We created our first rules and strategy worksheet before kickoff in 2018 to help students analyze the rules and identify important information for game analysis and strategic goal-setting. We instructed students to answer the questions as they read the rules and discussed answers as a group afterward. We found the worksheet and ensuing discussion immensely helpful for improving student understanding of the game rules. We have added new questions and examples inspired by the 2018 and 2019 games as well as rewritten some previous questions to be more clear. I’d like to thank @Allison_K, @Katie_UPS, and @ahartnet for reviewing the updated worksheet and providing much-appreciated feedback.
Please feel free to use the worksheet or any of our questions during your kickoff, we just kindly request that you give attribution to Team 2791 in any new materials created. If you do use it, I would love to hear about your experience!
In addition to publicly posting this worksheet, we will post our answers to each question sometime during the first few days of the season.
EDIT: I have also attached an alternative version with spaces to actually answer the questions. Thanks @Connor_H for putting that together!
Thank you Brian, Allison_K, Katie_UPS, and ahartnet! This is definitely going in my back pocket for kickoff morning - I’ll forward a copy to my workshop coordinators and see what they think.
Thanks for sharing this! We needed a similar question sheet to help guide our kickoff this year and took heavy inspiration from a previous version of your worksheet. Good luck this year!
Great list. Another one I thought of while reading it is optimum human player actions and skills required (ex. fitting hatches through the ball loading slot in 2019, noodles over the alliance station wall in 2015, bowling over defense 2 in 2016, double frisbee loading in 2013, etc). Also, field obstacles and how they can impact height, ground clearance or other geometric constraints to accomplish certain tasks or limit where a robot can go on the field.
I find going through these exercises in small groups/as a team helps the team find trends in which scoring methods will be important/easy/protected.
It helps if teammates try to avoid any robot-design ideas before going into this and keep the robot as a black-box entity - if teams prematurely say “we need a shark with lasers” then they will miss options that a shark with hammers could have solved. Its hard to do, its exciting to think about shooters and elevators and climbers (oh my) but you will come up with far more creative and effective solutions if you ignore how something is done and only focus on what needs to get done.
Strategy analysis should lead robot design, not the other way around
I’d like to give this thread a quick bump. While it’s not as helpful for its intended purpose this year, I think the game analysis questions could be useful for the game design competition
I want to thank you for this worksheet. I think it is going to be incredibly helpful as we go forward this season. This is especially true of new members who did not attend our off-season events.
There are many new learning opportunities this season, and I think this worksheet helps us focus on what is important.
Hey, friendly reminder that this exists and everyone is welcome to use it. If I have time in the next week I might tweak some things to incorporate themes from the past few more recent games but we’ll see.
