sure the new members are caught up and know what FIRST is about and what they will be doing during the build season. Also if your team assigns roles (Captain, bumper leader, safety captain, etc.) then I recommend doing so. My team has no captain and instead just have a randomly selected person to be officially captain but it just is a title that has no power nor practical application. Also I suggest making sure the new members know how to use tools and if they don’t then teach them. I would have done it sooner but if you haven’t then I suggest doing it before kickoff so you can maximize build time.

We’ve done mock kickoffs, and shall again, but between relocation of our shop and reduced hours in the fall, we didn’t this year; we almost have the shop ready for a build season. As we were doing an old game, we have just done the initial day, as simulating any farther gets less like the actual process because team members use the previous game’s meta rather than working it through.

We shall be meeting on Thursday evening to organize into kickoff groups. We plan a couple of groups to go through the rules in detail, one to analyze scoring/ranking, and one or two to look at the field elements and game pieces and do some experimentation to determine how easy/difficult it would be to do the necessary manipulations.

At kickoff, we break into these groups to do the basic reading/analysis. This will be followed by a strategy brainstorming. We close Saturday out with a strategy “rack and stack” where we whittle the strategies we might select down to two or three to investigate more deeply.

Edit: oh, yes, and prepare the kickoff feast! I’ve purchased a couple of boston butts and the wood and charcoal to smoke them for pulled pork at lunch during kickoff. I’ll be up every couple of hours Friday night tending the fire, so I’ll already be in early build season mode when the video starts. Given that the weather won’t be changing much between now and then, I may make a pot of gumbo as well.

About $15k in pre-season purchases made this December.

-Mike

Anxiously waiting to see what it is so we can do some actual work… I’ve been doing nothing but cad modeling for the last few months.

Please don’t be water game
Please don’t be water game
Please don’t be water game

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Sleeping.

In all seriousness, we did all of our prep before the holidays. We spent the fall training new members, working on our strategy analysis and design process, and capped it all with a mock kickoff. Now we’re mostly just relaxing and getting our lives arranged so we can survive the coming 6+ weeks. For me personally, that means taking vitamins, eating well, getting plenty of sleep, and trying to get over this darned cold I picked up before Saturday :slight_smile:

At this point, all of our students have explicit instructions to relax, get lots of sleep, and get caught up (and ahead if possible) on their classwork.

Starting last summer, we had four pre-season design projects, each led by a different student (and those students will lead design groups next year). We built three of those projects and reviewed their general performance, making notes on what worked and what didn’t. Programmers mounted a Nerf gun to a turret to an old chassis and taught it to hit a target while moving, and they rewrote our drive code from scratch. Finally, we did a mentor-led mock kickoff for the engineering leadership, and then the student leaders ran one for the rest of the engineering team.

It’s been a busy pre-season.

Team movie night with RoboLeague, Underwater Dreams, Spare Parts, and/or SlingShot is a great way to get motivated and bond as a team before the season.

Also make sure you’re ready for season by streamlining an order process, making sure each student is confident in their respective tasks that many teams may put to the side during the hectic first few weeks of season (chairman’s lead debriefed and ready to take charge, marketing continuing efforts - maybe working on a backup fund to use for champs, etc).

Also, if you haven’t yet gone in your lab, you may want to make sure all is set - most importantly heat! With cold blasts over the US and recently the East Coast Storm the last thing you’d want on kickoff is single digit temps in the shop. Stay warm!